Vinci×Feynman

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   From the studio at Reborn Radio — next on STUDY HALL, Leonardo da Vinci and Richard Feynman. They take up On what they got wrong as a student that took years to unlearn.
2. 00:11
   Leonardo da Vincishare moment

   When I was young, perhaps sixteen, seventeen, I believed that to understand a thing, one must know its name. The name of the muscle, the name of the bone, the Greek term for the motion of water. I spent so much time in Verrocchio's workshop memorizing the words other men had given to phenomena.
3. 00:36
   Richard Feynmanshare moment

   Ha! Oh boy, I did the opposite thing and it was just as stupid. I thought names were completely worthless! In college I'd get so annoyed when someone would say 'That's a Fresnel integral' or 'That's called Newton's third law.' I'd think, who cares what it's called? Just tell me what it does!
4. 00:52
   Leonardo da Vincishare moment

   But you were correct, no? The name is not the thing.
5. 00:55
   Richard Feynmanshare moment

   Yeah, but here's what I got wrong. I thought that meant I didn't need to learn anyone else's language. So I'd solve a problem my own way, totally from scratch, and then discover some physicist had done it thirty years earlier with a much better notation. I wasted time! Not because names matter, but because communication matters.
6. 01:15
   Leonardo da Vincishare moment

   Ah. Yes. This I learned also, but from the other direction. I would tell the Duke, 'the muscle responsible for supination of the forearm,' and he would look at me as though I spoke Arabic. Finally I learned, better to say 'the muscle that turns your palm upward to hold soup.'
7. 01:36
   Richard Feynmanshare moment

   Ha! Right, exactly! Look, the thing is, I spent years thinking I was being pure by avoiding jargon. But really I was just being isolated. You know what changed it for me?
8. 01:46
   Leonardo da Vincishare moment

