Reading Journal: Surely You Are Joking, Mr. Feynman!

Having been born and raised in Queens, New York, Richard Feynman felt completely out of place when he first arrived in Princeton. There’s an aspect of elegance to Princeton that makes it kind of like an English school. From its red brick buildings to the accents, everything was like an imitation of Oxford or Cambridge.

Not knowing anyone there, Feynman decided to attend a tea event hosted by the Dean. At the event, the madame asked Feynman whether he wanted lemon or milk in his tea, to which Feynman replied “both, please!” In response, the madame quipped: “Surely you are joking, Mr. Feynman!”.

That remark became the title of his autobiography. It does a fine job setting the tone for the book. It would be incorrect to call it an autobiography. It is more of a collection of farcical stories, musings, adventures and misadventures of a fascinating character. Some of his stories were incredibly entertaining, others somewhat off-putting for our modern ears, but one thing you can’t say is that they are boring.

Being a fan of biographies myself, I found this book to be a breath of fresh air. It is not a rigidly structured, scrupulous recollection of a person’s life from birth. The writing itself is extremely colloquial with a hint of New York accent on every page. I felt like I read it in a New York accent if that’s even possible.

To quote Ralph Leighton on Feynman’s life:

“That one person could have so many wonderfully crazy things happen to him in one life is sometimes hard to believe”

Feynman on Learning

Feynman was smart no doubt, but he didn’t view himself as a genius. However, he believed he learned more deeply than most people around him. Moreover, he was playful with his learning.

• In high school, he had a reputation of being a puzzle master. Guys would go to him everyday with harder and harder puzzles trying to stump him. In fact, there were many instances where he was stumped; where he had spent hours cracking a puzzle. But when he was asked the same puzzle again, he could solve it in a flash. So for one guy, he took an hour, while the other five though he was a super-genius.
• In one instance, he recalled stating some fundamental properties of curves during a freshman drafting class. His classmates were impressed by his math knowledge. However, those same knowledge (related to tangents and derivatives) were taught just a semester before in the intro Calculus class.

“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. Their knowledge is so fragile”

• Feynman claims he learned best when he can hold a specific example in his mind. He has a hard time understanding anything in general, abstract terms.

“Some people think in the beginning that I’m kind of slow and I don’t understand the problem, because I ask a lot of these ‘dumb questions’. […] But later, when the guy’s in the middle of a bunch of equations, he’ll say something and I’ll say, ‘Wait a minute! There’s an error! That can’t be right!’ The guy looks at his equation and after a while 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?’ “

• Throughout the book, Feynman stressed the importance of curiosity and “proper learning”. He is a fierce critic of learning by rote memorization, or learning the bare minimum for grades rather than understanding.

Feynman spent a few years in Brazil on his sabbatical, during which he became quite critical of Brazil’s educational system and culture of learning. He spent a chapter talking about it.

• He recalled the students having a weird one-upmanship attitude and being afraid of asking questions. When he inquired a student further on why no body is asking questions:

“If I ask you a question during the lecture, afterwards everybody will be telling me, ‘what are you wasting our time for in the class? We are trying to learn something. And you’re stopping him by asking questions’ “

• The end result is everyone trying to put each other down as if they knew better. The truth is no body knew anything. The students are faking it because they are afraid of losing face by asking questions. Feynman concluded that it’s a self-propagating system in which people pass exams, and teach others to pass exams, but nobody knows anything.

Playful and Mischievous

• Feynman loved being playful, even when it came to physics. After Los Alamos, he spent a few years at Cornell, he recalled being stuck in a rut. He felt unmotivated and couldn’t do any meaningful work. One day he had a epiphany, he realized he had always done his best work while “playing”. To quote Feynman: “I’m going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.”
  • One day, while sitting in the cafeteria, he saw a plate fly through the air from some ruckus nearby. He noticed the peculiar way in which it wobbled and decided to investigate out of curiosity. Long story short, Feynman credited that investigation into wobbling plates as the genesis of his Nobel-prize-winning work later on in his career.
• In high school, he invented his own custom notation for the trigonometry and calculus. For example, he thought “tan f” looked like \(t \times a \times n \times f\). Instead, he denoted the tangent function as a \(\tau\) with the hat extended. Eventually, he stopped inventing his own notations once he realized physics is collaborative and standard symbols are needed for proper communication.
• During his time at Princeton, he volunteered to be hypnotized as part of a performance. He gives a fascinating account of how he was hypnotized on stage to feel no pain despite being burned by a match on the back of his hand. He recalled that it “felt warm”. He describes hypnosis as less of being controlled or brainwashed, and more like being willing to go along.

“So I found hypnosis to be a very interesting experience. All the time you’re saying to yourself, “I could do that, but I won’t” - which is just another way of saying you can’t.

Brazen and Authentic

• Feynman was known to be quite brazen and direct when it came to the topic of physics. Out of the hundreds of geniuses at Los Alamos, Niels Bohr had the specific request to discuss new ideas with Feynman. Quote:

“Remember the name of that little fellow in the back over there? He’s the only guy who’s not afraid of me, and will say when I’ve got a crazy idea. So next time when we want to discuss ideas, we’re not going to be able to do it with these guys who say everything is yes, yes, Dr. Bohr. Get that guy and we’ll talk with him first”

• To quote Feynman himself:

“I was always dumb in that way. I never knew who I was talking to.”

