Not Just a Physicist

Newton and gravity; Einstein and relativity; Darwin and evolution: everyone knows the theories associated with those scientists.

But Richard Feynman? Most (lay) people wouldn’t know anything about what he contributed to science. And yet Feynman continues to be rock star famous. Why? Shane Parrish gets the reason for that perfectly:

“Why is Feynman so well known? It’s likely because he had tremendous range outside of pure science, and although he won a Nobel Prize for his work in quantum mechanics, he’s probably best known for other things, primarily his wonderful ability to explain and teach.”

As Bill Gates puts it:

“He takes such obvious delight in knowledge—you can see his face light up. And he makes it so clear that anyone can understand it.”

It’s not as if Feynman is good at explaining things only to laymen. Even physics students at college used to be blown away. As Leonard Susskind wrote in Black Hole Wars:

“Everyone else would struggle through hours of complicated calculations to answer some physics problem, but Feynman would explain in twenty seconds why the answer was obvious.”

Feynman taught us a simple way to detect whether we really understood something or just knew a term to use:

“Without using the new word which you have just learned, try to rephrase what you have just learned in your own language.”

He then cites a great example:

“Shoe leather wears out because it rubs against the sidewalk and the little notches and bumps on the sidewalk grab pieces and pull them off.” That is knowledge. “To simply say, ‘It is because of friction,’ is sad, because it’s not science.”

The scary part of this technique is that it makes you realize how often we use terms without knowing anything… without even realizing it.

In one of his non-science books, The Meaning of it All: Thoughts of a Citizen Scientist, he starts by acknowledging that not everything needs to be dealt with scientifically:

“In life, in gaiety, in emotion, in human pleasures and pursuits, and in literature and so on, there is no need to be scientific, there is no reason to be scientific. One must relax and enjoy life.”

But, he says, even politics would benefit if it got a bit more scientific!

“Suppose two politicians are running for president, and one goes through the farm section and is asked, “What are you going to do about the farm question?” And he knows right away— bang, bang, bang.

Now he goes to the next campaigner who comes through. “What are you going to do about the farm problem?” “Well, I don’t know... But it seems to me it must be a very difficult problem, because for twelve, fifteen, twenty years people have been struggling with it… And it must be a hard problem. So the way that I intend to solve the farm problem is to gather around me a lot of people who know something about it, to look at all the experience that we have had with this problem before, to take a certain amount of time at it, and then to come to some conclusion.”

Articulate. That should have been Feynman’s middle name.