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. First, the stories. Feynman led such an interesting life and this book chronicles some of his most colorful and entertaining adventures. That alone makes for a wonderful book. 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