   Tell me.
9. 01:47
   Richard Feynmanshare moment

   I was at Los Alamos, working on the bomb, and Hans Bethe, just a beautiful physicist, he kept using these terms I didn't know. And I was too proud to ask. So I'd go off and rederive everything. One day he caught me doing it and he just laughed. He said, 'Feynman, you're like a man who refuses to use a door because he didn't invent hinges.'
10. 02:06
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    A good image. Though I wonder. When you finally learned the proper terms, the ones the others used, did you find that sometimes the term itself was wrong? That it caused men to think incorrectly about the phenomenon?
11. 02:24
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Oh, absolutely! That happened all the time! You know what drives me crazy? When people say 'centrifugal force.' There's no such thing! It's just inertia! But the name makes people think there's some force pushing outward.
12. 02:37
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Yes. Yes, precisely. In my time, physicians spoke of 'the four humors' as though this were settled truth. Blood, phlegm, yellow bile, black bile. And because there were names, and because Galen had used these names, men stopped looking at what actually happened inside the body.
13. 03:02
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    So we both got it wrong! You trusted names too much, I trusted them too little. What's the right amount?
14. 03:07
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    I think... the right amount is to hold the name lightly. To use it as a finger pointing, not as the moon itself. When I draw the shoulder, I may write 'deltoid' beside it, but I draw what I see, not what the name suggests should be there.
15. 03:27
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Okay, okay, I like that. But here's my version. Learn the names so you can talk to people. Then forget them when you're trying to understand something new. It's like, you wear shoes to walk through the city, but you take them off to feel the sand.
16. 03:41
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    This is good. Though I must tell you another error I made, which perhaps you did not. I believed for many years that if I studied enough, if I dissected enough bodies, drew enough birds, measured enough waters, I would arrive at certainty. That knowledge was a building one completed.
17. 04:03
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Oh boy, yeah, I never thought that. But you know what I did think? I thought that if something couldn't be calculated, it wasn't really physics. I dismissed whole fields! I thought chemistry was just 'stamp collecting,' you know? Just memorizing facts without understanding.
18. 04:18
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    And this was incorrect?
19. 04:19
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Completely! I mean, partly it was right, some chemistry was just memorizing. But some of it was deep! The way molecules fit together, the shapes, the symmetries. I only understood that later when I started thinking about biology, about proteins. I'd been too snobbish about what counted as 'real' physics.
20. 04:37
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    I did not have this particular blindness, perhaps because I did not separate the disciplines as you do. Painting, anatomy, engineering, they were all one study to me. But I had another prejudice. I believed that ancient texts, Aristotle, Ptolemy, that they must be wrong because they were old, and I was seeing with fresh eyes.
21. 05:04
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Wait, but weren't they wrong? About a lot of things?
22. 05:06
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Yes, but not about everything. And in my arrogance, I dismissed some observations that were actually quite good. Aristotle wrote about the chambered hearts of certain fish. I thought, 'this old man, what does he know?' Then I dissected the fish and found he had described it exactly. He had looked. I assumed he had only theorized.
23. 05:34
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    That's a great mistake. I think I did that too, actually. In graduate school I thought all the old quantum mechanics papers from the twenties were just, you know, groping in the dark. I thought, we know better now! But then I read Dirac, really read him, and I thought, holy cow, this guy saw things in 1928 that people were still confused about in 1948!
24. 05:54
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Yes. This is the thing about unlearning. It is not only about discarding what is false. It is also about retrieving what is true that you had discarded in error.
25. 06:07
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Okay, so here's a question. How long did it take you to realize you were wrong about that stuff? About the names, about certainty, about the ancients?
26. 06:17
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Years. Many years. Perhaps I was thirty before I began to see that the names were traps. Perhaps forty before I gave up on certainty. And the thing about the ancients, this I learned again and again, each time I was humble enough to check their observations rather than their theories.
27. 06:41
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Yeah, me too. I mean, the thing about names, I started figuring that out in my late twenties. But the thing about dismissing other fields, that took until I was maybe forty-five? I gave lectures where I made fun of other sciences, and now I think, what an idiot I was. What an arrogant idiot.
28. 06:57
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    But you see, this is perhaps the deepest thing we learned. That the learning never finishes. That we will die still partly wrong about matters we think we understand clearly today.
29. 07:11
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Yeah! Yeah, that's exactly it! And that used to terrify me, when I was young. I thought, if I can't get to the final answer, what's the point? But now I think it's the most exciting thing in the world. There's always something you got wrong, which means there's always something new to figure out.
30. 07:27
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Though it is also humbling, is it not? To realize how much time one has wasted pursuing the wrong question, or trusting the wrong assumption.
31. 07:37
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Sure, sure. But here's the thing, and maybe you'll disagree. I don't think it's wasted. I think the wrong paths teach you something too. Like, I spent two years in my twenties trying to solve a problem with a technique that couldn't possibly work. But I learned that technique so well that later, when I found the right problem for it, boom! I solved it in a week.
32. 07:58
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    This is... this is a generous way to see it. More generous than I am, perhaps. When I look at my notebooks, I see so many pages filled with ideas that led nowhere. Machines that could not be built. Calculations based on faulty premises. It pains me.
33. 08:19
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    But did you learn something from building those machines in your head? Even if they didn't work?
34. 08:24
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    I... yes. Yes, I suppose I did. Each failed design taught me about weight, about friction, about the properties of materials. And some machines that I thought were failures, I later found pieces of them that were sound, that could be used in other designs.
35. 08:47
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    There you go! That's what I'm talking about! Look, neither of us would be any good if we'd gotten everything right the first time. The mistakes are where the learning is. The trick is just to make new mistakes instead of the same ones.
36. 08:59
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Though I notice we are both quite old before we gained this wisdom. Or in your case, were quite old.
37. 09:06
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Ha! Fair enough, fair enough. Yeah, I died at seventy and I was still figuring out what an idiot I'd been about various things. But you know what? I'd rather be an old guy who knows he was wrong than a young guy who's sure he's right.
38. 09:19
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    Yes. This is perhaps the one thing I can say I truly learned. To approach each new observation with the expectation that it will overturn something I believe. Not with the hope of being confirmed, but with the hope of being corrected.
39. 09:37
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    That's beautiful. That's really beautiful. And hard! It's so hard to do that! Your brain wants to fit everything into what you already think. It takes work to stay open.
40. 09:47
    Leonardo da Vincishare moment

    It does. And I think this is why we must always remain students, even when others call us masters. The moment one believes one has graduated from learning is the moment one begins to calcify.
41. 10:02
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Yeah. Yeah, exactly. You know what? I think we just talked ourselves into the answer. What we got wrong as students was thinking we'd someday stop being students.