My fav parts from “Surely you’re joking Mr. Feynman”

He was a truly spectacular mind and I enjoyed this book like I haven’t enjoyed any read for a while now.

It’s people with such mindset that were at the forefront of 20th century scientific, but even more importantly, social revolution.

I hope these won’t be the only memoirs of Richard Feynman. Certainly the reminiscences here give a true picture of much of the character — his almost compulsive need to solve puzzles, his provocative mischievousness, his indignant impatience with pretension and hypocrisy, and his talent for one-upping anybody who tries to one-up him!

About the way he worked with engineers. Always trying to make sure they understand what they work on:

Then they cam to work, and what they had to do was work on IBM machines — punching holes, numbers that they didn’t understand. Nobody told them what it was. The thing was going very slowly. I said that the first thing there has to be is that these technical guys know what we’re doing. Oppenheimer went and talked to the security and got special permission so I could give a nice lecture about what we were doing, and they were all excited: “We’re fighting the war! We see what it is!” They knew what the numbers meant. If the pressure came out higher, that meant there was more energy released, and so on and so on. They knew what they were doing.

The story how he faked insanity:

At the end of the whole physical examination there’s an army officer who decides whether you’re in or you’re out. For instance, if there’s something the matter with your hearing, he has to decide if it’s serious enough to keep you out of army. And because the army was scraping the bottom of the barrel for new recruits, this officer wasn’t going to take anything from anyone. He was tough as nails. For instance, the fellow ahead of me had two bones sticking out from the back of his neck — some kind of displaced vertebra, or something — and this army officer had to get up from his desk and feel them — he had to make sure they were real!

I figured this is the place I’ll get this whole misunderstanding straightened out. When it’s my turn, I hand my papers to the officer, and I’m ready to explain everything, but the officer doesn’t look up. He sees the “D” next to “Psychiatric”, immediately reaches for the rejection stamp, doesn’t ask me any questions, doesn’t say anything; he just stamps my paper “REJECTED”, and hands me my 4-F paper, still looking at his desk.

About teaching:

The questions of the students are often the source of new research. They often ask profound questions that I’ve thought about at time and then given up on, so to speak, for a while. It wouldn’t do me any harm to think about them again and see if I can go any further now. The students may not be able to see the things I want to answer, or the subtleties I want to think about, but they remind me of a problem by asking questions in the neighborhood of that problem. It’s not so easy to remind yourself of these things.

So I find that teaching and the students keep life going, and I would never accept any position in which somebody has invented a happy situation for me where I don’t have to teach. Never.

About high expectation towards him:

It wasn’t a failure on my part that the Institute for Advanced Study expected me to be that good; it was impossible. It was clearly a mistake — and the moment I appreciate the possibility that they might be wrong, I realized that it was also true of all the other places, including my own university. I am what I am, and if they expected me to be good and they’re offering me some money for it, it’s their hard luck.

Then, within the day, by some strange miracle — perhaps he overheard me talking about it, or maybe he just understood me — Bob Wilson, who was head of the laboratory there at Cornell, called me in to see him. He said, in a serious tone, “Feynman, you’re teaching your classes well; you’re doing a good job, and we are very satisfied. Any other expectations we might have are a matter of luck. When we hire a professor, we’re taking all the risks. If it comes out good, all right. If it doesn’t, too bad. But you shouldn’t worry about what you’re are doing or not doing.” He said it much better than that, and it released me from the feeling of guilt.

About hooking up with an ordinary girl:

On the way to the bar I was working up nerve to try the master’s lesson on an ordinary girl. After all, you don’t feel so bad disrespecting a bar girl who’s trying to get you to buy her drinks — but a nice, ordinary, Southern girl?

We went into a bar, and before I sat down, I said, “Listen, before I buy you a drink, I want to know one thing: Will you sleep with me tonight?”

“Yes.”

So it worked even with an ordinary girl! But no matter how effective the lesson was, I never really used it after that. I didn’t enjoy doing it that way. But it was interesting to know that things worked much differently from how I was brought up.

About moving to Caltech:

But then the snow gets deep enough that the car begins to skid a little bit, so you have to put the chains on. You get out of the car, put the chains out on the snow, and it’s cold, and you’re beginning to shiver. Then you roll the car back onto the chains, and you have this problem — or we had it in those days; I don’t know what there is now — that there’s a hook on the inside that you have to hook first. And because the chains have to go on pretty tight, it’s hard to get the hook to hook. Then you have to push this clamp down with your fingers, which by this time are nearly frozen. And because you’re on the outside of the tire, and the hook is on the inside, and your hands are cold, it’s very difficult to control. It keeps slipping, and it’s cold, and the snow’s coming down, and you’re trying to push this clamp, and your hand’s hurting, and the damn thing’s not going down — well, I remember that that was the moment when I decided that this is insane; there must be a part of the world that doesn’t have this problem.

On Japan:

Eating meals at the hotel was also different. The girl who brings in the food stays with you while you eat, so you’re not alone. I couldn’t have too good a conversation with her, but it was all right. And the food is wonderful. For instance, the soup comes in a bowl that’s covered. You lift the cover and there’s a beautiful picture: little pieces of onion floating in the soup just so; it’s gorgeous. How the food looks on the plate is very important.

At the institute the next day, I said to the guys in the office, “How would I say in Japanese, ‘I solve the Dirac Equation’?” They said such-and-so.

“OK. Now I want to say, ‘Would you solve the Dirac Equation?’ — how do I say that?”

“Well, you have to use a different word for ‘solve,’ “they say.

“Why?” I protested. “When I solve it, I do the same damn thing as when you solve it!”

“Well, yes, but it’s a different word — it’s more polite.”

I gave up. I decided that wasn’t the language for me, and stopped learning Japanese.

On drawing:

The next time we met I showed him my attempts:

“Oh, look!” he said. “You see, around in back here, the line of the flower pot doesn’t touch the leaf.” (I had meant the line to come up to the leaf.)

“That’s very good. It’s a way of showing depth. That’s very clever of you.” “And the fact that you don’t make all the lines the same thickness (which I didn’t mean to do) is good. A drawing with all the lines the same thickness is dull.”

It continued like that: Everything that I thought was a mistake, he used to teach me something in a positive way. He never said it was wrong; he never put me down. So I kept on trying, and I gradually got a little bit better, but I was never satisfied.

About strip club he frequented:

Gianonni went around to all the customers and asked them if they would testify in support of him. Everybody had an excuse: “I run a day camp, and if the parents see that I’m going to this place, they won’t send their kinds to my camp…” Or, “I’m in the such-and-such business, and if it’s publicized that I come down here, we’ll lose customers.”

I think to myself, “I’m the only free man in here. I haven’t any excuse! I like this place, and I’d like to see it continue. I don’t see anything wrong with topless dancing.” So I said to Gianonni, “Yes, I’ll be glad to testify.”

About integrity in science:

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. And it’s this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in cargo cult science.