In the meantime, we were having a lot of trouble explaining to people what we
were doing with cellular automata. Eyes tended to glaze over when we started
talking about state transition diagrams and finite state machines. Finally
Feynman told us to explain it like this,
“We have noticed in nature that the behavior of a fluid depends very little on
the nature of the individual particles in that fluid. For example, the flow of
sand is very similar to the flow of water or the flow of a pile of ball
bearings. We have therefore taken advantage of this fact to invent a type of
imaginary particle that is especially simple for us to simulate. This particle
is a perfect ball bearing that can move at a single speed in one of six
directions. The flow of these particles on a large enough scale is very similar
to the flow of natural fluids.”
This was a typical Richard Feynman explanation. On the one hand, it infuriated
the experts who had worked on the problem because it neglected to even mention
all of the clever problems that they had solved. On the other hand, it delighted
the listeners since they could walk away from it with a real understanding of
the phenomenon and how it was connected to physical reality.
We tried to take advantage of Richard’s talent for clarity by getting him to
critique the technical presentations that we made in our product introductions.
Before the commercial announcement of the Connection Machine CM-1 and all of our
future products, Richard would give a sentence-by-sentence critique of the
planned presentation. “Don’t say ‘reflected acoustic wave.’ Say [echo].” Or,
“Forget all that ‘local minima’ stuff. Just say there’s a bubble caught in the
crystal and you have to shake it out.” Nothing made him angrier than making
something simple sound complicated.
— Danny Hills, Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine, 1989 (via)
