Posts Tagged ‘commonplace book’
“The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled”*…
(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 :-)
“Nothing so much assists learning as writing down what we wish to remember”*…
Your correspondent is away for the rest of this month; regular service will resume on or around September 1st. For the hiatus, a little something to occupy you…
As readers of this blog will have deduced, (Roughly) Daily is a kind of commonplace book…
Commonplace books (or commonplaces) are a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They have been kept from antiquity, and were kept particularly during the Renaissance and in the nineteenth century. Such books are similar to scrapbooks filled with items of many kinds: sententiae, notes, proverbs, adages, aphorisms, maxims, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, prayers, legal formulas, and recipes… Commonplaces are used by readers, writers, students, and scholars as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts. Each one is unique to its creator’s particular interests but they almost always include passages found in other texts, sometimes accompanied by the compiler’s responses.
“Commonplace book“
As Steven Johnson points out, commonplace books have a storied history…
Scholars, amateur scientists, aspiring men of letters — just about anyone with intellectual ambition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was likely to keep a commonplace book. In its most customary form, “commonplacing,” as it was called, involved transcribing interesting or inspirational passages from one’s reading, assembling a personalized encyclopedia of quotations. It was a kind of solitary version of the original web logs: an archive of interesting tidbits that one encountered during one’s textual browsing. The great minds of the period — Milton, Bacon, Locke — were zealous believers in the memory-enhancing powers of the commonplace book. There is a distinct self-help quality to the early descriptions of commonplacing’s virtues: in the words of one advocate, maintaining the books enabled one to “lay up a fund of knowledge, from which we may at all times select what is useful in the several pursuits of life.”
The philosopher John Locke first began maintaining a commonplace book in 1652, during his first year at Oxford. Over the next decade he developed and refined an elaborate system for indexing the book’s content. Locke thought his method important enough that he appended it to a printing of his canonical work, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding…
“The Glass Box And The Commonplace Book“
Perhaps because in these interconnected days almost anything seems re-retrievable at a click, not too many bother keeping commonplaces. That’s a shame. Your correspondent can testify that the habit– whether practiced in a book or digitally– is a powerful aid both to learning and to writing.
Happily, there are lots of sources of good advice for getting started, e.g., here, here (source of the image above), and here. There’s even a Masterclass.
* Marcus Tullius Cicero
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As we live and learn, we might recall that it was on this date in 1858 that (prodigious journaler and commonplace keeper) Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace published “On the tendency of species to form varieties; and on the perpetuation of varieties and species by natural selection” in the Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society. This was the first printed formal exposition of the theory of evolution by natural selection.
Darwin had developed the essential elements of his theory by 1838 and set them on paper in 1844; however, he chose to keep his work on evolution unpublished for the time, instead concentrating his energies first on the preparation for publication of his geological work on the Beagle voyage , and then on an exhaustive eight-year study of the barnacle genus Cirripedia.
In 1856, at the urging of Charles Lyell, Darwin began writing a vast encyclopedic work on natural selection; however, it is possible that the extremely cautious Darwin might never have published his evolutionary theories during his lifetime had not Alfred Russel Wallace, a naturalist born in New Zealand, independently discovered the theory of natural selection. Wallace conceived the theory of natural selection during an attack of malarial fever in Ternate in the Mollucas, Indonesia (Febuary, 1858) and sent a manuscript summary to Darwin, who feared that his discovery would be pre-empted.
In the interest of justice Joseph Dalton Hooker and Charles Lyell suggested joint publication of Wallace’s paper prefaced by a section of a manuscript of a work on species written by Darwin in 1844, when it was read by Hooker, plus an abstract of a letter by Darwin to Asa Gray, dated 1857, to show that Darwin’s views on the subject had not changed between 1844 and 1857. The papers by Darwin and Wallace were read by Lyell before the Linnean Society on July 1, 1858 and published on August 20.
“Darwin & Wallace Issue the First Printed Exposition of the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection“
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