How Knowledge Illusion May Be Dispersed with Simple Stupid Question?
Recently Youtube has recommended me to watch video about Richard Feynman the Nobel prize winner physicist. I just can’t take my eyes off a man who loves what he does! Hence the sentence awkwardness it is what is, when Richard speaks about laws of nature the universal joy just spreads all around! What he also does, he brings clarity to a such a difficult domain! For example, I’ve never realized that the light and warmth coming from fire are actually condensed sun energy.
It turned out (Coincidence? ?? or DoubleClick data is used to not only serve better ads, Google?) that for about a month I had Fs.blog tab hanging patiently and waiting for my attention.
The now famous tab has revealed me that Richard Feynman had great insight on how to learn and to really understand things, not just to know names of things. It’s so easy to fall in trap of knowledge illusion and stop asking “stupid” questions with presumably “known” answers.
I have opportunities to realize that when my 5 and half year daughter asks me “dad, why Earth spins?”. It appears I don’t know. I looked for the answer everywhere (like 3 or 5 websites ??), but I just had no luck to find appropriate answer! Although just right after hearing the question, I was feeling so confident about the answer! The confidence went away after the first attempt to conduct a reasonable sentence on that.
It seems that the 6th grader (explaining things for a 6 year toddler is a lot harder!) concept may serve as a real challenger for our knowledge - do we pretend to know something or we actually know something? Just give your best shot and try to simplify topic so the 6th grader would be able to understand it. It's like having imaginary 12 year old friend and constantly having meaningful conversations with him. If our president can have one, we can too!
So let me introduce you or if you already know the man just to remind about the curious and truly passionate explorer of nature laws Richard Feynman! There is certainly a lot to learn from this great mind.