I watched this great piece some half hour ago, thank you! went away. But something bothered me: "The thing that Feynman did exceptionally well was calculate".<br>I'm sorry, but what do you calculate? Trying all options may work well in a narrowly confined environment (space).<br>Does the math lead your thoughts/'intuition', or does intuition, gained from your past Gedankenexperimente/calculations lead the way?<br>With all the footage of Feynman I've seen, I get the impression that he was extremely honest. It IS intuition that lead him, and only NEXT he calculated.<br>He was especially gifted at intuition, having always thought in substance and analogies, never in labels! Only next he calculated. and subsequently, fine tuned his intuition. <br>(So he 'backprop'ed'). That's why Niels Bohr consulted with him. And that's why he proposed nanotechnology ('why can't we..?'). And that's why he remains an inspiration to so many.,(reply>), I think that Stephen was trying to say that the way Feynmann <i>finally</i> arrived at the great Intuitive frameworks we've all seen is exactly through his skill at calculating. That is to say that he definitely started with intuition, but checked and refined it through calculation. Wolfram insinuated that Feynmann himself didn’t really understand the importance of his calculations because he was so used to it being easy for him. You can tell from how he proceeded to try Rule 30 not knowing what would come out just to see what would happen. His intuition was, with regard to advancing science, for the central necessity of a computational science and general knowledge language which enables people to quickly and easily manipulate and check data, and communicate easily verifiable results (vital to peer review and building on other work) to quickly develop intuition. Now that’s not to say we won’t return to an intuitive framework at some point in the future.<br><br><br>Great conversation. Thanks Lex!,(reply>), Yeah I love Feynman's work, and from what I can tell his biggest gift was his intuition. I daresay Wolfram is seeing his own strengths in Feynman, and missing the jewel that the truly wonderful physicists have polished; intuition. The reason people read Feynman's lectures, indeed even physics profs who know the material exceptionally well, is for the amazing turns of insight he grants on just about everything. Another point a few, an flourish of understanding; those lectures have no especial calculations (bar a few, his demonstration of euler's formula is very nice and I haven't seen it elsewhere) but they have depth nonetheless. But then again maybe neither Feynman nor Wolfram understood one another, they were after all very different men in the end in terms of their work.