Reminds me of the bit in Cryptonomicon where Lawrence Waterhouse takes an intelligence test for the navy:<p>"They gave him an intelligence test. The first question on the math part had to do with boats on a river: Port Smith is 100 miles upstream of Port Jones. The river flows at 5 miles per hour. The boat goes through water at 10 miles per hour. How long does it take to go from Port Smith to Port Jones? How long to come back?<p>Lawrence immediately saw that it was a trick question. You would have to be some kind of idiot to make the facile assumption that the current would add or subtract 5 miles per hour to or from the speed of the boat. Clearly, 5 miles per hour was nothing more than the average speed. The current would be faster in the middle of the river and slower at the banks. More complicated variations could be expected at bends in the river. Basically it was a question of hydrodynamics, which could be tackled using certain well-known systems of differential equations. Lawrence dove into the problem, rapidly (or so he thought) covering both sides of ten sheets of paper with calculations. Along the way, he realized that one of his assumptions, in combination with the simplified Navier-Stokes equations, had led him into an exploration of a particularly interesting family of partial differential equations. Before he knew it, he had proved a new theorem. If that didn't prove his intelligence, what would?<p>Then the time bell rang and the papers were collected. Lawrence managed to hang onto his scratch paper. He took it back to his dorm, typed it up, and mailed it to one of the more approachable math professors at Princeton, who promptly arranged for it to be published in a Parisian mathematics journal.<p>Lawrence received two free, freshly printed copies of the journal a few months later, in San Diego, California, during mail call on board a large ship called the U.S.S. Nevada. The ship had a band, and the Navy had given Lawrence the job of playing the glockenspiel in it, because their testing procedures had proven that he was not intelligent enough to do anything else."
For those who think this doesn't sound at least a little bit like Feynman, I highly recommend this video: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMFPe-DwULM" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMFPe-DwULM</a>
This comes up every now and then on social websites and every time I completely disagree that it reads like Feynman or that Feynman would react that way.
I'm not sure Feynman would respond this way, but he's one of my personal heroes. If you haven't read "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman" please do yourself a favor and pick up a copy immediately.
Feynman or not, it's entertaining to anyone who has waded through several hours of contrived interview questions that supposedly relate to programming ability, and that always have a "right" answer.
Of anyone I've read or seen (in person or from videos), Feynman has the best fundamental grasp of meta-knowledge. By meta-knowledge, for lack of a better term, I mean understanding what it means to know something.<p>mhartl has already posted this excellent video: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMFPe-DwULM" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMFPe-DwULM</a>, where he explains what the word "why" means in scientific inquiry. When we answer a "why" question, we don't really explain a concept in its entirety. At best, we're able to remove a layer of skin off the onion, but no one has ever really reached the center. I suppose science at it's heart is really just the elucidation of intermediate cause and effect scenarios.<p>For the question "why did the ball fall?", "Jimmy dropped it" is a perfectly valid answer. So is "Jimmy's motor neurons passed an action potential threshold, causing the muscles in his wrist to contract". So is "the ball moved along the curvature of space caused by the earth".<p>How far do we go?
I think I've seen this before, except Feynman was going on about how circles aren't the only constant width shapes:<p><a href="http://www.cut-the-knot.org/Curriculum/Geometry/CWStar.shtml" rel="nofollow">http://www.cut-the-knot.org/Curriculum/Geometry/CWStar.shtml</a>
To be a touch prosaic, is it simplest to cover a round hole with a round cover? No, Round holes are drilled. Covers for them can be simply cut squarely from stock. Why have a geometric match? Either way provision has usually to be made for covers to he bolted and locked down even if they are resting on a flange.
Heard this one before, and it made me think of the barometer problem:<p><a href="http://www.snopes.com/college/exam/barometer.asp" rel="nofollow">http://www.snopes.com/college/exam/barometer.asp</a>