Richard Feynman's blackboard at the time of his death (1988)

I took up social dancing in my 20s, including salsa and Argentinian tango. I think that it is a very good way to experience the difference between being very good at something and being able to teach.

I've been on courses with some people that are clearly exceptionally good at dancing but are a bit lacking when it comes to teaching. Then I've had the pleasure of having teachers that, while still very good at dancing, would not win the high level competitions. When it comes to teaching though, they are just wonderful to be around. They are exceptionally good at spotting what you are doing wrong and giving you an explanation of how to fix it. Not only that, but they make you feel good about learning.

One concrete memory I have is from a cuban salsa dancer trying to teach me, a poor northern European, how to move like a cuban. His frustration was very noticeable and not making it easier for me! Then an example of the other type of teach, is the crazy Australian tango dancer that not only had fantastically fun and simple workshops, but also spotted and explained simple fixes. When I was struggling with a move, he told me to rotate my foot, which I did, and I stopped struggling. When us attendees in the class talked about some high level move being complicated, he said that it is not at all complicated, and showed us how it's simpler than it appears.

I would say that if you can't explain on a blackboard how to ride a bicycle, then that simply means you do not understand how to ride a bicycle. You can do a thing without understanding it. I would guess very few bike riders really understand what all makes the act work even though they all can perform the act.

Maybe no one can learn how to ride a bike purely from a blackboard but that is a seperat issue about physicality.

But the quote is really about understanding, and the forces and effects that go into the act of riding a bike are both understandable and explicable. Anyone who understands them can describe them on a blackboard. So the quote holds water even in the case of riding a bike.

I would say anyway.

Maybe there are other examples and bike riding just wasn't the best example to invalidate the quote.

Literature professor = bike argument?

That's were I put my money, but I could see it going either way.

This can devolve into a definitional argument, but I actually think it's fair to say we don't understand how we ride a bike. We have many abilities and fluencies we don't understand, or only partially understand, in the sense that we can't break them down into pieces easily and transmit the information. That perspective feels more accurate to me than saying I understand how I ride a bike because I can ride a bike, though in common usage the phrase "I understand how to ride a bike" would be perfectly acceptable.

The subtle distinction between the phrase "knows how to" and "understands" hints at the difference here.

That's a great rebuttal. But if the actual claim is "I cannot teach..." It is still consistent. No one is claiming to teach you how to ride a bike or be in a relationship or know when to leave a party. "I cannot teach what I cannot understand" is not the inverse: "I can teach everything I understand".

I'm a native English speaker who, a lifetime ago, moved to Shanghai to teach English to adults. One of my biggest struggles when I first started was explaining to students not just what the correct English should be in a given situation, but why that was the correct English. This had a profound effect on my view of expertise and experts in general.

Exactly correct, but I would say 'Where it gets interesting ...' as opposed to complicated. Like the bike riding comment in a peer to the parent of this comment, there is a difference between 'operating' and 'creating' right? Knowing how to ride a bike tells you nothing about how to design a bike. It is not uncommon in my experience that people mix up these two things all the time.

"We can know more than we can tell."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polanyi's_paradox

Radioactivity in 1860:

In 1860 Lavoisier and Dalton have already published their work and died, so they know chemistry and atoms. Napier is much older, so they will understand exponential decay. It looks easy to explain.

I'm worry about getting some samples. Let's go to Poland and dig in random sites? Before the time travel I need a few days to study in Wikipedia where I should go and what mineral to look for.

I can try to guess how to purify it because I went to a high school with and specialization in Chemistry. (Let's dissolve everything with Nitric Acid, and then use Sodium Carbonate to precipitate Calcium and then Sodium Sulfide to precipitate all heavy metals including Uranium. I'm not sure if it works.) Anyway, one extra day to study this will be helpful.

To show the radioactivity I guess I can use a photographic plate. Luckily, it look like they already have some. (I was going to use Silver Nitrate and hope the best, but the chances of success are better if some of them already know what they are doing.) Add another day of preparation just in case.

Also, as an application, I'd try to irradiate food. 1860 is just in time for Pasteurization. Can I get enough radiation??? Is it safe???

---

Calculus to Archimedes:

That's easy. Archimedes was using Calculus 2000 years before it was cool. The guy calculated the area of a parable slicing it in small parts. Also the volume of a sphere slicing it in small parts. (And then the surface of a sphere with a trick.)

I taught Calculus in the first year of the university, and also in more advanced courses and also in high school. (It will be necessary to start explaining formulas or a translation of formulas to geometric figures. Also, the idea that a formula is related to a graphic in paper is hard, so it will take some time.) I guess I can enter the time machine on the spot.

Those both seem much easier to me than what I usually struggle with: Transported back to a pre-industrial time, is any of my technological knowledge or understanding even remotely useful?

