AN AFTER DINNER TALK—A GAP THAT SHOULDN'T BE

摘要

In the preface to a book describing his first encounter with Richard Feynman whom he was filming for a BBC documentary, Christopher Sykes describes Feynman's Thursday morning lecture. Feynman was solving a problem and time was running out. He told the students, "There are two ways of dealing with this problem, one is complicated and messy; the other is simple and elegant. We don't have much time so I'll just do the complicated messy way" (from No Ordinary Genius, Christopher Sykes, W.W. Norton, NY and London, 1994).