[William Sommerwerck]

"Ron C" wrote in message
...
On 6/15/2014 8:21 PM, Jay Ts wrote:

...gigantic snip...

Yes, it's very sad. One thing about Richard Feynman as compared to other
people I met at Caltech (faculty, other staff, and students) is that he
had a lot less "ego"! The others mostly had "density to match their IQ",
in my opinion, which limited everything. When a professor said something
in class no one understood, almost no one stopped him to ask a question,
in fear that it would make them look stupid. And when I asked questions,
I could hear other students in the class snicker at me. (When that
happened in Feynman's classroom, he defended me. How cool.)

I attended Caltech, but it was a few years after Feynman stopped teaching. You
were fortunate. (I was in Ricketts, by the way.)


Caltech was a bad learning environment for me and I'm glad I got out of
there, but I'm sure there are other "places of learning" that are just as
bad, and that's what many professional engineers go through.

Perhaps, but my EE came from the University of Maryland, and I had many fine
instructors. One of them was, by a narrow margin, the best instructor I've
ever had in anything.

Perhaps the biggest problem of learning anything is "grasping" it. (I can't
think of another word.) Having something explained to you is not the same as
thinking it through on your own. When you work through problems (particularly
in math), you start truly understanding the material.


One of the first [questioning moments] for me was when an expert
in the field told me the quest for liquid epitaxial InGaAsP on InP was
thermodynamically imposable. I did it, though my PhD supervisors
got most of the credit. Ah, but it did wonders for my credibility as an
experimentalist. G

Am I correct in assuming that, instead of trying to figure out a priori what
would work, you performed "little" experiments to get a better grasp of what
might and might not be possible? (Dr Alan Hill took that approach in
developing the first wide-range plasma loudspeaker.)


[IMHO] The bottom line is to not talk yourself out of the experiment BUT
also know when to quit. However, that's not always an easy line to define.
[ Oh yes (reality check) ...I've pushed a few lines too far. ]

Many years ago I asked a friend why it wouldn't be possible to grow
single-crystal diamond in the same way silicon is deposited on integrated
circuits. He asked a friend, who said the thermodynamics for carbon did not
work the way those for silicon did. Polycrystalline diamond is commonly
applied to many surfaces (such as speaker cones), of course.