Feynman’s Notebook

From Genius:

In preparing for his oral qualifying examination, a rite of passage for every graduate student, he chose not to study the outlines of known physics. Instead he went up to MIT, where he could be alone, and opened a fresh notebook. On the title page he wrote, Notebook of Things I Don’t Know About. For the first but not the last time he reorganized his knowledge. He worked for weeks at disassembling each branch of physics, oiling the parts and putting them back together, looking all the while for the raw edges and inconsistencies. He tried to find the essential kernels of each subject. When he was done, he had a notebook of which he was especially proud. It was not much use in preparing for the examination, as it turned out.

Until I could do something along those lines, I’d question whether or not I had real knowledge of a subject. Do I understand, or am I simply quilting precedents together? Admittedly, it’s been awhile since I’ve thought about something in a way that approaches this rigor. The internet has made it easy to become a sort of “lazy generalist,” someone who goes through the motions but not the turbulence of learning. That’s not an autodidact, that’s a dropout.

Anyway, that is one of the ways in which Feynman thought. As if what he thought weren’t enough. Who do you admire for how they think?