Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman

Author: Richard P. Feynman
Started: 2024-08-01
Finished: 2024-08-20
Rating: 7/10

UNDER CONSTRUCTION: This is still in draft mode as I figure out some formatting issues.

I think there are two reasons to read this book. The first are the stories: Feynman led such an interesting life and this book chronicles some of his most colorful and entertaining adventures. The second reason is to get a sense for the traits and thought-patterns of a genius.

On persistence

As a young boy, Feynman had a reputation for fixing electronics. Here he is talking about a particularly gnarly attempt:

I finally fixed it because I had, and still have, persistence. Once I get on a puzzle, I can’t get off. If my mother’s friend had said, “Never mind, it’s too much work,” I’d have blown my top, because I want to beat this damn thing, as long as I’ve gone this far. 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.

He called this tenacity, his “puzzle drive”:

That’s a puzzle drive. It’s what accounts for my wanting to decipher Mayan hieroglyphics, for trying to open safes. I remember in high school, during first period a guy would come to me with a puzzle in geometry, or something which had been assigned in his advanced math class. I wouldn’t stop until I figured the damn thing out—it would take me fifteen or twenty minutes.

On openness to experience

After the war, every summer I would go traveling by car somewhere in the United States. One year, after I was at Caltech, I thought, “This summer, instead of going to a different place, I’ll go to a different field.”

GIF is a bitmap image format. salamanders

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Richard Feynman

Now include something else, and footnote.¹