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Comment by beagle3 | Hacker News Reader

My theory is something I call "The Feynman effect". Feynman has a talent of making the listener believe that they (the listener) understand everything at a very deep level. So it gives the feeling he's an amazing teacher -- and if you don't actually try to apply that knowledge, you might never notice that you're wrong.

I realized that after reading his lecture on "the principle of least action" coming out with the feeling that I deeply understand (among other things) calculus of variations - a field I didn't even know existed until I read that. So I tried to use it -- and realized that, other than recreating Feynman's example, I can't really use it for anything.

I shared the sentiment with others over lunch the next day (a couple of other undergrads and two graduate students), and they were all familiar with that feeling....

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I interviewed a Caltech grad for a job once. She was completely qualified (overqualified?) and I figured that out in all of about 3 minutes. So I asked her if she'd taken Feynman. She smiled and said she'd sat in on a seminar where he lectured and, similar to your Feynman effect, she said that he had the ability to take the most complicated idea, crystalize it, explain it and that you would understand it. This effect lasted for about 5 minutes after which you would confuse yourself.

BTW, she didn't get the job which was not my doing. My boss was a woman who felt threatened by having another woman who was massively smarter than she was.

As for Feynman, I'm more than ok with his lectures. Clarity is no substitute for application but it damn well helps application.

I wish I could frame this comment for every first-year student. The profound irony of the Feynman Lectures is that although they are revered as master works, the whole endeavor was a miserable failure.

Feynman was teaching an intro sequence, and he delivered a lovely set of lectures that grad students and professors enjoyed. We still give newly minted physics majors a lovely bound copy of the Lectures, because some of us are in on the joke.

It depends on a person. For me the lectures deserve all the praise they've got and more.

I've read Feynman lectures twice. First time in the secondary school -- it was above my head but it gave me an understanding, the right models to work with later. The second time I read it in the university after I'd already studied the topics by other means (through complex math using e.g., Landau and Lifshitz textbooks). Now, I could appropriate the full depth of the lectures.

It is often useful to have several perspectives on a subject , to know it better in particular to solve complex problems (the more tools you can apply, the better).

Oh, I definitely agree. I appreciate the perspective. The Feynman lectures are great at giving an intuition and perhaps a general framework for thought.

What they don’t give you are tools; like you say, you had to learn them in other places before really appreciating the lecture.

But those lectures do seem to leave many people with the feeling they also got the tools and not just the gist.

They are enjoyable. They are informative. But they are not at a textbook level, even though they leave the impression that they are.

The reason why they are so popular is because school/textbook leaves the opposite impression to most people, i.e. we're given tools without the "gist".

I'd been in a prep school for 3 years, and people were just regurgitating what they had been shown, applying formulas with a very vague idea of what they're doing or what their results means.

School is just about remembering things and finding patterns.

There's a Feynman story in one of his books where he shows a university class a french curve (a very curvy plastic shape used in technical drawing) and explains to them it has the amazing property that no matter how you turn it, the lowest point is tangent to the horizon. No one in the class realized he was just messing with them.

The point of lecture is not to teach you the subject throughly. That’s what practice is for. The point of lecture is to get you so profoundly interested in the concepts you’re learning that you’ll go and do the practice without feeling like you’re doing any work.

I think this is a very easy trap for the layperson to fall into with physics.

Interestingly, "false understanding" by lay people seems more common in physics than perhaps any other field I am familiar with.

Happens in other fields too. When I worked at Tera, I (and plenty of others) would talk to Burton Smith in the halls. Whatever the topic, he always made us feel included and smart. Then, after the conversation, as we moved apart, our IQ would drop and our understanding would fail.

Except maybe some of it stuck. Hope so.

That is becase feynman lectures, or any physics lecture, will not give you a solid math framework.

I think you could get a relatively solid math framework just by studying physics and learning the math concept when you encounter it in your physics education.

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