Feynman Technique for All Domains

Can You Use This Technique Beyond Science?

Can an approach associated with physics help with art, ethics, or religion? These fields ask different questions and use different standards of explanation. Curiosity and clear explanations can still help reveal what you understand and what remains uncertain.

Feynman’s own interests extended beyond physics. Einstein played the violin and Heisenberg the piano. Feynman learned to draw and described what drew him to art:

“I wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world. It’s difficult to describe because it’s an emotion . . . It’s a feeling of awe—of scientific awe—which I felt could be communicated through a drawing to someone who had also had that emotion. I could remind him, for a moment, of this feeling about the glories of the universe.”

This account connects drawing with scientific curiosity. It illustrates an interest in expressing an experience, rather than demonstrating a universal method for learning art.

Einstein would sometimes speak of a “cosmic religious feeling” that permeated and sustained his scientific work, and near the end of his life, he said he wished to “experience the universe as a single cosmic whole.” John Brooke at Oxford University says, “Like other great scientists he does not fit the boxes in which popular polemicists like to pigeonhole him. It is clear for example that he had respect for the religious values enshrined within Judaic and Christian traditions . . . but what he understood by religion was something far more subtle than what is usually meant by the word in popular discussion.”

Brooke said that, despite rejecting conventional religion, Einstein resented his views being appropriated by militant atheists and was offended by their lack of humility, saying, “The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.”

Feynman once wrote of religion:

“It is a great adventure to contemplate the universe beyond man, to think of what it means without man—as it was for the great part of its long history, and as it is in the great majority of places. When this objective view is finally attained, and the mystery and majesty of matter are appreciated, to then turn the objective eye back on man viewed as matter, to see life as part of the universal mystery of greatest depth, is to sense an experience which is rarely described. It usually ends in laughter, delight in the futility of trying to understand. These scientific views end in awe and mystery, lost at the edge in uncertainty, but they appear to be so deep and so impressive that the theory that it is all arranged simply as a stage for God to watch man’s struggle for good and evil seems to be inadequate.”

Here, Feynman seems to be pointing out the inadequacies of conventional religious faith—but not because it is vast and mysterious and full of uncertainty, but because it is not vast and mysterious and uncertain enough!

The passage illustrates a spirit of inquiry rather than setting out the technique’s steps. Whether a subject is described as “soft” or “hard,” trying to explain an idea clearly can reveal questions worth pursuing. What counts as an adequate answer will depend on the subject.