It's the way I study - to understand something by trying to work it out or, in other words, to understand something by creating it. Not creating it one hundred percent, of course; but taking a hint as to which direction to go but not remembering the details. These you work out for yourself.
Interpretation
Understanding is best achieved through hands-on experience and creativity.
In this quote, Richard P. Feynman emphasizes that true comprehension comes from actively engaging with concepts through exploration and creation rather than through rote memorization. He suggests that while guidance may be necessary, it is ultimately up to the individual to discover and internalize the details of what they are learning.
In practice
In a lecture about innovative teaching methods, this quote can be used to highlight the importance of experiential learning.
The philosophical question before us is, when we make an observation of our track in the past, does the result of our observation become real in the same sense that the final state would be defined if an outside observer were to make the observation?
We seem gradually to be groping toward an understanding of the world of subatomic particles, but we really do not know how far we have yet to go in this task.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.
It has not yet become obvious to me that there's no real problem. I cannot define the real problem; therefore, I suspect there's no real problem, but I'm not sure there's no real problem.
For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?
Science is a way to teach how something gets to be known, what is not known, to what extent things are known (for nothing is known absolutely), how to handle doubt and uncertainty, what the rules of evidence are, how to think about things so that judgments can be made, how to distinguish truth from fraud, and from show.
Children have very sharp powers of observation - probably sharper than adults - yet at the same time their emotional reactions are murky and much more primitive.
I'm a professor of media studies as well as humanities, and I'm an evangelist of popular culture, but when there's only media, then there's going to be a slow debasement of language, and that's what I think we're fighting.
Awaken people's curiosity. It is enough to open minds, do not overload them. Put there just a spark.
There are two subjects, indeed, which I shall claim a right to further as long as I breathe: the public education, and the sub-division of counties into wards. I consider the continuance of republican government as absolutely hanging on these two hooks.
The scandal of education is that every time you teach something, you deprive a [student] of the pleasure and benefit of discovery.
I believe that we should read only those books that bite and sting us. If a book we are reading does not rouse us with a blow to the head, then why read it?
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