“Knowing the name of something and knowing something”: did Feynman say it?

What Feynman said

“Now that’s a deep understanding — he doesn’t give me a name, he knew the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something, which I learnt very early.”

Source: Richard Feynman, interview for the BBC television programme Horizon, “The Pleasure of Finding Things Out” (1981); edited transcript in The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (Perseus, 1999), chapter 1, p. 5.

Key findings

The sentence is genuinely Feynman’s. In his 1981 BBC Horizon interview he says his father “knew the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something, which I learnt very early.”

The popular wording reorders his spoken sentence but keeps every key word.

The bird line (“you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird”) is Feynman quoting his father, from a walk in the Catskill Mountains when Feynman was a boy.

In the same story his father explains inertia, then adds that “nobody knows why it’s true”: a name is not an explanation.

Where it comes from

In 1981 the BBC’s Horizon programme filmed a long, relaxed interview with Feynman, later shown in the United States on Nova. An edited transcript opens the collection The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (1999), and the story behind this quote is on pages 4 and 5.

The Feynmans spent summers in the Catskill Mountains, where the fathers came up from New York at weekends. Feynman’s father took him for walks in the woods. One Monday another boy pointed at a bird and asked what kind it was. Young Richard had no idea. “Your father doesn’t tell you anything,” the boy said.

“But it was the opposite,” Feynman says. His father had already made the point. Looking at a bird, he would give its name in one language after another, and then say: “you know in all the languages you want to know what the name of that bird is and when you’ve finished with all that, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You only know about humans in different places and what they call the bird.” And then: “let’s look at the bird.”

The wagon and the ball

The quote itself comes a moment later, in a second story. Feynman noticed that a ball in his toy wagon rolled to the back when he pulled the wagon forward, and asked why. His father said that things that are moving tend to keep moving and things standing still tend to stay still: “This tendency is called inertia but nobody knows why it’s true.”

Feynman’s comment: “Now that’s a deep understanding — he doesn’t give me a name, he knew the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something, which I learnt very early.”

Our take

Real. The popular version turns his spoken sentence around (“I learned very early the difference…”), but every key word is his, and so is the meaning. One thing to fix if you quote the bird line: those are his father’s words, as Feynman remembered them. Feynman told this story more than once, so you’ll find versions with slightly different wording. Cite the one you actually use.

How we check a quote

We look for the original: the book and page, the lecture, the letter, the recording or the report. Real means we found the words in Feynman’s own work. Paraphrased means he said something close, but not those words. Misattributed means someone else said it, or it first appears somewhere that isn’t Feynman. No reliable source found means we couldn’t trace it to any original. Quotations are kept short and come with our own commentary. If you have a source we missed, write to us via the imprint and we’ll update the page.

“Knowing the name of something and knowing something”: did Feynman say it?

Verdict: Real