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Re: bird-names, star-names



"Frohne, Vickie" wrote:

When I wrote that naming stars is like bird-watching, I was thinking
of Feynman's essay in which he distinguishes between knowing only the name
^^^^
of a bird, and knowing about the bird...its habits, behavior, diet, etc.,
and how the latter is preferable to the former. Feynman argues that you can
know a lot about a bird without knowing its proper name. Yes, counting
populations of birds, or stars, has been invaluable to science. Casual
bird-watching, and amateur astronomy, has benefitted science greatly.

Right. The key word there is "only". This is often overlooked
or misstated.

Feynman's bird-naming story pops up fairly often. The story
is ambiguous, even self-contradictory, so by taking snippets
out of context one can support all sorts of extreme viewpoints.
And just because Feynman said it doesn't make it true.


http://www.phy.ilstu.edu/faculty/wenning/ptefiles/310content/nature/feynman.html

1) He said quite explicitly "In order to talk to each other,
we have to have words, and that's all right." And although he
didn't mention it, he was quite aware that knowing "only" the
name of a bird allows you to go home and look it up, whereupon
you know quite a bit more.

2) OTOH he was intentionally making a virtue of not knowing
the names. He made the same point on other occasions ("the
map of the cat"). I disagree with this, especially when it
is taken out of context and exaggerated, as it so often is.

If forced to choose between knowing the name and knowing the
physics, it is better to know the physics -- but this is a
goofy and vacuous statement, because we are _not_ forced to
choose.

Which brings up the
practical difficulty of teaching star-naming to 125 students in a daytime
class located 200 miles from the nearest planetarium in an area where it's
cloudy most of the time. Therefore, I decided not to ...

Good decision. Some things should be taught in physics class.
Other things should be taught by the scoutmaster sometime
when it's not daytime and it's not completely cloudy --
sometime when the kids actually want to know and have
immediate uses for the knowledge.