The Nobel Prize-winning physicist also known as The Great Explainer

Originally Published February 21, 2022

Perhaps it was Einstein who quoted that “If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.” But if there is a noteworthy man who shared the same principle—and coincidentally worked for him as a junior physicist—it was professor Richard Feynman. He was 23 when he fell in love with theoretical physics. That happened after he realized that math was too abstract for him and later shifted his major to electrical engineering (that one didn’t work out for him either).

With ardor, he believes that Science takes a lot of imagination but is it possible to develop a familiarity with the things that are not familiar on hand by studying? In his famous and one of the only few recorded interviews, he dissembled this crux and you guessed it right, his answer was yes. This is also the reason why The Feynman Technique is named after him—a learning method that enables the teacher to cut through the noise and simplify a subject for it to be easily understood. When asked about the galaxy, he quoted “The numbers and sizes are problems in astronomy, and the best thing to do is to relax and enjoy the tininess of us and the enormity of the rest of the universe.” As the generations develop, they will invent ways of teaching so that the new people will learn tricky ways in looking at things and be so well trained that they won't have our troubles with the atom picturing.

In contrast to the backlash that he faced from his fellow scientists who doubted his way of seeing things—as physics isn't supposed to be easy and simple, he developed The Feynman Diagrams. With his efforts that laid the groundwork for electrodynamics, he won the Nobel Prize in 1965. This work changed physics forever as it broke down the hardest math of the century in one picture. This is just one of the moments that proved how Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.

Feynman consistently felt out the frontiers of competence by teaching himself a wide and wild array of skills, always romancing the intoxicating uncertainty of not-quite-knowing. In fact, he started drawing at the age of 44 and he was good at it. Practicing like how he studied science. Albeit he lived an intellectual and creative life, what made him genuine is his levity. He even taught himself how to write Chinese, a skill acquired specifically to annoy his sister. 

He is undeniably a skillful teacher both for his charisma and his uncanny ability to make complicated topics feel natural and approachable. Calling him a professor or a physicist would be an understatement given the ungodly amount of contribution that he gave to Science and Learning.

He was once described as the outstanding intuitionist of our age, and a prime example of what may lie in store for anyone who dares to follow the beat of a different drum. Without pushing complexity down our throat and just laying some bit of no-nonsense pragmatic wisdom.

Not all of us might be like him—tenacious and almost fearless to find a solution, but our simplistic behavior could save us a lot of time and energy. For what it’s worth, be spontaneous in this tumultuous age and fulfillment is surely underway. Like how Richard Feynman answered when he was asked what he would want to put on his epitaph, I’d say “surprise me”. You can still consume the towering Feynman Lectures for free: feynmanlectures.caltech.edu

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