Feynman Technique Quotes

I noticed that the [drawing] teacher didn't tell people much... Instead, he tried to inspire us to experiment with new approaches. I thought of how we teach physics: We have so many techniques - so many mathematical methods - that we never stop telling the students how to do things. On the other hand, the drawing teacher is afraid to tell you anything. If your lines are very heavy, the teacher can't say, "Your lines are too heavy." because *some* artist has figured out a way of making great pictures using heavy lines. The teacher doesn't want to push you in some particular direction. So the drawing teacher has this problem of communicating how to draw by osmosis and not by instruction, while the physics teacher has the problem of always teaching techniques, rather than the spirit, of how to go about solving physical problems.

So the drawing teacher has this problem of communicating how to draw by osmosis and not by instruction, while the physics teacher has the problem of always teaching techniques, rather than the spirit, of how to go about solving physical problems.

Each of us talked about what we thought the “ethics of equality” was, from our own point of view, without paying any attention to the other guy’s point of view. For example, the historian proposed that the way to understand ethical problems is to look historically at how they evolved and how they developed; the international lawyer suggested that the way to do it is to see how in fact people actually act in different situations and make their arrangements; the Jesuit priest was always referring to “the fragmentation of knowledge” and I, as a scientist, proposed that we should isolate the problem in a way analogous to Galileo’s techniques for experiments; and so on. “So, in my opinion,” I said, “we had no dialogue at all. Instead, we had nothing but chaos!” Of

My four things I care about are truth, meaning, fitness and grace. [...] Sam [Harris] would like to make an argument that the better and more rational our thinking is, the more it can do everything that religion once did. [...] I think about my personal physics hero, Dirac – who was the guy who came up with the equation for the electron, less well-known than the Einstein equations but arguably even more beautiful...in order to predict that, he needed a positively-charged and a negatively-charged particle, and the only two known at the time were the electron and the proton to make up, let's say, a hydrogen atom. Well, the proton is quite a bit heavier than the electron and so he told the story that wasn't really true, where the proton was the anti-particle of the electron, and Heisenberg pointed out that that couldn't be because the masses are too far off and they have to be equal. Well, a short time later, the anti-electron -- the positron, that is -- was found, I guess by Anderson at Caltech in the early 30s and then an anti-proton was created some time later. So it turned out that the story had more meaning than the exact version of the story...so the story was sort of more true than the version of the story that was originally told. And I could tell you a similar story with Einstein, I could tell it to you with Darwin, who, you know, didn't fully understand the implications of his theory, as is evidenced by his screwing up a particular kind of orchid in his later work...not understanding that his theory completely explained that orchid! So there's all sorts of ways in which we get the...the truth wrong the first several times we try it, but the meaning of the story that we tell somehow remains intact. And I think that that's a very difficult lesson for people who just want to say, 'Look, I want to'...you know, Feynman would say, "If an experiment disagrees with you, then you're wrong' and it's a very appealing story to tell to people – but it's also worth noting that Feynman never got a physical law of nature and it may be that he was too wedded to this kind of rude judgment of the unforgiving. Imagine you were innovating in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. The first few times might not actually work. But if you told yourself the story, 'No, no, no – this is actually genius and it's working; no, you just lost three consecutive bouts' -- well, that may give you the ability to eventually perfect the move, perfect the technique, even though you were lying to yourself during the period in which it was being set up. It's a little bit like the difference between scaffolding and a building. And too often, people who are crazy about truth reject scaffolding, which is an intermediate stage in getting to the final truth.

By extending our techniques—and if necessary our definitions—still further we can infer the time duration of still faster physical events. We can speak of the period of a nuclear vibration. We can speak of the lifetime of the newly discovered strange resonances (particles) mentioned in Chapter 2. Their complete life occupies a time span of only 10-24 second, approximately the time it would take light (which moves at the fastest known speed) to cross the nucleus of hydrogen (the smallest known object).

However, Jim Hartle of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and I realised there was a third possibility. Maybe the universe has no boundary in space and time. At first sight, this seems to be in direct contradiction to the geometrical theorems that I mentioned earlier. These showed that the universe must have had a beginning, a boundary in time. However, in order to make Feynman’s techniques mathematically well defined, the mathematicians developed a concept called imaginary time. It isn’t anything to do with the real time that we experience. It is a mathematical trick to make the calculations work and it replaces the real time we experience. Our idea was to say that there was no boundary in imaginary time. That did away with trying to invent boundary conditions. We called this the no-boundary proposal.

... Feynman's technique was simple. And he claimed that it was always successful. But it' not currently working for me. Not yet. What was it? Well, when he was building the first atomic bomb, he observed that scientists were so worried about forgetting the codes to their safes that they invariably used a memorable date as their combination. And if you do the maths on that, the first two numbers, the month in the American dating system, could only be 01 - 12 and having only twelve options instead of 99 made it far more manageable process when the next to numbers were likely to be between one and 31, and the last two were certainly a two-digit number from the previous 50 years. Basically, he cut the odds and could crack the code with brute force if he had to. But he rarely had to because he just found that people wrote the code down on a slip of paper or in a notebook somewhere near the safe in question. In a drawer or what not. Seriously, Tanika asked, that's the problem with magic tricks. If you look at the effect, Richard Feynman breaking into Robert Oppenheimer's safe, where the codes where the atomic bomb were kept, your dumbstruck. But explain your workings and it all becomes very hum-drum.

The Feynman technique revised So, if you want to master something, do it publicly and do it consistently. Publishing your written ideas forces you to learn more often and to write more clearly. Publishing a video forces you to improve your speaking skills and to articulate your thoughts. Sharing your ideas on stage teaches you how to hold an audience and tell captivating stories. In any area of your life, doing it in public, and creating an obligation that forces you to do it consistently, will lead you to mastery.

To foster mastery and understanding of a concept, employ the Feynman technique. This involves simplifying and explaining complex topics using simple language, either in writing or by teaching others.

The Feynman technique is a specific application of elaborative interrogation. Remember, the goal is not to actually answer the questions; it’s to see what you are unable to answer—that is the information it provides.

The Feynman technique is a specific application of elaborative interrogation. Remember, the goal is not to actually answer the questions; it’s to see what you are unable to answer

If there is one thing the experts agree on, then it is this: You have to externalise your ideas, you have to write. Richard Feynman stresses it as much as Benjamin Franklin. If we write, it is more likely that we understand what we read, remember what we learn and that our thoughts make sense. And if we have to write anyway, why not use our writing to build up the resources for our future publications?