How was Richard Feynman a nuisance at philosophy lectures? How did the atomic bomb change his life? How did he react to winning the Nobel Prize?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Richard Feynman’s scientific discoveries were merely one result of his lifelong love of learning, his spirit of adventure, and his determination to live life to its fullest. His memoir demonstrates his drive to solve puzzles, his joy at new discoveries, and his sense of inquisitive delight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Here’s our overview of Surely You\u2019re Joking, Mr. Feynman!<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Unlike most award-winning scientists, Richard Feynman is more commonly remembered for his quirky wit, his adventurous spirit, and his colorful personality than for his achievements in the world of physics. Feynman began his career as a young theoretician working on the Manhattan Project<\/a> to develop the atomic bomb during World War II. He went on to do research at Cornell and Caltech, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1965 for his work on quantum mechanics<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n However, that\u2019s not the story Feynman wants to tell. After all, his discoveries in the realm of science were merely one result of his lifelong love of learning and adventure<\/strong>\u2014of seeking out new experiences, exploring new skills, widening his horizons, and living life to its fullest. Throughout his tales runs a thread of inquisitive delight that shows how intellectual rigor and persistence can go hand-in-hand with excitement and fun. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Published in 1985, Surely You\u2019re Joking, Mr. Feynman!<\/em><\/a> doesn\u2019t take the form of a traditional autobiography, and it doesn\u2019t hit all the highlights of Feynman\u2019s career. Instead, it\u2019s a collection of Feynman\u2019s personal stories as recorded by his friend Ralph Leighton and edited into a roughly chronological sequence. There\u2019s little discussion of Feynman\u2019s scientific work, but much about Feynman\u2019s drive to solve puzzles, his joy at new discoveries, and his childlike ability to turn every situation into a game (or even, on occasion, a prank).<\/p>\n\n\n\n We\u2019ll chart the outline of Feynman\u2019s life from his early college days, through his years as part of the team that developed the atomic bomb, and finally to his academic career. We\u2019ll then examine the personal values that permeate Feynman\u2019s stories of his life: curiosity, persistence, the importance of teaching, scientific rigor, and most of all, having fun<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rather than focusing on the major events in Richard Feynman\u2019s biography, the stories in Surely You\u2019re Joking, Mr. Feynman!<\/em> take place around them. Feynman shares the details of his life through the incidents and adventures he most liked to talk about, rather than what others might consider more significant, such as his research in quantum mechanics or his work on the atomic bomb. In this section, we\u2019ll explore the shape of Feynman\u2019s life, from his years in school at Princeton and MIT, his participation in the Manhattan Project, and his return to the academic world, during which (and much to his annoyance) he earned a Nobel Prize.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Richard Feynman was born in New York on May 11, 1918. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology<\/a> (MIT) from 1935-1939 and was reluctant to leave after finishing his undergraduate work. However, MIT\u2019s rules required its undergraduates to complete their advanced degrees elsewhere, so Feynman did his graduate studies at Princeton University<\/a> until earning his doctorate in 1942. Although he found Princeton to have a stuffier, more formal culture than MIT, Feynman describes its physics laboratory as a playground, not unlike his cluttered workshop at home. Moving to Princeton was a blessing in that it pushed him to learn what the rest of the world was like, in terms of academics, people, and how physics was done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While at Princeton, Feynman spent time with groups outside the physics department so he could learn what was going on in their fields. He says he was a nuisance at philosophy lectures because he had a habit of asking for definitions of fuzzy philosophical concepts. He enjoyed biology because there were so many interesting questions that scientists hadn\u2019t been able to solve yet. He met scientists who could easily see mathematical problems in their heads, whereas Feynman had to grind away at them. He also gave a lecture that famous scientists such as Albert Einstein attended. This made him extremely nervous until the moment his presentation began and the science swept him away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As Feynman approached the end of his graduate studies, the US entered the Second World War. Feynman would contribute his intellectual gifts as part of the theoretical team that developed the atomic bomb<\/strong>. While Feynman would begin as a low-ranking recruit, he would play an important role in the advancement of the atom bomb project, though the ultimate success of his military mission would coincide with a great personal tragedy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Like many Americans, Feynman felt it was his duty to contribute to