If Feynman Was Teaching Today… A Simplified Python Simulation of Diffusion (Part 1)
How often has this happened to you? You think you understand a topic well. Then you realise that you hadn't quite understood it as well as you thought.
I've been listening to the Feynman lectures in physics recently. Some of you may be familiar with these lectures. Richard Feynman was a brilliant physicist and an exceptional communicator. In the early 1960s, he was asked to deliver a two-year undergraduate physics course. This would have been "beneath him" as one of the most renowned physicists of his time. But Feynman loved teaching, and he was remarkably good at it. So he accepted on the condition he only delivers the course once!
What's this got to do with The Python Coding Stack? Some of you may know that I'm a physicist by training, and I worked as a research scientist for many years. As someone with a PhD in physics, surely there's nothing to learn from listening to undergraduate-level lectures, right?
Even in the early lectures when Feynman was covering basic concepts, his descriptions and explanations led me to understand topics I "knew well" at a deeper level. Feynman's talent as a communicator was to help students visualise what's going on intuitively.
