1 Comment.

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.... – Bo Leuf

– move zz 2009-06-14 13:47 UTC</div>