🚀 go-pugleaf

Here is some food for thought!
------------------Forwarded message:

I remember what Feyman often repeated when he was teaching Advanced
Field Theory while dying (He died with his boots on, so to speak, giving
his last energy to students with frightening sincerity).

He would say, "The biggest problem with being a student is that you're
always too busy getting an education to learn anything."

Now I call this "Feyman's Theorem on Being a Student".

It would have sounded trite - were I myself not being torn at that
moment by a horrible quandary - preparing for candidacy exams while deep
in the middle of a slow digestion of Hawking and Ellis. I was so angry
at having to interrupt my intellectual life to satisfy some arbitrary
sociological determination of what "an educated person" was supposed to
know about the nuclear shell model and other fantastic bits of physics
trivia that I could barely eat all year.

But at least I felt validated in my frustration by Feynman.

He neglected his committee work, people say he let his colleagues
carry his advising burdens, but he never succumbed to the pomposity
of "the educational process."

He literally taught until he could no longer stand, and after that he
asked us permission to teach sitting down, taking bites from candy bars
to maintain enough of a blood sugar rush to last out the hour. After
class I know he was in pain, but he never let us see it when he was
teaching.

And then one day he even took a half hour out of class time to prepare
us for his death. He wanted his class to know that he was facing it very
soon and with a calm curiousity, even.

I really wish he was still here to take part in this debate.

In her "Wickedary" - an anti-"dick-tionary" by radical pagan feminist
Mary Daly, she defines the word "academentia" as: normal state of
persons in academia, marked by varying and progressive degrees;
irreversible deterioration of faculties of intellectuals

And then she has the phrase: abominable snowmen of academentia: freezers
and packagers of learning; chilling throng of frigid fellows,
specialists in verbigeration and refrigeration of knowledge.

I think part of the fascination science holds for me is that we humans
can still do it despite the tendency to become academented, to
vertigerate, to bibliolate.

(Bibliolater: a hot air type who attempts to contain the universe within
the confines of one bible/bubble.)

My conclusion: all this discussion of how to fine-tune the Machine that
drips knowledge drop by expensive loan-financed, degree-certified drop
into the mouths of supplicants (i.e. paying customers) is IMHO a kind of
stabilizing small-scale turbulence comforting, but helpless against a
large-scale perturbation.

What will we do if the rate of communication transfer in society
increases to such a magnitude that the concept of Intellectual Property
becomes unenforceable, and people are able to feed themselves at any
trough they want to without paying for the expensive IV hookup called a
Professor in a classroom?

Maybe we can use the old boring excuse "most people are too stupid and
lazy to challenge our empire by being smart without our permission and
recognition" to omit this possibility from our "shopping list" for
instituting educational re-form.

But what if it happens anyways?

As we have seen in a number of famous "who ordered that" experiments,
Nature can always appear outside the boundaries of our previous
extrapolations, especially when our objectivity is colored by disdain
for effects semantically disregarded as being minor.

I remember when a friend of mine, a Russian physicist who was writing
brilliant papers in conformal field theory, and other related subjects
in string theory, was forced through the indignity of being a graduate
student in Princeton in order to acquire his PhD to be officially
considered as adequate in doing what he already had been doing
superlatively for many years.

He failed his qualifying exam!

Oh No! Now he can never become "a physicist."

Darn. If you learn too much, you do run the risk of endangering your
education!

This is a corollary to Feynman's above-mentioned Theorem on
Being a Student.


 - patricia.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Paul

Paul Hickman
Physics
Belmont HS