Richard Feynman, the late Nobel Laureate in physics, was once asked by a Caltech faculty member to explain why spin one-half particles obey Fermi Dirac statistics. Rising to the challenge, he said, “I’ll prepare a freshman lecture on it.” But a few days later he told the faculty member, “You know, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t reduce it to the freshman level. That means we really don’t understand it.”
But Feyman never gave up on this project, and produced a relatively elementary explanation almost 20 years later in his Dirac memorial lecture, Elementary Particles and the Laws of Physics, in 1986.
