Reviews from Audible: Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman

This guy has got a good attitude on life. I feel like some of his unawareness of/disregard for social convention I share.

He got tight with the big dogs at Los Alamos because he wasn’t afraid to spar with them, and that’s who they wanted to be around, not sycophants. “I never who I was talking to…if the idea was lousy, I said it was lousy.”

At one point Los Alamos hired some high schoolers to help with the IBM punch cards. They weren’t that good at their job until Feynman explained what the whole point of all of it was, and afterwards they started working nights and weekends and quadrupled the processing speed.

He read that bloodhounds had good smell so he started smelling everything himself to get a sense of just how much aptitude humans had.

Having a “different box of tools” to apply to problems than everyone else is a good way to think about learning skills, and very similar to what Andreesen wrote awhile back.

At some point, he got paralyzed because he thought he had to always be doing “important” physics research. He then realized that this was dumb and he wanted to make physics fun again so he started investigating stuff that fancied him. He got a kick out of modeling a wobbling plate, and from those calculations he ended up stumbling onto the research that won him his Nobel.

Even a Nobel prize winner gets blown away some times — I respect his humility when he was describing how when talking with Enrico Fermi and other “great men” at Los Alamos they’d consistently get the sense of a problem he was working on for awhile really quickly and blow him away with their intellect.

Once he won his Nobel, it was hard to just speak to specialized audiences. He wanted to just speak to one physics club, so he told someone to put up posters advertising a talk by some random prof about some random physics topic in a random room. Only the people who actually cared about physics showed up, which was just fine for him.

This riff on “cargo cult science” is still depressingly relevant today.

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.

In summary, the idea is to try to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.

The easiest way to explain this idea is to contrast it, for example, with advertising. Last night I heard that Wesson Oil doesn’t soak through food. Well, that’s true. It’s not dishonest; but the thing I’m talking about is not just a matter of not being dishonest, it’s a matter of scientific integrity, which is another level. The fact that should be added to that advertising statement is that no oils soak through food, if operated at a certain temperature. If operated at another temperature, they all will — including Wesson Oil. So it’s the implication which has been conveyed, not the fact, which is true, and the difference is what we have to deal with.

We’ve learned from experience that the truth will out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature’s phenomena will agree or they’ll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven’t tried to be very careful in this kind of work.

His casual sexism is an off-putting relic that would not fly today. I feel bad for young people, particularly young women, today who get turned off when he says he slept with lots of women by insulting them and that he is more likely to accept speaking invitations when they’re delivered by cute blonde students. And yes, you were at Los Alamos, but not living with your wife when she’s dying of TB is out there.

Who should listen: If you want to meet a unique personality in a form you can dip in and out of who has a Mark Twain sense of humor as well as some real wisdom to go along with it.

8.8/10.