诺贝尔物理学奖获得者的童年故事--学习什么最重要？

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知道怎么学习，怎么思考，怎么问问题，要比知道信息更重要。信息是训练思维方式的媒介，通过掌握信息发展思维。下面是诺贝尔理论物理学奖获得者Robert Feynman (1918-1988) 的一段童年记忆，充分地说明了他的父亲如何训练他的思维。

你从这个故事中得到了什么”真知“？学习过程中掌握什么更重要？掌握了这个方法，什么都可以事半功倍。

The next Monday, when the fathers were all back at work, we kids were playing in a field. One kid says to me, “See that bird? What kind of bird is that?”

I said, “I haven’t the slightest idea what kind of a bird it is.”
He says, “It’s a brown-throated thrush. Your father doesn’t teach you anything!”

But it was the opposite. He had already taught me: “See that bird?” he says. “It’s a Spencer’s warbler.” (I knew he didn’t know the real name.) “Well, in Italian, it’s a Chutto Lapittida. In Portuguese it’s a Bom da Peida. In Chinese, it’s a Chung-long-tah, and in Japanese, it’s a Katano Tekeda. You can know the name of the bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You’ll only know about humans in different places, and what they call the bird. So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing—that’s what counts.” (I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.)

He said, “For example, look: the bird pecks at its feathers all the time. See it walking around, pecking at its feathers?”

“Yeah.”

He says, “Why do you think birds peck at their feathers?”

I said, “Well, maybe they mess up their feathers when they fly, so they’re pecking them in order to straighten them out.”

“All right,” he says. “If that were the case, then they would peck a lot just after they’ve been flying. Then, after they’ve been on the ground a while, they wouldn’t peck so much anymore—you know what I mean?”

“Yeah.”

He says, “Let’s look and see if they peck more just after they land.”

It wasn’t hard to tell: there was not much difference between the birds that had been walking around a bit and those that had just landed. So I said, “I give up. Why does a bird peck at its feathers?”

“Because there are lice bothering it,” he says. “The lice eat flakes of protein that come off its feathers.”

He continued, “Each louse has some waxy stuff on its legs, and little mites eat that. The mites don’t digest it perfectly, so they emit from their rear ends a sugar-like material, in which bacteria grow.”

Finally he says, “So you see, everywhere there’s a source of food, there’s some form of life that finds it.”

Now, I knew that it may not have been exactly a louse, that it might not be exactly true that the louse’s legs have mites. That story was probably incorrect in detail, but what he was telling me was right in principle. (pp.13-15)

Feynman, R.P. 1998. The making of a scientist, What do you care about what other people think? New York: Bantam Books

Richart Feynman (1918-1988) Nobel Prize Winner in Physics in 1965

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