2 ms·
Do you happen to have a link to Feynman’s comments on the topic?
by bradleyankrom 6y ago
Do you happen to have a link to Feynman’s comments on the topic?
- not_knuth 6y agoA bunch of quotes can be found on the Wikiquote page on Feynman [0] together with the proper references, but these two stand out: “What I cannot create, I do not understand.” “Once I asked him to explain to me, so that I can understand it, why spin-1/2 particles obey Fermi-Dirac statistics. Gauging his audience perfectly, he said, ‘I'll prepare a freshman lecture on it.’ But a few days later he came to me and said: ‘You know, I couldn't do it. I couldn't reduce it to the freshman level. That means we really don't understand it.’“ His book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! also has a couple of anecdotes where he solves people's problems by asking them questions and trying to understand them. Unfortunately I read this some time back and the exact page numbers escape me. Generally, if you search for Feynman Technique you'll find anything in the direction of "explain it to someone to understand", but I think there is a lot of misattribution going on here. Like Einstein, people love to stick his name on things. And finally, an indirect, but in my opinion well-summarized reference to the way Feynman learned, was in the Richard Feynman section of Lex Friedman's 118th podcast [1]. [0] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman#Quotes https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman#Quotes [1] https://youtu.be/U_6AYX42gkU?t=452 https://youtu.be/U_6AYX42gkU?t=452 (with exact starting time)