Mohsen retweetet
A Caltech colleague once asked Feynman to explain why spin-½ particles obey Fermi-Dirac statistics in a way a freshman could understand.
Feynman agreed enthusiastically and promised to prepare a freshman-level lecture.
A few days later, he returned sheepishly and admitted defeat:
“I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t reduce it to a freshman level. That means we really don’t understand it.”
He used this as a teaching principle,
if you can’t explain something simply, you probably don’t understand it yourself.
This story circulated quietly among faculty and students as a humbling reminder that even Nobel laureates should test their own knowledge against the ability to communicate clearly.
It reflected his broader disdain for “cargo cult” teaching and his commitment to stripping away pretense in the classroom.
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