\u201c The next Monday, when the fathers were all back at work, we kids were playing in a field. One kid says to me, \u201cSee that bird? What kind of bird is that?\u201d I said, \u201cI haven\u2019t the slightest idea what kind of a bird it is.\u201d He says, \u201cIt\u2019s a brown-throated thrush. Your father doesn\u2019t teach you anything!\u201d But it was the opposite. He had already taught me: \u201cSee that bird?\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s a Spencer\u2019s warbler.\u201d (I knew he didn\u2019t know the real name.) \u201cWell, in Italian, it\u2019s a Chutto Lapittida. In Portuguese, it\u2019s a Bom da Peida. In Chinese, it\u2019s a Chung-long-tah, and in Japanese, it\u2019s a Katano Tekeda. You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you\u2019re finished, you\u2019ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You\u2019ll only know about humans in different places, and what they call the bird. So let\u2019s look at the bird and see what it\u2019s doing\u2014that\u2019s what counts.\u201d (I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.)<\/p>\n
My father taught me to notice things. One day, I was playing with an \u201cexpress wagon,\u201d a little wagon with a railing around it. It had a ball in it, and when I pulled the wagon, I noticed something about the way the ball moved. I went to my father and said, \u201cSay, Pop, I noticed something. When I pull the wagon, the ball rolls to the back of the wagon. And when I\u2019m pulling it along and I suddenly stop, the ball rolls to the front of the wagon. Why is that?\u201d \u201cThat, nobody knows,\u201d he said. \u201cThe general principle is that things which are moving tend to keep on moving, and things which are standing still tend to stand still, unless you push them hard. This tendency is called \u2018inertia,\u2019 but nobody knows why it\u2019s true.\u201d Now, that\u2019s a deep understanding. He didn\u2019t just give me the name. He went on to say, \u201cIf you look from the side, you\u2019ll see that it\u2019s the back of the wagon that you\u2019re pulling against the ball, and the ball stands still. As a matter of fact, from the friction it starts to move forward a little bit in relation to the ground. It doesn\u2019t move back.\u201d I ran back to the little wagon and set the ball up again and pulled the wagon. Looking sideways, I saw that indeed he was right. Relative to the sidewalk, it moved forward a little bit. That\u2019s the way I was educated by my father, with those kinds of examples and discussions: no pressure\u2014just lovely, interesting discussions. \u201c<\/p>\n
Richard Feynman<\/strong>(1918\u20131988) Theoretical physicist<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201c The next Monday, when the fathers were all back at work, we kids were playing in a field. One kid says to me, \u201cSee that bird? What kind of bird is that?\u201d I said, \u201cI haven\u2019t the slightest idea what kind of a bird it is.\u201d He says, \u201cIt\u2019s a brown-throated thrush. Your father […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37227,"featured_media":146,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-143","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/edutara\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/edutara\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/edutara\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/edutara\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/37227"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/edutara\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=143"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/edutara\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/143\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":154,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/edutara\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/143\/revisions\/154"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/edutara\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/146"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/edutara\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}