Connection: Alda Essay and My Grandfather

In Alan Alda’s essay, Pass the Plate, Mr. Feynam, Alda explains how he admires Feynman for not only being curious and finding something in the world that he truly loved, but also for loving that something so much that he felt it absolutely necessary to share it with others in a way that they could understand it. Feynman’s heart belonged to science. His intrigue led him to make many discoveries, but his love for the subject gave him the need to share it with the rest of the world. In Alda’s essay he explains that, “When [Feynman] was talking to ordinary people with no training in physics, he never fell back on his authority as a great thinker. He felt that if he couldn’t say it in everyday words, he probably didn’t understand it himself”. What Alda means is that even though Feynam had great intelligence, he was amazing because he took the time to help others understand scientific concepts by talking to them in the manner that they were accustomed to.

In so many ways Feynman reminds me of my grandfather, but in one way, they are very different. My grandpa was a nuclear physicist at Argonne National Laboratory, and he was the director of the high energy physics department there for twenty five years, in which time he developed their accelerator. He is an unbelievably intelligent man, and he himself was always quite interested in Feynam, yet I have noticed over the years that he has always lacked the ability to explain concepts to those who are not trained in the field of physics.

While my mom and her five sisters were growing up, he devoted all of his time to his work; his work was truly the love of his life. Even now, after he retired, it is obvious that he hasn’t given up his interest in science; he clearly never will. Sadly, he does not have the same talent for communicating his scientific knowledge that Feynman did; however, his understanding of it is unmistakable.

I remember one year when I found myself sitting with my grandpa near the Christmas tree, desperately trying to understand the scientific ideas he was attempting to articulate. I remember afterwards how my aunt came up to me and said, “So I saw that grandpa caught ya earlier for one of his science lectures. Poor girl.” She said it jokingly, but it made me sad because I had realized that my grandfather had a hard time explaining science to those who were not familiar with it, and that people simply gave up trying to understand him. In fact, they avoided getting into the subject with him altogether. If someone could simply hear and understand one bit of the information that fascinated him so much, it very likely would have kept them listening.

It wasn’t until pretty recently, last year in fact, that I finally reaped the benefits of my grandpa’s immense knowledge. I had found myself in a tough spot in school in the one class that, out of anybody, he would understand the most, physics. My parents pushed me to go to him for help, and when I finally did he told me something. He said to me that he knew he what he was talking about when it came to physics, but that he also knew that he wasn’t a very good teacher. I agreed to be patient, and so it began; he taught himself to teach, and I taught myself to listen.

The first thing he did was take my extra physics textbook home with him to read. When we met up again he had read nearly the entire book, and told me that he had a better understanding of how the school was teaching me the subject. We then sat down at my computer in front of my physics webassign. It was right before the final exam and I knew if I wanted to get a good grade in the class I would have to do very well on the final. Together we went through problem after problem. He would never simply give me the answer; instead he would help me figure out which formula to use and how to use it. I found it hilarious that we came across a couple problems that even my nuclear physicist grandfather couldn’t solve.

Before the experience, I had thought that trying to learn from my grandpa would be an agonizing failure, but after it was all over I had gained much more than I could have ever expected. Not only did I actually know how to solve physics problems, but I understood how and why everything worked the way it did. Because we were both patient, we were both able to learn from the experience. Not only that, but It also strengthened my relationship with grandpa.

The best feeling in the end though, was how undoubtedly happy it had made him to have helped me become more interested in science. It had given him a chance to put his knowledge to use again, and like Feynman, allowed him to give the priceless gift of understanding.