(Roughly) Daily

(Roughly) Daily is, in effect, a kind of notebook, a commonplace book. So it will be no surprise that your correspondent found today’s featured piece fascinating.

Jillian Hess, a professor who studies the history of note-taking, shares the lessons she took from her review of the papers of the remarkable Richard Feynman…

Formal education, at its best, prepares us for a life of learning. After all, we are only in school for a fraction of our lives and there is so much to learn!

Richard Feynman (1918-1988) understood the value of self-education. He was a Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist, a member of the Manhattan Project at the age of 25, and a dynamic public intellectual who never stopped learning.

Often touted as one of history’s greatest learners, Feynman taught himself a dizzying amount of science. I wanted to see his notes for myself—to observe the great autodidact thinking on the page. So, I visited his archives at Caltech in February…

… In the archives, I saw… for myself: Feynman’s notebooks contain imprints of thinking in real-time—the work as it happened. They were instruments for thinking through uncertainty.

What follows is a list of note-taking principles for self-education that I gathered while studying Feynman’s notebooks.

Start with First Principles: Feynman’s “Things I Don’t Know About” Notebook

Discussions about Feynman’s learning process usually draw from this notebook, which he compiled as a Ph.D. student at Princeton. The contents include mechanics, mathematical methods, and thermodynamics. Clearly, he knew something about these topics, but he found his understanding superficial. So, his response was to take the subject apart—to break it down into “the essential kernels” …

[Hess illustrates this principle, then unpacks two others: “create a reading index” and “keep learning.” She continues…]

… Uncertainty is Interesting

This is my biggest takeaway: We should fear certainty more than doubt. Learning to live with uncertainty is an essential aspect of learning, as Feynman said in 1981:

You see, one thing is, I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.

And then, in an echo of his “Notebook of Things I Know Nothing About,” compiled four decades prior, he adds:

…I’m not absolutely sure of anything, and there are many things I don’t know anything about.

If a man as celebrated for his genius as Feynman felt that way, certainly the rest of us have a lot more to learn…

[And she concludes…]

… Notes on Feynman’s Notes:

Use notes to think: Feynman didn’t think through problems in his head and then turn to his notebooks. Instead, he used his notebooks to think through problems. His thought process required paper.

Start with first principles: “Why” is a very powerful question. And asking why can lead us back to the fundamentals and help us understand them in an entirely new light. This applies to any subject. Feynman has helped me think of note-taking as a kind of expedition. Use your notes to dig deeper into topics you think you already understand.

Never stop learning: How wonderful would it be if we could hold onto the excitement of learning we had as children? After all, the world didn’t get less interesting. It’s worth returning to the note-taking methods you used in school to see if they are still useful in adulthood. I particularly like Feynman’s high school method of taking 30 minutes to understand a subject before he allowed himself to take notes on it.

[Then leaves us with the man himself, “in all his radiant, enthusiastic, brilliance”…]

On “Richard Feynman’s Notes For Self-Education.”

Pair with: “Curiosity Is No Solo Act“: “it gains its real power when embedded in webs of relationship and shared meaning-making”… something that Feynman’s life also demonstrated (as you can see in his autobiography and/or in James Gleick‘s biography, Genius)

* Plutarch

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As we light that fire, we might spare a thought for Jeremy Bernstein; he died on this date last year. A physicist who woked on nuclear propulsion for Project Orion and held research and teaching positions at Stevens Institute of Technology, the Institute for Advanced Study, Brookhaven National Laboratory, CERN, Oxford University, University of Islamabad, and École Polytechnique, he is better remembered as a gifted popular science writer and profiler of scientists.

Bernstein wrote 30 books, and scores of magazine articles for “general readers”– for The New Yorker, where he was a staff writer from 1961 to 1995, and for The Atlantic Monthly, the New York Review of Books, and Scientific American, among others.

Of Feynman, Bernstein wrote “[his] Mozartean genius in physics seemed to be combined with an almost equally Mozartean urge to play the clown.” (in which, of course, Feynman was in the good company of Einstein, Claude Shannon, and others :-)

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