Ralph Leighton
speaker
164 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 29 May
Ralph Leighton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
He says it's a duty of a scientist to create a philosophy of ignorance and doubt, meaning admit that you don't know something.
Don't just fake it and, you know, make it up.
When you don't know something, say you don't know it.
I know that some people, Alan Alda comes to mind, have set up like a center for the communication of science.
And so Feynman, I'm sure, would happily give a guest talk at Alan Alda's Center for the Communication of Science.
But he would start off by saying, now, you know, I don't know anything about really how to communicate science.
So I'm just going to tell you something really interesting that I found out about the other day.
And then by example, he would show you great communication of science.
My name is Alan Alda, and I act, I write.
You don't need to know more.
When I was born, my father was in burlesque.
So from the earliest times I can remember, when I was two or two and a half years old, I was standing in the wings watching burlesque shows.
watching comics and straight men, chorus girls and strippers.
And I learned a lot.
And the thing that I identified with was the performing, I guess you could say the performing instinct.
Communicating with the audience without necessarily acknowledging that they were there.
Feynman was a performer on his own.
If you look at his lectures, you see the jokes he does that Ralph Layton said were carefully constructed and paced.
And he always was aware of where he wanted something funny to happen.
I think Feynman had a good policy about how he taught physics.
Showing 61–80 of 164 · page 4 of 9
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