Feynman: Knowing versus Understanding

What people said

dframe · 2015-09 · Strong recommendation

You and the person's comment above you are missing the point. First watch : [LINK] (A.I and physics) are quite related and workable ^I reference the above video not because I watched it and thought (hey that makes sense). I reference it because I already felt the same in my work on A.I and felt (wow someone else gets it) Also : [VIDEO] It's good to keep all sorts of working ideas/knowledge in your head when you're working towards solving a problem. All the physics experiments in the world aren't going to give you insight into problems unless you have workable ideas for how to integrate the findings into understanding/knowledge. What people often error in is that you can keep hacking away at and brute force your way to knowledge/understanding ... “A theory can be proved by experiment; but no path leads from experiment to the birth of a theory.” — Albert Einstein Ancient philosophers solved a lot of problems. More than you seem to be giving credit to. It's from their ideas that people knew where to look to 'prove' things. Watch the Feynman video and truly grasp what he is saying.

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gloomyday · 2025-03 · Reference

The pursuit of knowledge is not a linear path. The reason you benefit from deep learning now is because a few people in the past believed neural networks had a future despite not working as well as other techniques such as SVMs. Discovering knowledge and using the knowledge that works best are very different. Your argument remind me from this lecture from Feynman. Quoting him: "...and every theoretical physicist that is any good knows 6 or 7 different theoretical representations for exactly the same physics and knows that they are equivalent... but he keeps them in his head hoping that they'll give him different ideas for guessing." [VIDEO]

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RichardCA · 2022-08 · Reference

There is always a tension in Physics between physical proof and observability on the one hand, and having the right idea, the right intuition on the other. Going back to my Einstein example, there were other Physicists who contributed to Relativity (Lorentz, Minkowski, Poincaré, Fitzgerald) but we give Einstein the most credit because he had the right idea, that it's not enough to treat the speed of light as a constant in your math, you actually have to believe the Universe works that way. One of the stories that gets told is the reason Einstein never got a Nobel prize for Relativity is because the Nobel committee just wasn't ready to give it up and credit Einstein with discovering a new, fundamental truth about the Universe. Another story that gets told is that when Einstein was an undergrad at the ETH in Zurich, Minkowski was one of his professors and he dismissed Einstein for being a "Lazy Dog" because the math never came easy to him. But he looked at how Physics was taught at the time and knew something had to change. And he was right about that. I'll just leave this here, Feynman explained it better than I ever will. [VIDEO]

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