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Comment by _yb2s | Hacker News Reader

Feynman was a uniquely gifted teacher that made things intuitive and simple. Those other books are course textbooks for physics majors, and they require an order of magnitude more effort and time to understand.

When I was a physics student the best students seemed to use both types of materials simultaneously. A work like Feynmans would give a bigger picture and more intuitive understanding of what is going on and help you not miss the forest for the trees so to speak, the regular textbooks will teach you all of the little details and math tricks you need to actually solve difficult problems with these concepts.

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>>Feynman was a uniquely gifted teacher that made things intuitive and simple.

I think explainers like Neil deGrasse Tyson have a job harder than people imagine. Historically the problem with science education has been, that, as the conceptual universe gets bigger and complicated there's a tendency to assume the common person is too stupid and beneath the subject to understand it.

To simplify and demystify science to a point to get people interested in it as a intuitive iterative process helps a lot in increasing participation of the general crowd.

And then gatekeepers criticize them for doing so.

That particular person is more of a shouter and interrupter than an explainer.

patently false, have you attended one of his lecture series in person?

He's not perfect, but he's really good at explaining science and conveying a sense of awe.

Bang on.. Several thought experiments and constructs he would present in the lectures will elucidate/challenge a foundational concept in such a manner as to lead an inquisitive reader or student on a quest to absorb the extant knowledge just to be able to answer the conundrum satisfactorily. Many of these have since become classics.

Yes, another thing Feynman is doing is teaching people how to think about and model problems in a simple but reliable way in their mind, something he was very good at. In a sense his specific subject matter is just an example to demonstrate the process.

A textbook that just plainly presents the facts about a specific phenomenon isn't necessarily training you to think like a theorist, in the way Feynman is.

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