" We used to go up to the Catskill Mountains for vacations. In New York, you go the Catskill Mountains for vacations. The poor husbands had to go to work during the week, but they would come rushing out for weekends and stay with their families. On the weekends, my father would take me for walks in the woods. He often took me for walks, and we learned all about nature, and so on, in the process. But the other children, friends of mine also wanted to go, and tried to get my father to take them. He didn't want to, because he said I was more advanced.
So we went alone for our walk in the woods. But mothers were very powerful in those day's as they are now, and they convinced the other fathers that they had to take their own sons out for walks in the woods. So all fathers took all sons out for walks in the woods one Sunday afternoon. The next day, Monday, we were playing in the fields and this boy said to me, "See that bird standing on the stump there? What's the name of it?"
I said, "I haven't got the slightest idea."
He said, "It’s a brown-throated thrush. Your father doesn't teach you a thing!."
That evening I asked my father, why he never told me the name of the bird. He asked me, "What was the first thing you noticed about it?"
"Well, it flies ... , which is kind of strange.... " , I answered.
Father replied with a wry smile, "It's a brown-throated thrush, but in Germany it's called a halsenflugel, and in Chinese they call it a chung ling and even if you know all those names for it, you still know nothing about the bird--you only know something about people; what they call that bird. Now that thrush sings, and teaches its young to fly, and flies so many miles away during the summer across the country, and nobody knows how it finds its way."
There is a difference between the name of the thing and what goes on."
This an anecdote from Mr. Richard P. Feynman's life. He was a physicist. I am not preaching science. This is just for those people who don't know enough about a certain thing, but consider themselves right in forming illogical opinions about it, coating the partial knowledge they have with figments of their own imaginations. Fine, even if forming opinions about just another thing you know "the name of" satisfies your ego, go ahead smart-asses! But don't try to preach your incomplete knowledge as if you are the ultimate authority.You might be diluting the essence of things.
