Why are so many great scientists physicists?

Richard Feynman (Richard) was an American theoretical physicist, an expert in quantum electrodynamics, the father of nanotechnology, and a Nobel Prize winner. He was a personable, approachable and wacky person who was one of the ten greatest physicists of all time.

Feynman visited Brazil in the 1980s and taught physics at the university. At that time, Brazil was struggling to catch up with Western science. There was a passion for learning science throughout the country, which was far greater than that in the United States at that time.

But soon Feynman discovered a problem. In class, his graduate physics students could recite complex physics formulas by heart, but they could not answer the simple physics questions he asked in life:

After studying for a long time, I realized that my students memorized everything very well, but they did not understand what they were memorizing at all.

When they hear "light reflected from a medium with a certain refractive index", they have no idea that this refers to something like "water". They don't know that "the direction of light" is the direction when you look at something.

One of the important reasons why Feynman became the best physicist of the 20th century is that he has always been very clear about the difference between "knowing something" and "knowing the name of something".

He has always believed that there are two types of knowledge and information we learn, and most people will always focus on the first one. In the first type, we focus on learning the surface or name of something. In the second type, we focus on understanding and digging deeper. Feynman always said that his success lay in learning something with a deep understanding, and that this method is suitable for all topics and everyone can do it.

Next, I will introduce Feynman’s learning method to everyone. In just 4 simple steps, you can better understand the knowledge you know.

Choose a concept

Choose a topic that you need to learn and understand. Take out a piece of paper and write down a headline.

Teach this concept

Write or draw everything you have learned about this topic. While writing, you can start telling it to yourself, or find someone who doesn't understand the topic at all and introduce it to him.

Because when we learn new content, it is often accompanied by too many unfamiliar vocabulary or professional terms. To understand according to professional translations or definitions is actually to lie to yourself, because you will not realize whether you really understand.

When you connect a knowledge point from beginning to end using simple language and pictures, you will force yourself to understand the theory first and find out what you are unclear about...

Rework

When you find that you cannot explain a theory in simple words, or connect it to other knowledge. You will understand exactly where you need to put in more time and effort to understand the topic. And this is when the real learning begins.

When you find yourself stuck when telling yourself or others, you will start studying the raw materials before learning and understanding.

Review and streamline

Now, after the first three steps, you have written down an explanation of the concept. Review these explanations and make sure you are not borrowing any complex concepts to explain the concept. Read these explanations aloud. If it doesn't read concisely, or sounds confusing, that's an indication that there are areas where you could improve your understanding. You can also try to explain using analogies to common things and phenomena.

Finally, you can explain this concept clearly in the simplest language and with the fewest words. At this time, it shows that you really understand the essence of this concept.

When you really use Feynman's method, you will find that it is not only a learning method, but also a way of thinking. Feynman mentioned in his book "Stop It, Mr. Feynman" that his father taught him this way of thinking when he was a child:

See that bird? It's a short pheasant, but in Germany it's called a halzenfugel, in China it's called a Chung Ling, and even if you know all its names, you still know nothing about the bird.

Look, this short pheasant is singing and teaching its young to fly. It travels tens of thousands of miles across the country in the summer, but no one knows how it knows its direction.

This is a very simple truth: knowing the name of something is not the same as truly understanding it. This is like when we study mathematics from childhood to college. We memorize multiplication tables and memorize partial differential equations, but we fail to learn "mathematical thinking" and truly learn to look at problems around us from a mathematical perspective. .

This is actually the same thing as the basic principle thinking (First Principle Thinking) that "Iron Man" Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, who also graduated from the Department of Physics, admires and is good at.

Musk mentioned in an interview:

With first principles thinking] you boil things down to the most fundamental truths … and then reason up from there.

< p>When you think in first principles terms, you trace things back to the most basic truth...and then, starting from that most basic truth, work your way up logically.

Great minds think alike!

Article source: WECRACK "3 minutes, 4 steps, let you master the best learning method: Feynman method", wisdom collection "Quick learning method of famous physicist Feynman".

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