“Once I asked him to explain to me, so that I could understand it, why spin-1/2 particles obey Fermi-Dirac statistics. Gauging his audience perfectly, he said, “I’ll prepare a freshman lecture on it.” But a few days later he came to me and said: “You know, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t reduce it to […]
Richard Feynman:
John Trinkaus, who was awarded the 2003 Ig Nobel Literature Prize for publishing more than 80 detailed academic reports about things that annoyed him, got some recent attention for his how-well-do-people-guess-at-passwords research. The Chinese Apple site produced this video about that: Here’s a machine translation into English of part of what it says: “John Trinkaus, a professor at […]
Richard Feynman, asked a question that begins “Why…”, explains why that kind of question is tough:
