3 ms·
I'd really like the source for that quote, because it's dumb for obvious reasons, and I don't know Feynman to be dumb. In fact he said pretty much the opposite
by Luc 12y ago
I'd really like the source for that quote, because it's dumb for obvious reasons, and I don't know Feynman to be dumb.
In fact he said pretty much the opposite to the interviewer asking about magnets in this well known video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO0r930Sn_8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO0r930Sn_8
- happyscrappy 12y agoHmm. The closest I can find is this: "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." David L. Goodstein, "Richard P. Feynman, Teacher," Physics Today, volume 42, number 2, February 1989, p. 70-75, at p. 75
- snowwrestler 12y agoI think Feynman is drawing a distinction between being able to calculate an accurate prediction, and "understanding" things intuitively enough to describe with plain English.