Einstein said it first:
If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/19421-if-you-can-t-explain-...
If you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it
161–170 of 237 posts
Re: If you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it
#162Edit: apparently, I have been misinformed for a very long time. These are still excellent lectures to watch though! The Feynman Lectures are now on Youtube[0], and I like to watch them (all of them) every few years. I highly recommend that if you've never seen them, you take some time and watch them- really watch them. Close the other windows, turn your phone to do not disturb, and really watch these masterpieces of…
These lectures are different from his famous Lectures on Physics. The lectures you linked to were compiled in "Character of Physical Law" and are not related to his Caltech undergraduate courses where he presented his "Lectures on Physics" content. You link to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Character_of_Physical_Law "Feynman Lectures on Physics" are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feynman_Lectures_on_Physic...
....
Are you serious?!?!
Oh shit, that's... I've been grossly misformed for a very long time.
Re: If you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it
#163Feynman also said: "Hell, if I could explain it to the average person, it wouldn't have been worth the Nobel prize." [1] Showing a limitation of the maxim or Feynman's hubris? [1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman
If one assumes that things at the edge of human understanding and thus most worthy of such a prize are understood only incompletely by those who understand them best, it is both consistent with Feynman's maxim and not at all a sign of hubris.
Re: If you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it
#164"had I more time, I would've written a shorter letter".
Remember that "in simple terms" does not mean easy or over simplifying something. To me it means making a to-the-point and jargon-free explanation.
Re: If you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it
#165Edit: apparently, I have been misinformed for a very long time. These are still excellent lectures to watch though! The Feynman Lectures are now on Youtube[0], and I like to watch them (all of them) every few years. I highly recommend that if you've never seen them, you take some time and watch them- really watch them. Close the other windows, turn your phone to do not disturb, and really watch these masterpieces of…
To be more clear, the lecture series you are talking about is called "The Character of Physical Law" and is not the same content that one would get from reading "The Feynman Lectures on Physics", which is a rigorous course in most of undergraduate physics. But I highly recommend the "Character" series. Just wanted to avoid having people think they're the same thing.
Yeah, I'm an idiot. Now I need to go find the actual lectures.
Re: If you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it
#166"What I cannot create, I do not understand." This actually came up for me at the office. I was asking a bunch of questions about the Z transform and the Fast Fourier Transform. The person I was talking to said, "Hey, just call the function in MATLAB, it doesn't matter how it works, just that you understand what it is saying." All of my life I have rebelled at this notion. My earliest recollection of running into it w…
surely there's some tension between these two extremes. for someone learning how to _use_ FFT's, treating them as a black box for a while is useful so they can build some intuition etc and then, if it floats their boat, go back and dive deeper. as a chemist, I didn't give a rat's how the thing worked, I had spectra to analyse...
Conversely, if you had to deep dive everything, you would not get _anything_ done since there's always a deeper level.
Maybe it's just an experience thing where you start to appreciate that for most things (probably all bar one or two) you are just the privileged user of other people's expertise.
Re: If you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
But then what does it mean to be understood? If you skip out the part of the analogy where you actually return to the complex terminology you're simplifying, you haven't produced understanding - you've only made a just-so story which is a reflection of the reality, not a justification for it.
It's the other way around: First was the concept, then the agreement which words we use to describe them. > If you skip out the part of the analogy where you actually return to the complex terminology you're simplifying, you haven't produced understanding Billions of people know what a telephone does and how to use one without understanding τῆλε ("tele-", distant) and φωνή ("phone", voice, talk, language). They all g…
> I can teach you to play chess without teaching a single chess-specific term. Yes, other players will laugh at you when you call the pawns "smurfs", but when you understand how to handle your smurf-army
But that doesn't remove the terminology, it only changes it. You can understand chess equally well in English, French, or Lebanese, because the syntax isn't as important as the semantics. You can't teach me chess without talking about the idea of a "piece", no matter what you end up calling it. There has to be some common groundwork.
>Billions of people know what a telephone does and how to use one without understanding τῆλε ("tele-", distant) and φωνή ("phone", voice, talk, language). They all get the concept and nobody would argue that they need to understand the terminology as well.
The etymology of words tends to have no bearing on understanding them technically. To me, that's a non-comparison.
What's really meant is more that plenty of people use a telephone without a comprehensive understanding of EM radiation. That doesn't mean they can't use their phones, it just means if you explain EM radiation to them in terms of phones, they probably aren't going to come away understanding it any better.
Re: If you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it
#168I interviewed a woman once who'd graduated from Caltech. She was massively overqualified and a fine fit. So about 10 minutes into the interview I started just having a nice conversation.
She'd gone to Caltech. That was on her resume. So I asked her if she'd ever taken a class from Feynmann. That was actually unlikely but she had sat in on a seminar with Feynmann once. She said he could explain the most difficult material and that you would understand it. You would understand it walking away and this would last about 15 minutes during which time you confuse yourself.
Re: If you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Education is a series of small lies." Spoken by my intro to computer engineering professor, upon telling us that most real processors actually have some ternary logic. The notion here is that educating beginners about a subject is different from communication between experts. Yes, experts use jargon because it is more efficient. But, the notion here is that if you truly understand something, you should be able to fi…
> most real processors actually have some ternary logic Was he referring to the Z state? If so, it's not really ternary logic but rather a "no result" state for cases where there is a control signal involved (e.g., in a tri-state buffer).
Modern CPUs have phase-locked loops generating clocks for each region of the chip. These use separate pull-up and pull-down mosfets to control the frequency, so arguably ternary.
Even more non-binary things happen inside DRAM and flash memory.
Re: If you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
exactly what I was trying to point out. It came out wrong I guess. A statement like "if not a, then not b" is not applicable unless a "implies" b and a "is because of" b. Correct me if I got it all wrong somehow.
"if not a, then not b" is equivalent to "if b then a" and is neither equivalent to nor the opposite of "a implies b". I'm having trouble understanding your point under these confusions. Is it that being able to explain is a sufficient but not a necessary condition for understanding?
Point taken. My point is just because I can simply explain it does not imply clear understanding. And not being able to explain isn't a reliable indicator of lack of understanding