• Feynman was critical of some of the social sciences. His dislike probably originated from his time at Cornell, when he was approached by some of the social sciences professor to join an anti-Semitic club that went on about how the Nazis weren’t so bad. Feynman was born Jewish but he disliked placing people in buckets like that anyways. Interesting fact: Feynman was almost rejected from Princeton because there was a Jewish quota back then. One professor vouched for Feynman because according the the professor, he wasn’t “that Jewish”. (Amazing how far we’ve come)

• He saw some of the social sciences as pretentious and mostly unproductive. For example, he was invited to a conference in New York to discuss the “ethics of equality”. At the conference, he recalled reading a paper where he just could not understand what the paper was trying to say. So he decided to translate the paper paragraph by paragraph. For example, in one paragraph: “The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels.” was translated to “People read”. After he was done, he realized the paper was not saying much at all.

• Feynman attended a roundtable discussion at the conference. Afterwards, a stenographer who was recording every word of the discussion came up to him and asked, “What profession are you? Surely not a professor.” Feynman responded that he was a physics professor, to which the stenotypist replied, “ah! That must be the reason”.

  “You see, I’m a stenographer, and I type everything that is said here. Now, when the other fellas talk, I type what they say, but I don’t understand what they’re saying. But every time you get up to ask a question or to say something, I understand exactly what you mean”

Open and Free-Spirited

After completing his studies at MIT, his advisor forced him to go to another school for graduate studies. “Learn what the rest of the world is like. The variety is worthwhile”. Feynman thought this was a valuable advice. He no doubt applied it to other areas of his life as well. He was open to all sorts of adventures and mischiefs.

• While at Caltech, Feynman was offered a ludicrously amazing opportunity to come teach at University of Chicago. It was three to four times what he was making at Caltech. He recalled why he must refuse. His reasoning is both amusing and shocking.

“The reason I have to refuse a salary like that is I would be able to do what I’ve always wanted to do - get a wonderful mistress, put her up in an apartment, buy her nice things.”

This is such a brazenly honest admission that I wonder if Feynman is doing it on purpose… Imagine anyone in the current day and age doing something like this. It would be social suicide; self-cancellation; idiotic.

My theory is that he was attempting to embody traits that are as diametrically opposed to the nerdy scientist image as possible. He wanted to shatter stereotypes. I wonder if it was that stultifying to be a nerd or geek back in those days. How much damage Hollywood has done to the collective psyche of this country, and how much is it responsible for the mass innumeracy in the US today.

Other Amusing Stories

• Feynman enjoyed spending time at bars, chatting with people, and occasionally being a womanizer. He recalled quipping with a bar owner one night on the best way to pick up woman. To quote the bar owner: “Under no circumstance be a gentleman! You must disrespect the girl.” Feynman was skeptical but tried it to great success. The principle is essentially this: when a guy wants to be a gentleman, he follows a very predictable pattern psychologically; he doesn’t want to be impolite or thought of as a cheapskate. As long as the girl knows the guy’s motive, it is easy to steer him. Of course Feynman’s words have more levity than my cold journalistic retelling. Nevertheless, Feynman is so eccentric because I would never expect anyone else to put this type of stuff in their autobiographies.
• Feynman did some physics work that he later abandoned because there were “too many phenomenological adjustment of constants to make everything fit.” I had a good laugh because it reminded me of reinforced-concrete design, or engineering in general.
• While in Japan, Feynman was quite disappointed when he found out he was staying at a thoroughly European style hotel. Instead, he checked out and went to stay at a local Japanese style hotel to get the full experience.
  • He recounted a hilarious story of his friend, with whom he was staying with, coming out of the shower completely butt naked, all the while a young woman was there to take care of their room and fix breakfast. She turned to him completely composed and said “ohayo, goazi masu” (good morning). His friend turned to Feynman and said “God, are we uncivilized!”. Feynman reasoned that if the same situation were to happen in the US, there would be a little scream and a big fuss. He concluded that the Japanese are much more advanced and civilized about these things.
  • Feynman hated eating fish, but he found out that was a childish thing to say in Japan. As a result, he forced himself to eat fish in Japan and actually enjoyed it. Then when he went back to the US, he went to a fish place and it was horrible.
• Feynman loved art and music and had many artist friends. According to his artist friend, scientists destroy the beauty of nature when they pick it apart and turn it into mathematical equations. On the other hand, Feynman believes understanding science can enrich your appreciation of nature, rather than reduce it
• Feynman developed a painting hobby while at Caltech. You can find some of his paintings online. Although he was no Van Gogh, he eventually became quite good. When others compliment him on how he was a man of many talents (painting, playing the drums, etc) while also being a great physicist, he quipped:

“If you see a dog walking on his hind legs, it’s not so much that he does it well, as that he does it at all”

Conclusion

In conclusion, you can use many adjectives to describe Feynman. Curious, adventurous, authentic, mischievous, fun… The list goes on. From his delightful tales of playing the drums on the streets of Brazil, to his mischiefs at seedy dive bars in Buffalo, New York, Feynman wrote his “autobiography” in a way that I thoroughly enjoyed. The massive collections of amusing stories were quite effective at giving us a complete picture of what Feynman was like; retold in his characteristically whimsical, fun way.

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