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[T]he Mayan[s]... had a scheme for predicting... when Venus was a morning... or . ...[T]hey had a rule for... making corrections and... had a very go… - Richard Feynman
" "[T]he Mayan[s]... had a scheme for predicting... when Venus was a morning... or . ...[T]hey had a rule for... making corrections and... had a very good way of predicting when Venus was coming up. ...Suppose that the professors (the priests in those days) ...were giving a lecture ...to explain ... these wonderful predictions ...He would say, "What we're doing is counting the days, just like you're putting nuts in a pod." ...[The students] did not know a quick and tricky way to add 365 x 8. ...These students were learning ...the laws of arithmetic. Something... to us now, because we have public, free, general education, almost everybody has to... learn... by a tricky scheme... The waitress, just an ordinary person, in two minutes does that. How..? ...She's ...counting ...415 pennies ...then ...287 more ...and telling you how many pennies you would have got if you counted ...beginning to the end. But it's highly educated and very trained to... do that... quickly. ...In the 14th century [it was] mathematicians... who could do that.
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About Richard Feynman
Richard Phillips Feynman (May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988) was an American theoretical physicist. He is known for the work he did in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, and in particle physics, for which he proposed the parton model. For his contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 jointly with Julian Schwinger and Shin'ichirō Tomonaga. Feynman developed a widely used pictorial representation scheme for the mathematical expressions describing the behavior of subatomic particles, which later became known as Feynman diagrams. During his lifetime, Feynman became one of the best-known scientists in the world.
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Also Known As
Pen Names:
Ofey
Native Name:
Richard Phillips Feynman
Alternative Names:
Feynman
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Dick Feynman
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Richard P. Feynman
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Additional quotes by Richard Feynman
What I got out of that story was something still very new to me: I understood at last what art is really for, at least in certain respects. It gives somebody, individually, pleasure. You can make something that somebody likes so much that they’re depressed, or they’re happy, on account of that damn thing you made! In science, it’s sort of general and large: You don’t know the individuals who have appreciated it directly. I understood that to sell a drawing is not to make money, but to be sure that it’s in the home of someone who really wants it; someone who would feel bad if they didn’t have it. This was interesting.
Of course, I am interested, but I would not dare to talk about them. In talking about the impact of ideas in one field on ideas in another field, one is always apt to make a fool of oneself. In these days of specialization there are too few people who have such a deep understanding of two departments of our knowledge that they do not make fools of themselves in one or the other.
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