“You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird… So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing — that’s what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.” –Richard Feynman

There is a VERY good reason I try to study and model things as wordlessly as possible…it’s because of “Feynman and the Bird”.

Back in 1973, the legendary Nobel prize winning physicist Richard Feynman was interviewed about how he views the world and what had allowed him to make such transformative discoveries in science. 

He went on to share a story about when he was growing up and a kid asked him to state the name of a bird they had observed. When Feynman said he had no idea, the kid confidently stated that it was a brown throated thrush. 

Feynman simply shrugged at the kid because his father had already taught him that you can know the name of a bird in any language and still know nothing about the bird…ie. there is a difference between knowing ‘the name of a thing’ and knowing about ‘the thing itself’. 

The goal of my research is to get myself to focus on ‘the thing itself’ and not just ‘words about the thing’. 

This brings us to one of the primary fundamentals of Spaced Generation Learning: concretization. 

Model your ideas in as concrete a way as possible and focus on the actual thing itself…not just words about the thing.

I’ll let Feynman say it better than I ever could….