I opened a training session with it last month and afterwards someone asked me where it's from, which I could not answer. Half an hour of searching gets me a thousand posters and not one citation with a page number in it. Before I use it again I'd like to know whether it's his, someone else's, or nobody's. Has anyone actually chased this one down?
Setting aside who said it, I think the claim is wrong as stated and it does damage in rooms like the one you were training. Simplification isn't a solo act — it depends on what your listener already has to build on. I can explain what a Fourier transform is for in two sentences to a musician, because octaves and overtones give me the scaffolding, and I cannot do it in twenty minutes for someone with no reference points at all. That isn't me not understanding it. The quote gets used to shame specialists into producing analogies that are simple and quietly false, which is worse than an honest 'this one takes an hour'.
The simple-but-false thing is my whole experience of learning networking. Every clean analogy I was given had to be unlearned later, and the unlearning took longer than the original explanation would have.
The Feynman version is closer to something real, though I'd still call it an anecdote rather than a quotation. The account that goes around comes from David Goodstein, who describes asking Feynman to prepare a freshman lecture on why spin one-half particles obey Fermi-Dirac statistics; the story is that Feynman came back saying he couldn't get it down to freshman level, and that this meant physics didn't really understand it. I've never found a transcript or a letter behind that, so I quote it as a story someone told about him, not as words he wrote. Worth noting it also says the opposite of what your poster says: Feynman's point was that the failure to simplify is a fact about the physics, not a personal failing of the explainer.
I put it on a slide in front of a room that happened to contain a historian of science, and she asked the same question your colleague did, in front of forty people. It was a very long two seconds. Now if I want the sentiment I attribute it honestly: 'there's a line people put in Einstein's mouth, and the closest documented version is Rutherford's', and that framing gets a better reaction than the poster ever did.
No source for the Einstein version. Rutherford's barmaid line is real and cited. Use that one and you're both safe and more interesting.
@labcoat_lior · 4w ago · 2 replies
I've looked for this one before and there is no primary source — it doesn't appear in the standard collections of his writing and letters, and every trail ends at another poster. What does have a citation is a cousin of it from Ernest Rutherford: 'An alleged scientific discovery has no merit unless it can be explained to a barmaid', which Wikiquote sources to G. J. Whitrow's 1973 book Einstein: The Man and His Achievement. Which is a small joke in itself — the barmaid line is documented in a book about Einstein, and that proximity is probably part of how the modern phrasing ended up with his name on it.
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@litercount_lou · 3w ago
The working rule I use: if a quote is pithy, flattering to the reader and attributed to Einstein, Twain or Churchill, assume it isn't theirs until someone produces a page number. Those three are where orphaned quotations go to get adopted.
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