Like, sure, germ theory is great I guess, but I have no idea how I'd begin to explain the internal combustion engine (which I'm fairly sure requires pretty advanced metallurgy) let alone something as esoteric as solar panels. Hell, how do you generate electricity? I could mumble something about waterwheels, a coil of wires, and a large magnet, but I have no idea how you'd begin to go about sourcing a large magnet. Industrial-scale mining of Africa/Australia, maybe?

Like, I know a lot, and I could explain a good amount about how a lot of this works conceptually, but I couldn't even begin to explain how to actually engineer it. As far as I'm concerned, solar panels come from factories.

[dead]

I think that “teach” has a different meaning here. There is “understanding something well enough to elaborate it in its entirety” (the technical capacity to teach it) and then there is the former + “and have the skill/talent of being able to explain it to a wide variety of other people from different backgrounds.”

I'm interested in hearing your thoughts.

Given that his sister Joan was an accomplished scientist in her own right, and they got along well, I don't think your comment is accurate.

> “During the conference I was staying with my sister in Syracuse. I brought the paper home and said to her, “I can’t understand these things that Lee and Yang are saying. It’s all so complicated.”

> “No,” she said, “what you mean is not that you can’t understand it, but that you didn’t invent it. You didn’t figure it out your own way, from hearing the clue. What you should do is imagine you’re a student again, and take this paper upstairs, read every line of it, and check the equations. Then you’ll understand it very easily.”

> I took her advice, and checked through the whole thing, and found it to be very obvious and simple. I had been afraid to read it, thinking it was too difficult.”

http://wavefunction.fieldofscience.com/2017/04/richard-feynm...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Feynman

That is the one I was talking about. Watching the first 5 minutes is enough I think.

I especially liked the pointless masses.

After you learnt it, did you keep on feeling good about that forever or did it just fade away into the pile of other things you don't care about anymore while you went on to want to learn new things?

Of course, some desires are straightforward. But if every want was just about the thing itself, marketing departments would be out of a job.

That's fine

It's from a 10+ year-old blog post so I wouldn't expect it to be in line with modern psychotherapy.

It's an insight that has stuck with me since then and seems to strike a chord with others when shared, regardless of whether or not it's "great".

Of course it's fine to want something and then get it. Last night I wanted a Klondike bar so I walked to my freezer and got one. This misses the point entirely.

Plenty of examples of people getting what they thought they wanted and still feeling unfulfilled.

I appreciate your point about the serenity prayer, I think there's something relevant there for sure.

Surely it can be true that a profoundly wise and consistently effective person holds a belief or utters a phrase that is profoundly unwise and endlessly futile.

Feynman has a comment in one of his two autobiographies where he describes an argument with an artist friend — about, I think, the beauty of a rose. His friend believed that "dissecting" the rose, breaking it down to its biological components chemical processes, took away from the beauty of the rose.

Feynman disagreed — couldn't understand how knowing more about the thing could possibly take away from it.

It was the one thing I read from him where I disagreed with him. It seems strange to me he didn't see naivety, wonder as things someone might cherish. Those are things that you are in danger of losing when you come to know too much.

I'm probably belaboring my point, but I remember when I was in my 20's pointing out to my girlfriend at the time some of the more well known constellations in the night sky. They were not well know to her. I'd try to point to a star, point to another — "There, that's Scorpio. You can see the one reddish star, Aldebaran in the center..."

No, she could not see it. Christ, like Orion, I can't look up at the night sky in winter and not see it. What does she see in the sky at night?

Oh, that's right, an amazing jumble of mysterious points of light — like I used to as a young boy.

Funny when I later came across "When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer".

> 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".

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.

I suspect one can. This is because "progress" is pretty much never in a straight line from New York to San Francisco. It meanders all over the place, in circles, around the horn a few times, bumping into Africa, until it eventually blunders into San Francisco.

Today, we can go directly from New York to SF in a straight line.

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?

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."

> 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?

It's not a critique of his work (although to be honest, he's probably not in the top 10 physicists of the 20th century). Rather, it's a critique of the mythbuilding that seems to surround Feynman--and only Feynman, you don't see this stuff around (say) Hawking or Einstein--that turn him into the only physicist worth emulating.

As for your later contention that he's less visible to the general public since the '90s, well, I had Surely You're Joking as required school reading in the '00s, the narrator of the video similarly remarks on it being recommended reading for aspiring physicists in probably near enough the same timeframe. Oh, and someone cared enough to post a link today to his blackboard, and (as of this writing) 58 other people cared to upvote it.

To be clear that YouTube video is not really a critique of Richard Feynman, especially not his scientific career, it's a critique of people who knew him writing books and making content using his name and making money off it as if it came directly from him. It also critiques some of his behavior around interactions with students or telling what amounts to tall tales or standup comedy jokes and then other people taking it as gospel. Richard Feynman did not write the book "Surely you're joking, Mr Feynman". And some of the content in that book seems like it may greatly exaggerated or even be completely fabricated. And Feynman was not alive to see much of what was published in his name or using his name.

