Richard Feynman
âIf I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize.â - Feynman
Feynman was not able to simply explain a great deal of things to many people. Including experts. I know that many of you find that shocking.
But Internetâs take is wrong here.
If you cannot explain something in simple terms, you don't understand it.
Even the great Feynman said a great many meretricious things about science. Mostly because he wanted to speak in a powerful and overly simplistic fashion that lay people loved. âHey, if I canât understand you, itâs because YOU donât get it! Ha.â
Except that isnât how this works.
This is a description of how Feynmanâs brilliant âSum Over Historiesâ technique went over at the Pocono conference in the spring of 1948. Feynman wasnât able to explain what he was doing to even the worldâs very top experts in Theoretical Physics!
And how did he explain failure?
Very simply: âMy machines came from too far away.â
The Internet needs to grow out of its expectation that it can use what is possibly Feynmanâs dumbest quote to dismiss those it cannot quickly understand. But it wonât. Why? Because the quote is both powerful and totally wrong.
Disagree? Great. Prove it!
Step I: Get someone who understands âThe Families Index Theorem on Manifolds with Boundaryâ to fully explain it simply to you.
Step II: Explain it to us all!
I look forward to conceding to you. Until then? Maybe go easy on Feynmanâs dumbest take?
If you still love repeating that Feynman quote despite the greater context provided, hereâs some material. Ask your expository heroes to explain it.
Good luck. Because, if Iâm not wrong, youâre gonna need itâŚ
[Until then, hereâs a primary source:
https://imo.universite-paris-saclay.fr/~bismut/Bismut/1990e.pdf]
đ
Note: The quote in the original tweet has a typographical error. It should be:
"Hell, if I could explain it to the average person, it wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize."âRichard Feynman. As Quoted in âPeopleâ, 22 July 1985.
@Eluminat1 Witten? Dirac? Did they make the cut?
@karlbykarlsmith Not as I understand it. Feynmanâs diagrams are just an indexing scheme for series terms albeit a provocative one. The apparent classical localization of position & momentum is taking place in the indexing diagram, NOT in the quantum propagator which the diagrams sum to construct.
@NukeBeach Ultimately it required more time, more conferences, and Dyson, Bethe, and Wilson to put the full Theory in a form where it was accepted.
@rolfascending @travislambirth Great. Just apply your critique in the terms you understand it to the challenge problem of the thread so I can fully appreciate the point of what you are saying. Thanks.
@theoctobear Itâs a test. Show us what it means to explain a proven theorem in simple terms. So easy. Find the experts who understand it and have them explain it in these simple terms that all interested parties can understand. Piece of cake I would think.
@robnormal Thatâs the beginning. Then that the listeners be *highly* motivated. Also intelligent. Also, that no listeners are trying not to understand. Etc
Pretty soon itâs stone soup. Youâre no longer explaining things quickly at a party but youâre now teaching QFT courses at university.
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