TODAY IN SCIENCE HISTORY ®  •  TODAYINSCI ®
Celebrating 24 Years on the Web
Find science on or your birthday

Today in Science History - Quickie Quiz
Who said: “Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.”
more quiz questions >>
Thumbnail of Richard P. Feynman (source)
Richard P. Feynman
(11 May 1918 - 15 Feb 1988)

American theoretical physicist who was probably the most brilliant, influential, and iconoclastic figure in his field. His lifelong interest was in subatomic physics. In 1965, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in quantum electrodynamics.


Richard Feynman on the French Curve

A Reflection on “Thinking Inside the Box”

French Curve
French Curve

Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, was adept at “thinking outside the box” but also a master at communicating the ideas of physics in such a comprehensible way that he was a popular lecturer to undergraduates.

In his book, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feyman, he prods us to be more familiar with what we already know.

Feynman makes this point when he recalled how, among the tricks he enjoyed playing on people, was one using a French curve during a mechanical drawing class while he was at M.I.T. Someone held up one of these funny-looking, curly plastic tools for tracing a variety of smooth curves, and asked, “I wonder if the curves on this thing have some special formula?”

Taking but little time to think, Feynman quickly answered with, “Sure they do. The curves are very special curves.” With a serious air, he began slowly turning his French curve in the air, demonstrating that “The French curve is made so that the lowest point on each curve, no matter how you turn it, the tangent is always horizontal.”

His classmates were intrigued, and each began holding a pencil tangentially against the lowest point of their own French curve, and discovered it was indeed horizontal, for every position to which they rotated the tool. The freshmen were interested, surprised, even excited, as if this was a revelation.

But Feynman knew that all of them had taken enough calculus to have “learned” about the maxima and minima of curves, and how the tangent drawn at the highest or lowest point of any curve will always have a zero slope and be horizontal. Oh, of course!

He had played a joke on his classmates, by drawing attention to the shortcomings of knowledge gained by rote and only comfortably applied in familiar textbook problem-solving scenarios. Yet how much solid understanding results from this kind of learning experience? When an opportunity to apply what they “know” comes in an unfamiliar setting, people may sadly show how fragile their knowledge really is!

We can also notice that with his anecdote, Feyman reveals his own early talent with a brain trained to follow a flexible path of thought. This is one of the reasons we can admire him as a great physicist and great teacher. However, taking his point to heart, we should more often practice thinking “inside the box” and develop our own mastery of knowledge by looking for new ways to understand what it is already at hand. This is especially true to interpret—to feel and see—mathematical equations as having a physical meaning wherever appropriate. This skill marks the most successful scientists and engineers.

— Ian Ellis


Ref: Richard Feynman, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman (1985), 36-37. (source)


See also:
  • Science Quotes by Richard P. Feynman.
  • 11 May - short biography, births, deaths and events on date of Feynman's birth.
  • Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, by James Gleick. - book suggestion.
  • Booklist for Richard Feynman.

Nature bears long with those who wrong her. She is patient under abuse. But when abuse has gone too far, when the time of reckoning finally comes, she is equally slow to be appeased and to turn away her wrath. (1882) -- Nathaniel Egleston, who was writing then about deforestation, but speaks equally well about the danger of climate change today.
Carl Sagan Thumbnail Carl Sagan: In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. (1987) ...(more by Sagan)

Albert Einstein: I used to wonder how it comes about that the electron is negative. Negative-positive—these are perfectly symmetric in physics. There is no reason whatever to prefer one to the other. Then why is the electron negative? I thought about this for a long time and at last all I could think was “It won the fight!” ...(more by Einstein)

Richard Feynman: It is the facts that matter, not the proofs. Physics can progress without the proofs, but we can't go on without the facts ... if the facts are right, then the proofs are a matter of playing around with the algebra correctly. ...(more by Feynman)
Quotations by:Albert EinsteinIsaac NewtonLord KelvinCharles DarwinSrinivasa RamanujanCarl SaganFlorence NightingaleThomas EdisonAristotleMarie CurieBenjamin FranklinWinston ChurchillGalileo GalileiSigmund FreudRobert BunsenLouis PasteurTheodore RooseveltAbraham LincolnRonald ReaganLeonardo DaVinciMichio KakuKarl PopperJohann GoetheRobert OppenheimerCharles Kettering  ... (more people)

Quotations about:Atomic  BombBiologyChemistryDeforestationEngineeringAnatomyAstronomyBacteriaBiochemistryBotanyConservationDinosaurEnvironmentFractalGeneticsGeologyHistory of ScienceInventionJupiterKnowledgeLoveMathematicsMeasurementMedicineNatural ResourceOrganic ChemistryPhysicsPhysicianQuantum TheoryResearchScience and ArtTeacherTechnologyUniverseVolcanoVirusWind PowerWomen ScientistsX-RaysYouthZoology  ... (more topics)

Thank you for sharing.
- 100 -
Sophie Germain
Gertrude Elion
Ernest Rutherford
James Chadwick
Marcel Proust
William Harvey
Johann Goethe
John Keynes
Carl Gauss
Paul Feyerabend
- 90 -
Antoine Lavoisier
Lise Meitner
Charles Babbage
Ibn Khaldun
Euclid
Ralph Emerson
Robert Bunsen
Frederick Banting
Andre Ampere
Winston Churchill
- 80 -
John Locke
Bronislaw Malinowski
Bible
Thomas Huxley
Alessandro Volta
Erwin Schrodinger
Wilhelm Roentgen
Louis Pasteur
Bertrand Russell
Jean Lamarck
- 70 -
Samuel Morse
John Wheeler
Nicolaus Copernicus
Robert Fulton
Pierre Laplace
Humphry Davy
Thomas Edison
Lord Kelvin
Theodore Roosevelt
Carolus Linnaeus
- 60 -
Francis Galton
Linus Pauling
Immanuel Kant
Martin Fischer
Robert Boyle
Karl Popper
Paul Dirac
Avicenna
James Watson
William Shakespeare
- 50 -
Stephen Hawking
Niels Bohr
Nikola Tesla
Rachel Carson
Max Planck
Henry Adams
Richard Dawkins
Werner Heisenberg
Alfred Wegener
John Dalton
- 40 -
Pierre Fermat
Edward Wilson
Johannes Kepler
Gustave Eiffel
Giordano Bruno
JJ Thomson
Thomas Kuhn
Leonardo DaVinci
Archimedes
David Hume
- 30 -
Andreas Vesalius
Rudolf Virchow
Richard Feynman
James Hutton
Alexander Fleming
Emile Durkheim
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Hooke
Charles Kettering
- 20 -
Carl Sagan
James Maxwell
Marie Curie
Rene Descartes
Francis Crick
Hippocrates
Michael Faraday
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Francis Bacon
Galileo Galilei
- 10 -
Aristotle
John Watson
Rosalind Franklin
Michio Kaku
Isaac Asimov
Charles Darwin
Sigmund Freud
Albert Einstein
Florence Nightingale
Isaac Newton


by Ian Ellis
who invites your feedback
Thank you for sharing.
Today in Science History
Sign up for Newsletter
with quiz, quotes and more.