I think we have to try or we're letting our people down From an excerpt of the book published in a 1996 issue of Caltech’s Engineering & Science magazine: Fey

I think we have to try or we're letting our people down From an excerpt of the book published in a 1996 issue of Caltech’s Engineering & Science magazine: Feynman was a truly great teacher. He prided himself on being able to devise ways to explain even the most profound ideas to beginning students. Once, I said to him, “Dick, explain to me, so that I can understand it, why spin one-half particles obey Fermi-Dirac statistics.” Sizing up his audience perfectly, Feynman said, “I’ll prepare a freshman lecture on it.” But he came back a few days later to say, “I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t reduce it to the freshman level. That means we don’t really understand it.” John Gruber writes the simple explanations are the goal at Apple as well: Engineers are expected to be able to explain a complex technology or product in simple, easily-understood terms not because the executive needs it explained simply to understand it, but as proof that the engineer understands it completely. https://kottke.org/17/06/if-you-cant-explain-something-in-simple-terms-you-dont-understand-it https://kottke.org/17/06/if-you-cant-explain-something-in-si...