Een stukje uit Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! van de geweldige Richard Feyman.
…I found things that even more people believe, such as that we have some knowledge of how to educate. There are big schools of reading methods and mathematics methods, and so forth, but if you notice, you’ll see the reading scores keep going down — or hardly going up — in spite of the fact that we continually use these same people to improve the methods. There’s a witch doctor remedy that doesn’t work. It ought to be looked into; how do they know that their method should work? Another example is how to treat criminals. We obviously have made no progress — lots of theory, but no progress — in decreasing the amount of crime by the method that we use to handle criminals.
Yet these things are said to be scientific. We study them. And I think ordinary people with commonsense ideas are intimidated by this pseudoscience. A teacher who has some good idea of how to teach her children to read is forced by the school system to do it some other way — or is even fooled by the school system into thinking that her method is not necessarily a good one. Or a parent of bad boys, after disciplining them in one way or another, feels guilty for the rest of her life because she didn’t do “the right thing”, according to the experts.
So we really ought to look into theories that don’t work, and science that isn’t science.
I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science. In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas — he’s the controller — and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.
Feynman over onderwijs
Well, l’ve been talking to you for two years and now I’m going to quit. In some ways I would like to apologize, and other ways not. I hope, -in fact I know, that two or three dozen of you have been able to follow everything with great excitement, and have had a good time with it. But I also know that “the powers of instruction are of very little efficacy except in those happy circumstances in which they are practically superfluous.” So, for the two or three dozen who have underrstood everything, may I say I have done nothing but shown you the things. For the others, if I have made you hate the subject, I’m sorry. I never taught elementary physics before, and I apologize. I just hope that I haven’t caused a serious trouble to you, and that you do not leave this exciting business. I hope that someone else can teach it to you in a way that doesn’t give you indigestion, and that you will find someday that, after all, it isn’t as horrible as it looks.
Finally, may I add that the main purpose of my teaching has not been to prepare you for some examination -it was not even to prepare you to serve inndustry or the military. I wanted most to give you some appreciation of the wonderful world and the physicist’s way of looking at it, which, I believe, is a major part of the true culture of modern times. (There are probably professors of other subjects who would object, but I believe that they are completely wrong.)
Perhaps you will not only have some appreciation of this culture; it is even possible that you may want to join in the greatest adventure that the human mind has ever begun.
________________________________________
Zo werkt onderwijs van de Aristos voor de aristos.
Feynman – schitterend !
Schitterende quote van Feynman, leuk om te herlezen. Ook : typisch amerikaanse benadering, educationalist, contrarian, evocative, exact, evocative.
Wel een klein min-puntje (nou ja klein ? – – big fat boy heette dat ding, augustus 1945). Beetje laat met inzicht over de destructive side van de uitvinding, lees maar :
Feynman alludes to his thoughts on the justification for getting involved in the Manhattan project in “The Pleasure of Finding Things Out.” As mentioned earlier, he felt the possibility of Nazi Germany developing the bomb before the Allies was a compelling reason to help with its development for the U.S. However, he goes on to say that it was an error on his part not to reconsider the situation when Germany was defeated. In the same publication Feynman also talks about his worries in the atomic bomb age, feeling for some considerable time that there was a high risk that the bomb would be used again soon so that it was pointless to, for example, build for the future. Later he describes this period as a ‘depression.’
maarten
Bijna.
Hiroshima was Little Boy, Nagasaki Fat Man.
bijna on target
Je hebt gelijk, thnx : begripscorruptie, my error.
Niettemin :
[1] Little boy (coined by FDR) was niet een miniatuur device, 3 meter x 70 cm en 4000 kilo ; historisch een aardbeving.
[2] Godbetert, het is een “koosnaam”. Wat een macacos.
[2] Fat Man : geen man, wel vet – 3,25 x 1.52 meter, 4630 kilo.
Deugde al evenmin, fout idee.
Er waren meer namen in omloop :
Fat Man was possibly named after Winston Churchill, though Robert Serber said in his memoirs that as the Fat Man bomb was round and fat, he named it after Sidney Greenstreet’s character in The Maltese Falcon.
During development, however, there was little uniformity, and both it and the shotgun design, now commonly known as Little Boy, were variously called Fat Boy, Thin Man (allegedly after FDR), S-1, and “the gadget”.
Hier een foto van Big Boy en Fat boy > www.flickr.com/photos/grahamking/2107830382/
maarten
Als burgergevangene in een
Als burgergevangene in een Jappenkamp heb ik waarschijnlijk mijn leven aan de kleine jongen en de vette man te danken. Japan was een consensusmaatschappij zonder echte leiders die een beslissing konden nemen en de oorlog had dus nog heel lang kunnen duren. Het maandelijkse dodental onder de burgerbevolking van Japan lag niet onder de “oogst” die een atoombom op één dag opleverde. De toestand van de Europese gevangenen in de concentratiekampen werd snel slechter. Steeds meer Javanen stierven van de honger of de gevolgen van de dwangarbeid. Een invasie van Japan zou zeer vele geallieerde slachtoffers geëist hebben. het territorium van Japan zou mogelijk net als dat van Duitsland verdeeld zijn tussen de Russen en de andere geallieerden.
Seger Weehuizen
burger-gevangene
Ja, dat weet ik ; mijn vrouw (Jappenkamp) weet t ook. Ik ken de argumenten van vechten, macht, overmacht, overwinnen en verliezen, “casualties” (zo heet dat), tellen, de relatieve nadelen wegstrepen tegen de voordelen.
Ik had het ook niet over lotgenoten en individueel lot, maar over wat moreel kan en mag, en, dat dingen ook altijd anders kunnen, of kunnen geweest zijn.
Niet de realistische waan van de dag, wel mogelijk voor wie wil. Voorbeeld : onderwijs hervorming, klein beginnen.
maarten
ook dit was Feynman – 1986
quote 1
– – Feynman was requested to serve on the presidential committee on the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster in 1986 – – his account reveals a disconnect between NASA’s engineers and executives that was far more striking than he expected – –
– – based on his experiences with NASA management and engineers, Feynman concluded that the serious deficiencies in NASA management’s scientific understanding, the lack of rapport between the two camps, and gross misrepresentation of the shuttle’s dangers, required that NASA take a hiatus from shuttle launches until – – the committee said : “there was no need for NASA to suspend its operations or to receive less funding” – – Feynman felt that the conclusions were not compatible with its findings and could not in good conscience recommend – – his fellow commission members were alarmed by Feynman’s dissension – – it was only after much petitioning that Feynman’s minority report was included at all as an appendix – –
quote 2
– – his earlier efforts to translate Mayan hieroglyphics, all demonstrate his life-long addiction to solving puzzles – –
quote 3
– – he gives advice on the best way to pick up a girl in a hostess bar. At Caltech, he used a nude/topless bar as an office away from his usual office – – when county officials tried to close the locale – – only Feynman accepted to testify – – in court – – he affirmed that the bar was a public need, stating that craftsmen, technicians, engineers, common workers “and a physics professor” frequented the establishment – –
Zou goed zijn om iemand zoals Feynman de nederlandse onderwijs-structuur eens te laten doorlichten.
maarten