The Plan
I’m planning to do a little blog series on the late Richard Feynman to record some of my impressions and learnings while I work myself through this intriguing oeuvre of his. No, that summer heat is not getting to me, yet. I’m not exactly planning on processing his massive back catalog – I’m not really into path integral formulation or the behavior of subatomic particles, let alone the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium. I do value the sparse free time that I have – time is on my side, yes it is. Rather, I’d like to document my exploration of his more popular works, audio and video recordings.
Exploratory learning, as you wish. Dipping into it all and savoring the juicy bits, spitting out the others. And relate things to testing, of course.
Why Richard Feynman?
Feynman intrigues me, and I have nothing but deep respect and admiration for the man. He was witty, brilliant and had this perpetual curiosity to discover new things (Tuvan throat-singing, anyone?). He opposed rote learning or unthinking memorization as teaching methods – he wanted his students to start thinking, for a change. How great is that?
On occasion, he was a totally nutty professor – a flamboyant geek. But he also happened to build a truly astonishing career which eventually earned him the Nobel prize in physics in 1965.
I’m planning to gradually learn about him and post my progress here. Stay tuned!
Test Side Story 
“He opposed rote learning or unthinking memorization as teaching methods – he wanted his students to start thinking, for a change. How great is that?”
That’s absolutely brilliant, if you ask me, and something I have a deep respect for as well, as I share the view. 🙂
In fact, I wrote something roughly similar sometime around 2001 or so in a write-up where I was comparing memorizing versus understanding.
The former is essential for the latter, but won’t make up for it ie. memorizing something does not equal understanding what you’ve read, but once you’ve understood something, you don’t even need to remember all the small details anymore as you’ve already grasped the essence of the subject.