Books: Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard Feynman

Richard Feynman, in case you don't know (I didn't), is an extremely famous physicist, educated at MIT and Princeton, professor at Cornell and then CalTech, perhaps best known for having worked on the atomic bomb during WWII. In this book, a lighthearted collection of anecdotes comprising his memoirs for the layman, we learn that physicists are people, too.

Okay, so that sounds really rather silly, but I think that it's right on target. Feynman has a 1940s/50s gee whiz! way of writing, with exclamation points marking his exuberance in practically every paragraph (this is distracting for the first 25-50 pages, but you get used to it, and his excitement becomes contagious—and that is one of the reasons he was such a popular professor).

He tells us stories about his childhood basement lab, where he played with circuits and radios—it was the depression era and he taught himself his first lessons by trial and error, repairing neighbor's broken radios. His method, from age ten to twenty to fifty never seems to change—he has an intense curiosity about how things work, and the curiosity motivates him to learn things from the ground up. Though he practiced theoretical physics, he always held a concrete example in his mind. He taught himself calculus with the help of a college textbook early in high school, and created his own set of symbols for processes like derivatives and integrals, which made more logical sense to him than the given symbols (e.g. in "dx/dy," it appeared to him—and I love him for it because this always caused me confusion as well—that the ds would cancel out, so he scrapped that for a completely different symbol of his own invention.) His idiot-savant style of understanding and thereby explaining things makes me wonder whether I couldn't have learned calculus and physics if he had been my teacher. He was never afraid of asking "stupid" questions—in fact, older and more established minds would ask him to ask their questions for them during symposia when they were too embarrassed to challenge greater minds. Feynman explains it such that when he engages in a conversation about physics, he forgets everything but the physics itself—he might be in awe when he sees Einstein walk into the room, but as soon as they begin talking, his only concern is whether the theory works or doesn't work.

Feynman's curiosity—and this is where he becomes a real person—extends beyond physics. He was curious about everything; he had a hungry mind, and he describes a "vacation" during which instead of visiting a new town, he visited a new field, and spent the summer working in a biology lab. He traveled extensively for work and pleasure, and always learned at least some of the language, not to mention local customs, music, etc. In the 60s, when parapsychology was taken perhaps somewhat seriously as a science, he spent a good amount of time in sensory deprivation tanks, practicing hallucinating, not unlike the time he spent on his own, practicing dreaming, and trying to remain conscious enough all the while to gain a better understanding of how his mind was working.

Finally, he is very candid about his appreciation for beautiful girls. Basically everyone likes beautiful girls, but we don't think of Enrico Ferme or Albert Einstein hanging around Las Vegas, having drinks with the dancers and chatting with high-end prostitutes. Feynman loved to do this. He also had a thing for PanAm air hostesses. He managed to go through three wives (he was a widower from the first) and countless lovers, but he never comes off as manipulative, cruel, or a pimp. He's just fun-loving and interesting and interested, and he engages with women in a way that they aren't accustomed to.

That is, ultimately, his M.O.—he does it to his readers, too. For Dick Feynman, the world around us is a fascinating place, and the mechanisms inside our heads is perhaps even more fascinating. Too bad he didn't teach at Berkeley.