FractalFeynman

Richard P. Feynman taught an undergraduate class that I sporadically sat in on circa 1975-76. Maybe the subject was advanced quantum mechanics; I don't really remember. I do remember the teacher.

Dick Feynman was an extraordinary physicist, and his passion for science was contagious --- but he was also an extraordinary entertainer. He loved to perform before an audience of Caltech kids as much as the students loved to learn from him. His Brooklyn accent was so pure and undiluted that we speculated he must listen to language tapes, to keep it fresh.

Once during a lecture Feynman appeared to get stuck during a derivation. He excused himself, moved over to one corner of the blackboard, and drew some small mysterious diagrams. After looking at them for a few moments he smiled, winked at us, erased his scribbles, and went back to continue solving the main equations. Did he really reinvent the math on the fly, in real time? Or was it a planned stage trick, a visual play on the Feynman Diagrams that were part of his Nobel prize-winning research many years before? No matter --- we all laughed together with him at the physical comedy. (pun intended!)

FourPiFeedback (27 Jan 2003) brought to mind another Feynmanesque moment. Dick was in the process of doing some surface integrals for the crowd, and as often happened he paused to reminisce. "You know the circumference of a circle and the surface area of a sphere," he said. Then he quickly demonstrated the general case, the formula for the boundary of a hypersphere in N dimensions. "See that factorial there? If you write it as a gamma function you get the surface area of a sphere in X dimensions. Notice that X doesn't have to be an integer. I did that a long time ago, and then I worked out a few other properties of objects in fractional dimensions. What the hell good are they? I have no idea!"

(above quotes are from memory, not verbatim; see also ThinkingToolsExamples (8 Apr 1999), JonMathews (25 Apr 1999), BraKet (24 Jan 2001), CollegeCollage3 (29 Sep 2001), ...)

TopicPersonalHistory - TopicScience - Datetag20030130

Years back, I thoroughly enjoyed reading the Feynman lecture series of books, but lucky you, to have had the experience live.

Regarding the "pause for thought" you noted, it's perfectly possible that he was in fact reworking it on the fly. It's a characteristic of "truly knowing a subject" that you store not the details, but the general principles as "patterns" of insight, which then lets you spawn required detail off the cuff. I've done that myself on numerous occasions in subjects I know well.

In my teens I did considerable thinking about the subject of "knowing" something, and in my 20s I had this visualization of the process of learning as a "multidimentional folding" of detail into a coherent "pattern" that would neatly tuck away.

I was studying at Chalmers then (U of Tech), and this meant that one had huge daily heaps of unsorted "facts" and detail to deal with. With the mind cluttered up like that, it was hopeless to make sense of a subject. But when insight came, it was as if one could tuck away a clean pattern of structure and just sweep away the clutter because it was no longer needed or relevant to "knowing". I believe this process is particularly true for the higher realms of abstract subjects.

Studies of how people work and reason at different levels of expertese bear it out, because those high up on the scale to experts do so in a completely different way to novices and barely competents in the field. Good experts also know how to shift down into different, more linear modes for teaching, training, explaining and mentoring at various levels below their own. Rare breed.... -- BoLeuf

(correlates: TeamWork, CelebrityTakeover, KnowCanLearn, ...)