141–150 of 284 posts
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Being part of a course doesn't mean the students get enough time to delve as deep or have as deep an understanding of the phenomenon though.
Yeah, imagine if the undergrads had to write out the underlying proof. When I took physics classes the professors would do things for our exams like assume gravity is 10 ms to give people an easier time with the numbers, and of course the spherical frictionless cow.
There's something rather sad, maybe poignant about it. It stands there as a testimonial to our brevity on this planet, to all that we will not see, do, understand. So it goes, I guess.
We don't have much time and it takes too long to get that until there is too little left. The latter is the tragedy.
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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 re…
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.
Today, we can go directly from New York to SF in a straight line.
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I almost want to read it as satire. Especially juxtaposed against his death. Because the ideas of "What I cannot create, I do not understand." and "Know how to solve every problem that has been solved" seem profoundly unwise and endlessly futile.
If you are calling Richard Feynman "profoundly unwise" and "endlessly futile", you might need to do a bit more reflection on the grounding for your opinion.
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".
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I'm reminded of a passage from the last psychiatrist blog: “One of the great insights of psychoanalysis is that you never really want an object, you only want the wanting, which means the solution is to set your sights on an impossible ideal and work hard to reach it. You won’t. That’s not just okay, that’s the point. It’s ok if you fantasize about knowing kung fu if you then try to actually learn kung fu, eventually…
I once wanted to learn how to change the oil in my car. I learned, and then I changed the oil in my car. It was never about wanting to want to learn about my car.
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I once wanted to learn how to change the oil in my car. I learned, and then I changed the oil in my car. It was never about wanting to want to learn about my car.
That's fine
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One of the reasons you can’t get good at riding a bike by reading about it is that we literally don’t understand the mechanics of bike riding. It’s a currently unsolved problem in physics. Google it if you do t believe me! So I get what you’re saying, but it is maybe not the optimal example.
It's not unsolved per se, just a complex topic that resists simple explanations. (see also: what causes lift in an airfoil)
Unlike lift, which is very well understood but often poorly explained.
Richard Feynman having the quantum Hall effect on his "to learn" list is amazing. I mean, it makes sense, because less than three years before he died the Nobel Prize in physics was awarded for its discovery. But it shows that even one of the greatest physicists of his generation had not fully grasped something that is now part of every undergraduate physics degree's standard curriculum and is arguably much less comp…
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Yeah, it's hard not to see some truth in what Murray Gell-Mann said, which is that he spent as much time trying to come up with stories about himself as he did working. Also while breaking the rules might be fun, lockpicking desks & sending coded messages out of Los Alamos "for fun" is maybe not for the best.
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.