> To tell someone who has devoted their career to
> understanding a complex topic that they don't
> understand their subject because they can't express
> it in layman's terms without doing terrible
> violence to the underlying phenomenon is ludicrous.
The article doesn't say you should be able to explain it to a layperson, but to a beginning student. This is a distinction that matters. A beginning student in your field should have enough preparation that what you need to explain is only the parts that relate to your particular area of expertise.
No one should devote their career to simply understanding a topic. If all you do is load someone else's work into your head, what value you are adding? A career is a mixture of learning as well as exploring and discovering new things. Explaining just the parts that are known is a much smaller order than transmitting the effort of your entire career into words.
Note also that Feynman isn't claiming you should be doing this all the time, but that you should be able to. I've been programming for about two decades and I've learned a ton (and yet still have even more left to learn). I'd like to believe that, yes, I could explain almost all of it to a beginning CS student or even a lay person.
They might not have the patience for me to build up all of the necessary structure from one simple piece at a time, but I think I could. After, that's how it got into my head in the first place. The parts that I couldn't do a good job decomposing and walking through are exactly the parts that I probably don't have a good handle on. (For me, networking and operating systems come to mind. I know some of the jargon, but I don't really know how it all works.)
No one should devote their career to simply understanding a topic. If all you do is load someone else's work into your head, what value you are adding? A career is a mixture of learning as well as exploring and discovering new things. Explaining just the parts that are known is a much smaller order than transmitting the effort of your entire career into words.
Note also that Feynman isn't claiming you should be doing this all the time, but that you should be able to. I've been programming for about two decades and I've learned a ton (and yet still have even more left to learn). I'd like to believe that, yes, I could explain almost all of it to a beginning CS student or even a lay person.
They might not have the patience for me to build up all of the necessary structure from one simple piece at a time, but I think I could. After, that's how it got into my head in the first place. The parts that I couldn't do a good job decomposing and walking through are exactly the parts that I probably don't have a good handle on. (For me, networking and operating systems come to mind. I know some of the jargon, but I don't really know how it all works.)