A nice place to learn about these in a physics context is the older book by Cheng and Li, “Gauge theory of elementary particle physics,” chapter 4.3. I believe Terning’s “Modern SUSY” also does a bit with Young tableaux.

You might also get some mileage by looking at textbooks on representations of Lie groups. The book by Georgi comes to mind, as well as the book by Cahn. I suspect more advanced quantum mechanics textbooks may also have good treatments. -F

You’re absolutely right that names have their own importance—as you explain, having a word for an idea separates signal from background. As you say, otherwise ‘everything is just a tree.’ ((This is why people like to believe that Eskimos have hundreds of words for snow, it ‘makes sense’ that a people who live in such a climate should distinguish between subtle difference in snow and that this should trickle into their language.)) In other words, I agree that [especially in science] the ideas which are given names are important ideas, and further that the scientists who end up learning these names almost always do so because they’re using those ideas.

But this isn’t always the case. I recently learned about a gene that has a delightfully silly name, the Sonic hedgehog gene. I have no idea what it does nor do I appreciate it’s significance and why it deserves a name, but I can happily answer a pub quiz question about a gene named after a famous video game echinoderm. It would be silly of me to say that “ah, I understand the Sonic hedgehog gene.”

Another silly example, suppose I can recite the date in which the Mona Lisa were painted. While this is perhaps useful knowledge for Jeopardy, it says very little on its own without some contextual background of what was going on in this time period.

I think this sort of thing is what Feynman’s anecdote is addressing: he wants to impress upon people that there’s more to appreciating an idea than being able to recite the superficial factoids around it. I don’t think he was talking to scientists when he said this—but rather the general public, who does not necessarily spend their time thinking about their work in the same way that scientists think about theirs. People can grow up watching Jeopardy (or your favorite trivia game in the UK) and think they’re ‘learning’ by memorizing trivia answers, but this sort of knowledge is empty without the context which you write about. And I think Feynman’s purpose was to grab these people by the shoulders a bit and say, “hey, there’s a lot more out there to appreciate than just the superficial information.”

This is the same point that I think you are getting to: to a trained eye, the leaf of a particular plant can tell you a lot about the plant. I’m not in the field, but I know that the aloe vera plants on my window sill store water in their leaves and are able to live in arid environments. But the name of the plant, “aloe vera” doesn’t mean anything in itself. I could go around saying “this plant is aloe vera!” and not appreciate how this plant evolved to survive in a particular environment, for example.

At any rate, I think we agree that the science of botany (and particle physics) goes much deeper than being able to recite scientific names, and this was my main point.

A corporate logo is meant to be easily identifiable with a brand name. A scientific idea, on the other hand, is much richer than its label

Thanks for the comment!
Flip