Collection of Richard Feynman talks on the scientific method, learning, and CS
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Re: Collection of Richard Feynman talks on the scientific method, learning, and CS
#2[deleted]
Re: Collection of Richard Feynman talks on the scientific method, learning, and CS
#3Feynman's view on CS is similar by Hal Abelson's take on the term (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQLUPjefuWA). Abelson's point about CS being more like magic has always stuck with me.
Re: Collection of Richard Feynman talks on the scientific method, learning, and CS
#4"If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics."
Re: Collection of Richard Feynman talks on the scientific method, learning, and CS
#5His answer on why he does not believe in Computer Science is pretty convincing. What I would love to have happened is a professor telling me that what I am going to be learning is not exactly science. Nobody did, so I spent a couple of years trying to scientify things.
Re: Collection of Richard Feynman talks on the scientific method, learning, and CS
#6If you are interested in physics and have not seen Dr. Feynman's 7-part lecture series entitled The Character of Physical Law, you really owe it to yourself to watch them in their entirety [1]. The site's interface has some neat features, such as links into the transcript and notes related to the topic being discussed.
Dr. Feynman delivered these lectures as part of the "Messenger Lectures" [2] series at Cornell University in 1964:
Lecture 1: Law of Gravitation - An Example of Physical Law
Lecture 2: The Relation of Mathematics and Physics
Lecture 3: The Great Conservation Principles
Lecture 4: Symmetry in Physical Law
Lecture 5: The Distinction of Past and Future
Lecture 6: Probability and Uncertainty - The Quantum Mechanical View of Nature
Lecture 7: Seeking New Laws
[1] Requires SilverLight: http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/index.html
Re: Collection of Richard Feynman talks on the scientific method, learning, and CS
#7If you are interested in physics and have not seen Dr. Feynman's 7-part lecture series entitled The Character of Physical Law , you really owe it to yourself to watch them in their entirety [1]. The site's interface has some neat features, such as links into the transcript and notes related to the topic being discussed. Dr. Feynman delivered these lectures as part of the "Messenger Lectures" [2] series at Cornell Uni…
Fortunately they're also on youtube, if you - like me - either don't like silverlight or you can't install it on your computer:
Re: Collection of Richard Feynman talks on the scientific method, learning, and CS
#8I'm so terribly bored by the same Feynman lectures reposted again and again to either YC, Facebook, or Reddit. Do a search and they come up again and again.
I wish there were more lectures by others spread around. Say John Bardeen, for example.
Re: Collection of Richard Feynman talks on the scientific method, learning, and CS
#9His answer on why he does not believe in Computer Science is pretty convincing. What I would love to have happened is a professor telling me that what I am going to be learning is not exactly science. Nobody did, so I spent a couple of years trying to scientify things.
I've heard others give the same argument, but I don't find it very compelling. There's no rule that says that science cannot be applied to purely human endeavors. We would not say that sociology is not a science, even though it is a study of a purely human concept. Science is simply a method of increasing your knowledge of a system. It doesn't matter if that system is the bare physical universe, the chemical interactions within a cell, or the flow of data and logic in a computer program.
One unambiguous application of the scientific method to computing is in debugging. Your program behaves unexpectedly – aha! a new phenomenon. The lateral thinking hardware in your brain engages as you tinker around, reproducing the bug and noticing the conditions in which it happens. You gather all of this together with your existing knowledge of the system, and come up with an explanation for the bug – a hypothesis! Then you try to falsify your hypothesis. You might try to falsify it by watching a value in the debugger, for example. Or you might modify your program and see if the bug persists or changes its behavior. You aren't usually recording all of this on paper, because in this case you don't care much about presenting your findings to others. Others will be satisfied if the bug is gone. And of course, you probably aren't thinking of the words "hypothesis" and "experiment". But that's what you did, and that's why you figured out the bug.
(On the other hand, some programmers try to debug their programs by poking and picking randomly at their code until they get it working. I would urge them to try adopting a scientific approach. It's not just a way to satisfy a teacher in a chemistry lab, as it turns out.)
Re: Collection of Richard Feynman talks on the scientific method, learning, and CS
#10His answer on why he does not believe in Computer Science is pretty convincing. What I would love to have happened is a professor telling me that what I am going to be learning is not exactly science. Nobody did, so I spent a couple of years trying to scientify things.
Computer Science as a field has evolved since then, and I doubt he would insist on the same view today. It is very common for Computer Scientists to work in close collaborations with e.g. biologists, physicists, etc. to study natural phenomena. Some branches of Computer Science, I'd agree, are more artificial (Compilers, Programming Languages, Networking, etc... ) and less directly about nature. These branches were mostly synonymous with Computer Science in those times, and I believe these are what Feynman was also thinking about.