4 ms·

“Know how to solve every problem that has been solved.” That seems a reasonable goal.

• readthenotes1 2y ago
  By who standard? It seems like an unsolvable problem to know every problem that is actually been solved correctly...
  • cbracketdash 2y ago
    I think he's being sarcastic
    • bitshiftfaced 2y ago
      It doesn't strike me as likely that Feynman would have written this with sarcasm behind it. Maybe someone knows the details better. Personally, I think it looks more like the sort of goal that you aim for even it's not literally possible. "Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars."
      • yunwal 2y ago
        dhosek was being sarcastic, not Feynman
        • danielmarkbruce 2y ago
          Neither of them were. The quote is saying "practice solving problems on solved problems as much as you can" and dhosek is saying "good idea".
  • turnsout 2y ago
    I read it with a different (epistemic) emphasis… I don't need to know the solution if I know how to solve it. I've never produced a chip before, but I know how the problem has been solved by others. And therefore if I break it down, I could solve it myself. It's also possible that he meant every problem in your domain. That would be slightly more reasonable, and something I could agree with.
    • mandmandam 2y ago
      > I don't need to know the solution if I know how to solve it. That's how a modern school system ought to be designed, imo. There's so much wasted time, and so much unused potential. And if that involves rote-learning at times, fine, but can we at least make that smarter too?
• hinkley 2y ago
  Feynman was a huge proponent of, whether he knew it or not, compression being a form of modeling. He thought everything settled about physics should be teachable in the freshmen introductory series, and if he couldn’t make it fit that meant we didn’t really understand it yet. I personally like the idea of upper level classes being about things we are still working out. That feels more like preparing people for the real world, where your job is to figure stuff out they couldn’t teach you in class because you and your coworkers are going to write the “book”. Or at least make money because not enough people have figured “it” out to make it cheap.
  • gowld 2y ago
    You can't reasonably keep compressing centuries of progress into an intro series. I think you are describing undergrad vs graduate, not intro vs upper level, and even that is optimistic. Even tenured professors are still learning new things about what is already known to the world at large.
    • nmz 2y ago
      Whether we want it or not we will have to or else what happens in hundreds of years? is there a limit to human knowledge, will people spend their entire lives studying only to then graduate when they're 80?
    • femto 2y ago
      > You can't reasonably keep compressing centuries of progress into an intro series. Reductionism can lead to simplification, which will take less time to teach and learn. Take planetary orbits as an example. There was a time when people would have spent a lot of time learning about all the complicated movements the planets make through the sky, "spheres within spheres", retrograde movement and so on. These days we teach Newton's laws of gravity and a heliocentric model (both of general application). The motion of the planets then pops out almost for "free".
    • iterance 2y ago
      Modern physics has actually done it quite well. This is because the core of many physics concepts revolve around general principles which can be taught directly or by example. A modern undergraduate education in classical mechanics teaches concepts around symmetry and energy that generalize to other areas in physics (for instance, the notion of a potential well giving rise to bound states reappears several times in different problem domains). A modern undergraduate optics education generalizes enough that students should readily understand concepts like evanescent waves and acousto-optical modulation. It's only when one moves away from these principles to something more subtle or less well-understood that the education becomes hairier. But as these are further characterized, compression again becomes possible. Landau & Lifshitz, for example, attempts to do this at a graduate level. Many concepts they discuss are increasingly available to the advanced undergraduate due to better compression and better physics principles / pedagogy.
• helpfulContrib 2y ago
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• WorkerBee28474 2y ago
  Sounds like Feynman would enjoy LeetCode.