Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman

Author: Richard P. Feynman
Started: 2024-08-01
Finished: 2024-08-20

Despite the fact that Richard Feynman was among the most famous scientists of the 20th century, who also produced voluminous autobiographical material¹, surprisingly little has been written to examine the traits that made him special. Most of the attention goes to the same few stories of his pranks, his hobbies and interest in lock-picking, playing the bongos, decoding Mayan hieroglyphics and so on. This is interesting, no doubt. But what was the personality which generated such an interesting life in the first place?

That is what I wanted to understand from reading Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman. How did Feynman think about himself? What were his work habits? What was he like when he socialized? Are there aspects of his personality that we can adapt in our lives?

Here is what I learned.

1. Feynman was extraordinarily persistent

The singular trait that stands-out throughout Feynman’s many and varied adventures is his relentless doggedness in everything. As a boy, Feynman was obsessed with fixing electronics and became so good that he acquired a reputation as the local electronics wunderkind. Here’s how he described one particularly gnarly attempt to fix a radio:

I finally fixed (the radio) 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”:

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.

He said that this “puzzle drive” set up a virtuous cycle: as he got better at solving technical problems, more and more people came to him with different and increasingly complex challenges. As he puts it:

So I got a fancy reputation. During high school every puzzle that was known to man must have come to me. Every damn, crazy conundrum that people had invented, I knew.

Today we call this “building in public”, and it’s a habit that’s encouraged by productivity gurus. Feynman was no doubt cognitively overclocked, but it does seem that this experience and exposure played a big role in his creative and technical skill.

He continued this habit when he went to college at MIT. He would work with more senior students on their homework problems, and in the process increase his repertoire of knowledge and problem-solving skills. In one example, he talks about correctly suggesting the use of Bernoulli’s equation in a physics problem that his older roommates were struggling with. He knew this was the right approach not because of some flash of insight, but simply becauses he’d seen this equation in high school:

Feynman’s tenacity wasn’t limited only to intellectual challenges. He shares a story about being hazed by his fraternity, and how hard he fought despite not being very strong, because he didn’t want to be seen as a “sissy”. When I read that story I thought of the aphorism: how you do anything is how you do everything, and the line by, Socrates I think, that excellence is a habit.

During the Manhattan Project when he was at Los Alamos, Feynman learned to crack safes. At one point he unlocked a safe that was considered unbreakable, all because he was incessantly practicing his newfound hobby:

I was able to open the safe because of my perpetual habit of taking the last two numbers off. While in Oak Ridge the month before, I was in the same office when the safe was open and I took the numbers off in an absent-minded way—I was always practicing my obsession.

Over and over, Feynman shares stories which highligh his patience and tenacity, sometimes in stark contrast with others around him. When he was working on the unbreakable safe, he says that other Los Alamos staff members were initially excited about watching him at work, but then slowly started to trickle back to their desks because they got bored:

They didn’t have the patience to watch me do this, but the only way to solve such a thing is patience!

Later when he went to Brazil, he applied the same tenacity to learning how to play the frigideira, an improvised percussion instrument local to the area. He was asked to join a local band to play in the Carnivale. He wanted to become good, and so he pushed through the initial emotional frustration and discomfort of learning a new skill:

I practiced all the time. I’d walk along the beach holding two sticks that I had picked up, getting the twisty motion of the wrists, practicing, practicing, practicing. I kept working on it, but I always felt inferior, that I was some kind of trouble, and wasn’t really up to it.

2. He favored concreteness over abstraction when learning

Feynman was fond of starting with specific, concrete examples and then building-up to the more abstract, general case.

They would tell me the general problem they were working on, and would begin to write a bunch of equations. “Wait a minute,” I would say. “Is there a particular example of this general problem?” “Why yes; of course.” “Good. Give me one example.” That was for me: I can’t understand anything in general unless I’m carrying along in my mind a specific example and watching it go.

By doing this, Feynman could follow complicated reasoning steps even if it was his first time seeing the problem. This is probably also one of the mechanisms behind his flashes of deep insights into problems when others were lost in technical details:

The guy looks at his equations, and sure enough, after a while, he finds the mistake and wonders, “How the hell did this guy, who hardly understood at the beginning, find that mistake in the mess of all these equations?” He thinks I’m following the steps mathematically, but that’s not what I’m doing. I have the specific, physical example of what he’s trying to analyze, and I know from instinct and experience the properties of the thing.

Terry Tao also talks about a similar approach for building “physical” intuition for mathematical objects. He said that sometimes he would literally roll on the floor trying to get a “feel” for a specific problem or mathematical concept.

In the book, Feynman also shares the story behind the eponymous “Feynman technique” for learning difficult concepts. He applied it to understand some new results on parity violation that, at the time, no one could make sense of:²

I brought the paper home and said to (my sister), “I can’t understand these things that Lee and Yang are saying. It’s all so complicated.” “No,” she said, “what you mean is not that you can’t understand it, but that you didn’t invent it. You didn’t figure it out your own way, from hearing the clue. What you should do is imagine you’re a student again, and take this paper upstairs, read every line of it, and check the equations. Then you’ll understand it very easily.” I took her advice, and checked through the whole thing, and found it to be very obvious and simple. I had been afraid to read it, thinking it was too difficult.

This is also how I’ve taught myself difficult concepts and my theory for why it is so effective is that each of our brains has a unique language it uses for comprehension. By rederiving other people’s work “in our own words”, we understand it much better.³

He did a sabbatical year in Brazil where he tried to teach this method to others (I wonder if anyone in his class kept their notes):

I taught a course at the engineering school on mathematical methods in physics, in which I tried to show how to solve problems by trial and error. It’s something that people don’t usually learn, so I began with some simple examples of arithmetic to illustrate the method.

At the conclusion of his course, he gave a departmental seminar where he encouraged other teachers to use concrete examples to stimulate the imagination of their students so that there is an “experience of nature”.

3. He had high openness to experience

4. He was highly social

5. Had interesting thoughts on esoteric things and experiences