“Once I asked him to explain to me, so that I could understand it, why spin-1/2 particles obey Fermi-Dirac statistics. Gauging his audience perfectly, he said, “I’ll prepare a freshman lecture on it.” But a few days later he came to me and said: “You know, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t reduce it to […]
Richard Feynman:
John Trinkaus, who was awarded the 2003 Ig Nobel Literature Prize for publishing more than 80 detailed academic reports about things that annoyed him, got some recent attention for his how-well-do-people-guess-at-passwords research. The Chinese Apple site produced this video about that: Here’s a machine translation into English of part of what it says: “John Trinkaus, a professor at […]
Richard Feynman, asked a question that begins “Why…”, explains why that kind of question is tough:
Richard Feynman told stories that got people thinking. This passage from a talk Feynman gave at a meeting of the National Science Teachers Association in 1966 in New York City, was later printed — as part of a transcript of the entire talk — in The Physics Teacher, vol. 7, issue 6, 1969, pp. 313-320. The next day, Monday, we […]
If you’re one of those people who looks into a mirror and wonders – ‘Why is left-right reversed, but not up-down?’ – then you’re not alone. “No agreed-upon account of mirror reversal is currently available although it has been discussed for more than two thousand years since Plato.” – explains mirror researcher Yohtaro Takanoa, Professor […]
This is how professor Richard Feynman, BSc., Ph.D. described the process of validating a scientific proposition – which he liked to call “A guess”. “It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn’t make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is – if it […]
The word “muggles”, so prominently used in the Harry Potter novels, may have danced through the speech of physicist Richard Feynman. Investigator David Kessler writes: In this youtube video [below], Feynman is discussing how scientists develop and test theories. At 05:10 he says this: “I must also point out to you that you cannot prove a ‘vague’ […]