3/28/2023 0 Comments Rochard feynman“The smartest man in the world”īut if Feynman tried again and again to transmit that vision of pure knowledge, it was because for him the understanding came naturally, while for the vast majority of humans it does not. Decades later, the physicist would emphasize the difference between knowing the name of a bird and knowing the bird the first did not say anything about the animal, but about humans. This recourse to knowledge without understanding was a constant in other statements from Feynman, such as when in 1983 he responded to a BBC interviewer who asked him about the mechanism of magnets: “I can’t explain that attraction in terms of anything else that’s familiar to you.” But maybe that viewpoint went back to his childhood, when his father took him to watch birds. When he delivered that famous quote during a conference at Cornell University in 1964, he was trying to convince his listeners not to try to understand his explanation “in terms of something familiar.” Instead, he announced that he would simply describe how nature works, inviting those present to “relax and enjoy it.” Richard Feynman teaching at Cornell University. Science popularizers often use real-world metaphors to bring specialized knowledge to the public. But the words make sense when you understand how Feynman’s fine mental gears worked, a man who was, in addition to one of the most renowned figures of theoretical physics of all time, one of the most popular scientists of the twentieth century. “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” It is one of the most repeated quotes of Richard Feynman ( – 15 February 1988), and is undoubtedly an unusual phrase coming from the mouth of a physicist.
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