The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Richard Feynman on How His Father Taught Him about What Is Most Important

Theoretical physicist and legendary science communicator Richard Feynman (May 11, 1918–February 15, 1988) remains known as “The Great Explainer” — a moniker at least as deserved as his Nobel Prize, merited by his enchanting explanations of such seemingly ordinary things as the magic of a flower, how rubber bands work, and why everything is connected to everything else.

In this wonderful short film — the second installment in Blank on Blank’s mini-series celebrating visionary innovators in science, which also gave us Jane Goodall on life — animator Paul Ruttledge brings to life a forgotten 1966 interview, in which The Great Explainer shares the story of how his father planted in him the seed for what would blossom into his life’s work: the art of extracting what is most important in science and translating it into a language at once widely understandable and universally captivating, an art rewarded not by honors and accolades but by “the pleasure of finding things out.”

The thing that was very important about my father was not the facts but the process. How we find out.

How exquisitely Feynman’s father embodies what the great Simone Weil wrote in her notebook in 1933: “The most important part of teaching = to teach what is to know (in the scientific sense).”

Complement with Feynman on the key to science in 63 seconds, his little-known drawings collected by his daughter, the role of scientific culture in modern society, his magnificent 1974 Caltech commencement address on integrity, and his mischievous Nobel Prize wager, then revisit this irresistible graphic-novel biography of The Great Explainer.


Published April 6, 2015

https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/04/06/richard-feynman-blank-on-blank/

BP

www.themarginalian.org

BP

PRINT ARTICLE

Filed Under

View Full Site

The Marginalian participates in the Bookshop.org and Amazon.com affiliate programs, designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to books. In more human terms, this means that whenever you buy a book from a link here, I receive a small percentage of its price, which goes straight back into my own colossal biblioexpenses. Privacy policy. (TLDR: You're safe — there are no nefarious "third parties" lurking on my watch or shedding crumbs of the "cookies" the rest of the internet uses.)