Physics is a good framework for thinking. ... Boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there.
One bit of advice: it is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree - make sure you understand the fundamental principles, ie the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to.
The tendency of modern scientific teaching is to neglect the great books, to lay far too much stress upon relatively unimportant modern work, and to present masses of detail of doubtful truth and questionable weight in such a way as to obscure principles.
When you understand one thing through and through, you understand everything.
[Computer science] is not really about computers and it's not about computers in the same sense that physics is not really about particle accelerators, and biology is not about microscopes and Petri dishes... and geometry isn't really about using surveying instruments.
Stick to primary colors.
No matter what engineering field you're in, you learn the same basic science and mathematics. And then maybe you learn a little bit about how to apply it.
What a teacher needs to know about psychology "might almost be written on the palm of one's hand."
I love to teach, especially high school-aged students, because I like introducing them to the absolute basics of everything they're ever going to learn, the things I wish I had learned at that age. It's the stuff you can always go back to in terms of absolute fundamentals.
There are really only two plays: Romeo and Juliet, and put the darn ball in the basket.
Every great religion is, in truth, a concentration of great ideas, capable, as all ideas are, of infinite expansion and adaptation.
Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas.
First master the fundamentals.
When someone tells you the fundamentals you think that everything's going to come out and be amazing.
'Think simple' as my old master used to say - meaning reduce the whole of its parts into the simplest terms, getting back to first principles.
We came up with three core touchy feely words.
And so with all things: names were vital and important.
In disquisitions of every kind there are certain primary truths, or first principles, upon which all subsequent reasoning must depend.
The only way you can stay on top is to remember to touch bottom and get back to basics.
Fundamentals, fundamentals, fundamentals. You’ve got to get the fundamentals down because otherwise the fancy stuff isn’t going to work.
When I write Superboy and other DC characters, it's about boiling them down to core concepts.
Perhaps more than English or history, STEM subjects require an enormous amount of foundational learning before students can become competent.
Get the fundamentals down and the level of everything you do will rise
Don't worry too much if you don't pass exams, so long as you feel you have understood the subject. It's amazing what you can get by the ability to reason things out by conventional methods, getting down to the basics of what is happening.
Things are still in early stages, but one can imagine that as we build up and systematize our theories of these associations, and try to boil them down to their core, the result might point us toward the sort of fundamental principles I advocate.