It's also easy to dunk on someone without watching their content. You should probably watch the video if you want to dunk on it. It does not dunk on his physics. It's extremely thoroughly researched and it's about "the sham legacy of Richard Feynman" which is specifically about the legacy of anecdotes about his personality, and is different from the actual physics legacy of Richard Feynman, and it is extremely clear on this point.

You can add to the list, "Putnam Fellow." And, not only was he a fellow, he apparently trounced the scores of the other 4 fellows:

    "Anyway, I was among the first five. I have since found out from 
     somebody from Canada, where it was scored, who was in the scoring 
     division—he came to me much later and he told me that it was 
     astonishing. He said that at this examination, 'Not only were you 
     one of the five, but the gap between you and the other four was 
     sensational.' He told me that. I didn’t know that. That may not 
     be correct, but that’s what I heard."

Feynman's grasp of mathematics was astounding

The video is not about Feynman's actual career. That's actually the point -- the idea of Feynman people have in their minds is totally divorced from the actual person and his work.

You should try actually watching the video before writing a manifesto.

He is known for being a bad ass scientists and super slick with the ladies.

Many decades later we say more accurately, he was a bad ass scientist who either sexually harassed or straight up raped most of his female mentees and was generally kinda racist (I mean, so was everyone back then. Still tho) and a general asshole.

I mean I don't really think there is any point in declaring anyone the best scientist ever. But he's firmly in whatever the top tier is when only considering scientific contributions.

She's a phd in physics, I think we can safely say that she has a curious mind.

Watch the video. Feynman didn't write a single book.

"He lived, he died, the rest is anecdote"

Frankly I'm having trouble believing you watched the video if you make the assertion:

> He’s inspired many people to go into physics and other sciences, which she herself states in the video, but somehow she makes that out to be a bad thing by implying the Feynman fans are weird, calling them “Feynman Bros”.

There were multiple points in the presentation on her experience with Feynman fans and why they deserved the Bros title.

* Having an unearned superiority complex while having misogynistic beliefs (6:50->8:23) - followed by examples of personal experiences by the video creator

* Making up stories about him (1:42:XX->1:44:XX)

* Thinking that negging is cool? I realize I already said misogynistic beliefs, but feel like this should be re-iterated (24:20->25:50). The example given about the Feynman and the waitress was particularly rage-inducing to me. I'm picturing my mother or wife in that scenario and some jackass doing that to them.

> Like the thing about brushing teeth and seeing things from a different point of view. She completely missed the entire point of why people think his point of view is interesting on it. Basically he’s just saying in a video that most people brush their teeth every morning, and if you view all the humans doing this from a higher vantage point, like from space, you see this line creeping across the earth and most of the people right on that line are engaged in the same ritual. It’s interesting to think about this one phenomenon from the perspective of individual humans and also from someone watching from space. She doesn’t provide a reason why this is dumb she just basically says it’s dumb and moves on to the next point. It kind of feels like she either didn’t think about it enough or is just being disingenuous.

This is a mischaracterization of this section of the video. 37:33-> 39:45 for anyone else who wants to make their own judgement. The point was that people watch the clip of Feynman and come out with the wrong/harmful conclusions.

It wasn't for the worst either. Frankly i think it's essential for people to have experience in some mischeviety. Hacker mindset, etc, etc. I've joined a PhD program recently and you can really tell who's never done anything but study.

Who is trying to "tear him down"?

All I see is people trying to point out the differences between "Richard Feynman the character" and "Richard Feynman the real person"

"Richard Feynman the character" would talk about how he goes to parties and is able to befuddled people in their native languages that he doesn't speak.

"Richard Feynman the person" was a nobel prize winning physicist

Do his tall tales have to be true for his nobel prize to be valid? Or can he be lying for his ego while still being a good scientist?

One minute and thirty seconds into the video: "Amazing Nobel Prize winning physicist"

Dyson has won nearly every award other than the Nobel.

Reminds me of this quote by Stephen Gould

> I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops

How many women or other discriminated-against people didn't have the chance to make a difference in the world because of attitudes of people like Feynman?

Most of these complaints about Feynman come down to one story he told. People who come away thinking Feynman is a misogynist generally miss the point of the story. Feynman talks about how when he was young, an older friend told him he could pick up women by being a jerk. He tried it, and it worked, but he felt bad about himself afterwards and decided not to do it any more.

Some people look at that story and say, "Look at what a jerk Feynman was to the lady in the story!" And then they completely ignore the part where Feynman says that even though the method was effective, he didn't feel right using it.

Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman? is the most heavily edited.

Gell-Mann famously threatened to sue Feynman if he didn't alter his book which he did in later printings.

The parts of the Cargo Cult Science chapter that referenced specific scammers were removed out of fear of a defamation lawsuit.

The Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Path chapter in which he discusses picking up women at bars was removed after the first edition.

All of Surely You're Joking received a pass to change the language of the book in order to "remove sexist and misogynistic language".

What Do You Care What Other People Think? was also altered to remove his descriptions of his first wife and broadly the language of the book was also updated.