Feynman knew physics but he didn’t know ornithology. When you name a bird, you’ve actually identified a whole lot of important things about it.
I think Feynman’s point was that a name is meaningful if you already know the other information. I can memorize a list of names of North American birds, but at the end I’ll have learned next to nothing about them. I can also spend my days observing birds and learn a lot without knowing any of their names.
Assigning consistent names to the right groups of things is colossally important to biology and physics.
I don’t think anyone will disagree with this. The hard part, though, is properly setting up the groups in the first place. Good classification systems took years (or centuries) of work and refinement to become the systems we take for granted today.
Not being able to name birds for an ornithologist would be like a physicist not being able to say whether an electron and a positron are the same thing or not.
Feynman has been quoted elsewhere criticizing students for parroting physics terminology without having the least idea of what they’re actually talking about. There’s the anecdote about students who knew all about the laws of refraction but failed to identify water as a medium with a refractive index.
Feynman wasn’t really wrong, he just failed to mention that if you want to remember anything about a certain bird that you observed you will have to invent a name for it, because ‘the traveler hath no memory’. Original names are OK if you only want the knowledge for yourself.
I’m reminded of another Feynman anecdote: when he invented his own mathematical notion in middle school. It made more sense to him, but he soon realized that it was no good for communicating ideas to others.
I think Feynman’s point was that a name is meaningful if you already know the other information. I can memorize a list of names of North American birds, but at the end I’ll have learned next to nothing about them. I can also spend my days observing birds and learn a lot without knowing any of their names.
I don’t think anyone will disagree with this. The hard part, though, is properly setting up the groups in the first place. Good classification systems took years (or centuries) of work and refinement to become the systems we take for granted today.
Feynman has been quoted elsewhere criticizing students for parroting physics terminology without having the least idea of what they’re actually talking about. There’s the anecdote about students who knew all about the laws of refraction but failed to identify water as a medium with a refractive index.
Feynman wasn’t really wrong, he just failed to mention that if you want to remember anything about a certain bird that you observed you will have to invent a name for it, because ‘the traveler hath no memory’. Original names are OK if you only want the knowledge for yourself.
I’m reminded of another Feynman anecdote: when he invented his own mathematical notion in middle school. It made more sense to him, but he soon realized that it was no good for communicating ideas to others.
Every time I try to learn to sight-sing I get sidetracked by trying to invent better notation for music.
After many repeats of this process I’ve decided that music notation is pretty good, given the constraints under which it used to operate.
Now I’m trying to just force myself to learn to sight-sing, already.