What it really means

When Richard Feynman was a small boy, his father read the Encyclopaedia Britannica to him. Once, they were reading about dinosaurs, and the book stated that the Tyrannosaurus rex was twenty-five feet high and its head was six feet across.

Most parents would have just kept reading. But Feynman’s father stopped and said, “Now, let’s see what that means.” He told young Feynman that if the T. rex stood in their front yard, it would be tall enough to put its head through the window of their second floor, where they were reading, but its head would be too wide to fit in the window.

“Everything he read to me he would translate as best he could into some reality,” Feynman recalled in his book, What Do You Care What Other People Think?

Thanks to Google and now ChatGPT, we can get our children almost any information they want, without even flipping open a book on our shelf. But like Feynman’s father did, we have to teach them what the information really means, not just recite the first answer we get. Our little ones might not understand how high twenty-five feet is, but they can imagine a creature as tall as their house.

Feynman went on to win a Nobel Prize in physics. His father sold uniforms for a living and was not even a scientist. But he made information real for his son, in ways a small boy could understand. We don’t have to be Nobel laureates to do that.