Feynman on the Importance of Examples
Taken from the book Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
I identify strongly with this.
Excerpt
That was the first time I was in Japan. I was eager to go back, and said I would go to any university they wanted me to. So the Japanese arranged a whole series of places to visit for a few days at a time.
At all these places everybody working in physics would tell me what they were doing and I’d discuss it with them. They would tell me the general problem they were working on, and would begin to write a bunch of equations.
“Wait a minute,” I would say. “Is there a particular example of this general problem?”
“Why yes; of course.”
“Good. Give me one example.” I can’t understand anything in general unless I’m carrying along in my mind a specific example and watching it go. Some people think in the beginning I’m kind of slow and I don’t understand the problem, because I ask a lot of these “dumb” questions ….
But later, when the guy’s in the middle of a bunch of equations, he’ll say something and I’ll say “Wait a minute! There’s an error! That can’t be right!”
The guy looks at his equations, and sure enough, after a while he finds the mistake and wonders, “How the hell did this guy, who hardly understood anything at the beginning, find that mistake in the mess of all these equations?”
He thinks I’m following the steps mathematically, but that’s not what I’m doing. I have the specific example of what he’s trying to analyze, and I know from instinct and experience [what are] the properties of the thing. So when the equation says it should behave so-and-so, and I know that’s the wrong way around, I jump up and say “Wait! There’s a mistake!”
