topics: |  autobiography | science

What I find interesting about Feynman is what a good technologist he was;
yet his research was completely theoretical, in the domain of equations and
physical laws.  Yet, the tinkering he lived through as a child and adult
taught him a science which was grounded on experiment.

Also he was stubborn:
    I finally fixed it because I had, and still have, persistence. Once I
    get on a puzzle, I can't get off.  ... I can't just leave it after I've
    found out so much about it. I have to keep going to find out ultimately
    what is the matter with it in the end.

My personal stance is that one can view his work in theory as his way of
answering "Why?".  Feynman's life is that of a stubborn and curious
child.

Excerpts

The stories in this book were collected intermittently and informally during
seven years of very enjoyable drumming with Richard Feynman. I have found
each story by itself to be amusing, and the collection taken together to be
amazing:

I turned it around slowly. "The French curve is specially made so that at the lowest point on each curve, the tangent is horizontal."
All the guys rotated their French curves, holding a pencil at the lowest point. Sure enough, the tangent is horizontal!
They had all already "learned" that the derivative (tangent) at the minimum of any curve is zero (horizontal), but they didn't put two and two together.

That one person could have so many wonderfully crazy things happen to him in one life is sometimes hard to believe. That one person could invent so much innocent mischief in one life is surely an inspiration! - Ralph Leighton

Childhood

When I was about eleven or twelve I set up a lab in my house. It consisted of an old wooden packing box that I put shelves in.
...
I had a fuse in the system so if I shorted anything, the fuse would blow. Now I had to have a fuse that was weaker than the fuse in the house, so I made my own fuses by taking tin foil and wrapping it around an old burnt-out fuse. Across my fuse I had a five-watt bulb, so when my fuse blew, the load from the trickle charger that was always charging the storage battery would light up the bulb. The bulb was on the switchboard behind a piece of brown candy paper (it looks red when a light's behind it)--so if something went off, I'd look up to the switchboard and there would be a big red spot where the fuse went. It was fun! [p.1]

Fixing radios by thinking

...when we got there I went over to the radio and turned it on. Little noise? My
God! No wonder the poor guy couldn't stand it. The thing began to roar and
wobble--WUH BUH BUH BUH BUH--A tremendous amount of noise. Then it quieted
down and played correctly. So I started to think: "How can that happen?"

I start walking back and forth, thinking, and I realize that one way it can
happen is that the tubes are heating up in the wrong order--that is, the
amplifier's all hot, the tubes are ready to go, and there's nothing feeding
in, or there's some back circuit feeding in, or something wrong in the
beginning part --the HF part--and therefore it's making a lot of noise,
picking up something. And when the RF circuit's finally going, and the grid
voltages are adjusted, everything's all right.

So the guy says, "What are you doing? You come to fix the radio, but you're
only walking back and forth!"

I say, "I'm thinking!" Then I said to myself, "All right, take the tubes out,
and reverse the order completely in the set." (Many radio sets in those
days used the same tubes in different places--212's, I think they were, or
212-A's.) So I changed the tubes around, stepped to the front of the radio,
turned the thing on, and it's as quiet as a lamb: it waits until it heats up,
and then plays perfectly --no noise.

When a person has been negative to you, and then you do something like that,
they're usually a hundred percent the other way, kind of to compensate. He
got me other jobs, and kept telling everybody what a tremendous genius I was,
saying, "He fixes radios by thinking!"

The whole idea of thinking, to fix a radio --a little boy stops and thinks,
and figures out how to do it-- he never thought that was possible.

Dating

Soon after these social guys had taught me how to meet girls, I saw a nice
waitress in a restaurant where I was eating by myself one day. With great
effort I finally got up enough nerve to ask her to be my date at the next
fraternity dance, and she said yes.

Back at the fraternity, when we were talking about the dates for the next
dance, I told the guys I didn't need a date this time--I had found one on my
own. I was very proud of myself.

When the upperclassmen found out my date was a waitress, they were
horrified. They told me that was not possible; they would get me a "proper"
date. They made me feel as though I had strayed, that I was amiss. They
decided to take over the situation. They went to the restaurant, found the
waitress, talked her out of it, and got me another girl. They were trying to
educate their "wayward son," so to speak, but they were wrong, I think. I was
only a freshman then, and I didn't have enough confidence yet to stop them
from breaking my date.

Drawing class: Knowledge by rote is fragile

One time, in mechanical drawing class, some joker picked up a French curve (a
piece of plastic for drawing smooth curves--a curly, funny-looking thing) and
said, "I wonder if the curves on this thing have some special formula?"

I thought for a moment and said, "Sure they do. The curves are very special
curves. Lemme show ya," and I picked up my French curve and began to turn it
slowly. "The French curve is made so that at the lowest point on each curve,
no matter how you turn it, the tangent is horizontal."

All the guys in the class were holding their French curve up at different
angles, holding their pencil up to it at the lowest point and laying it
along, and discovering that, sure enough, the tangent is horizontal. They
were all excited by t his "discovery"--even though they had already gone
through a certain amount of calculus and had already "learned" that the
derivative (tangent) of the minimum (lowest point) of any curve is zero
(horizontal).

They didn't put two and two together. They didn't even know what they "knew."

I don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by
understanding; they learn by some other way--by rote, or something. Their
knowledge is so fragile!

Cargo Cult Science

   I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are
   examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science. In the South
   Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes
   with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen
   now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along
   the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with
   two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking
   out like antennas--he's the controller--and they wait for the airplanes
   to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks
   exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes
   land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all
   the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're
   missing something essential, because the planes don't land.

w: The book, released in 1985, covers a variety of instances in Feynman's
life. Some are lighthearted in tone, such as his fascination with
safe-cracking, fondness for topless bars, and ventures into art and samba
music. Others cover more serious material, including his work on the
Manhattan Project (during which his first wife Arline Greenbaum died of
tuberculosis) and his critique of the science education system in Brazil.

The anecdotes were edited from taped conversations that Feynman had with his
close friend and drumming partner Ralph Leighton. Its surprise success led to
a sequel entitled What Do You Care What Other People Think?, also taken from
Leighton's taped conversations.