My Inspiration

Richard Feynman was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, developer of the Atomic Bomb at Los Alamos, and avid bongo drummer. In one of his books, What Do You Care What Other People Think?, he writes about some of the influence his father had on his outlook on life in general, and science in particular.

Young Richard and friends would often go on "nature walks" with their fathers. Later, one kid teases Richard for being unable to name a nearby bird, saying, "Your father doesn't teach you anything!"

"But," Richard writes, "It was the opposite." His father had pointed out a particular bird, and "named" it with made-up titles in English, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese and Japanese. Finally, he said, "You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You'll only know about humans in different places, and what they call the bird. So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing—that's what counts."

That is something that has always stayed with me—the difference between knowing what a thing is called, and the thing itself. It is very easy to confuse the two. One thing Feynman hated was a definition offered as an explanation. He once had the opportunity to review proposed science texts for middle- and high-school students, and hated them all. In particular, he scorned a text for saying, about various moving things, "Energy makes it go." Giving a word without an explanation was meaningless; you might just as well have said, "Wakalixes makes it go", for all the explanation it gives.

Do you have any thoughts? How detailed should we get in our explanations of things? Can we simply tell a child, "energy makes it go," and leave it at that? How much can we expect them to understand?