Intuition is a compressed way of looking at some phenomenon, an easy way to understand something. You observe again and again that people who do real innovations often have very robust intuition on the topic. So you wonder how could one get more of it?
Many physicists think of Feynman when the word intuition comes up. He was very good at giving intuitions for complex phenomena. One wonders how Feynman did it. But you barely find anything from his own words, except that he was good at imagination.
So, what to do? There is a scientist called Stephen Wolfram (I was listening to his appearance on Lex Fridman's podcast). It turns out Wolfram was a younger colleague and friend of Feynman's at Caltech. He gave some insights about Feynman's intuition that you cannot find elsewhere:
- First, Feynman knew that you cannot compress everything into simple intuitions — not everything can be reduced to a child-level analogy. (This is similar to the line often attributed to Einstein: everything should be made as simple as possible, but not ever simpler.)
- Then, Feynman was very good at calculating. He would do complex calculations/simulations on paper or in his head, fast, then see the overall picture, then come up with a post-hoc intuition for the phenomenon. BUT because he thought calculation was easy, he would simply not mention the many days he spent calculating.
So the important point: to get intuition you need to work in the weeds / fight in the trenches, then you understand what is happening, then you get the intuition. Usually there is no shortcut, and often the intuition you end up with is not child-level easy.
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1June 27, 2026 1.2K 3