the war effort, but he didn\u2019t want to go to army boot camp; he believed he could better serve in a technical position. While he was still working on his Ph.D., a general came to Princeton looking for physicists to recruit, and Feynman volunteered, even though at the time very few people even understood what a physicist was. Feynman says his first job was working on an analog computer to help artillery target enemy aircraft\u2014work that centered on tinkering with gears and engineering design, rather than Feynman\u2019s area of expertise, which was theoretical physics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After earning his doctorate, Feynman was recruited into the top-secret Manhattan Project team at Los Alamos, New Mexico, to develop the atomic bomb. In the beginning, he was a low-ranking member of the theoretical physics team whose first assignment was to consult with various engineering groups. When the scientists arrived at Los Alamos, the facilities were still under construction, so the experimental physics group lent a hand while theoreticians such as Feynman started work in whatever space was available. Despite his Ph.D., Feynman recalls that he wasn\u2019t knowledgeable about nuclear physics, and he felt he had a lot of catching up to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Feynman also admits to being a troublemaker, sometimes accidentally and sometimes on purpose<\/strong>. For example, when he was assigned a room in the dormitory for scientists, he decided that he didn\u2019t want a roommate, so he would ruffle the bed and leave some of his wife Arline\u2019s belongings around so that it looked like she was with him, when in fact she was convalescing at a hospital in Albuquerque. Unknown to him at the time, the fact that he was supposedly living with a woman in a men-only dorm went up the chain of command and caused a policy ruckus at the highest level of the project\u2019s management.<\/p>\n\n\n\n However, Feynman claims that the group at Los Alamos he probably irritated the most were those in charge of censoring the mail. He and his wife wrote to each other regularly, but certain topics, details, or even words (such as the fact that the mail was being censored) weren\u2019t allowed in correspondence. Feynman grew so frustrated by this that he and his wife started writing in code, which drove the mail censors crazy. The struggle between Feynman, his wife, and the censors grew to such a contest that he began to place bets on what he would or wouldn\u2019t be able to get past them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After the intense pace and pressure of working on the Manhattan Project, Feynman had to readjust to the life of an ordinary research professor. Feynman describes his difficulties finding his scientific inspiration again as he reentered the academic world. First, he had to learn what it meant to be a teacher before finding the place that would become his academic home and doing the work<\/a> that would earn his Nobel Prize.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Feynman\u2019s first position after leaving Los Alamos was a professorship at Cornell University<\/a>. There, he had to start his life over, having lost his wife and his four-year wartime job. He had a hard time motivating himself to do research, so, instead, he focused on teaching. Feynman says that since he was young and inexperienced, he didn\u2019t appreciate how much energy went into devising lessons and classes. When it came to doing research, he felt like a burned-out fraud, when in fact he was making great strides in honing his teaching skills<\/strong>. It was only when a close friend told him as much that he stopped feeling guilty about not producing the next breakthrough in physics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Feynman recalls having a life-changing inspiration after several universities offered him prestigious research positions that he felt overstated his talents: You\u2019re not responsible for living up to other people\u2019s expectations.<\/strong> Once he accepted that it wasn\u2019t his job to live up to some glorified academic ideal, he gave himself permission to play<\/em>\u2014in other words, to direct his research to questions in physics that he found personally interesting, instead of what might be considered \u201cimportant\u201d by the science community at large. Once he made that shift in his attitude, he found that his work became fun again. Research ideas began to flow once more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Though Feynman\u2019s recollections in his memoir may seem to bounce from topic to topic at random, they all exemplify certain key values that underlie Feynman\u2019s idiosyncratic personality. At Feynman\u2019s core is a deep love of learning<\/strong>, which expresses itself in a variety of ways. We\u2019ll explore how Feynman\u2019s values shaped his approach to problem-solving, teaching, intellectual honesty, and living life to its fullest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When Feynman talks about his life, one trait that stands out is his determination to understand how and why things work<\/strong>. He applied his curiosity to everything in life, not merely his scientific endeavors, and coupled it with a dogged persistence that made him stand out from his peers, often in unusual ways. Feynman\u2019s childhood curiosity led him to pursue an education in math and science, but, as an adult, his curious nature expanded his horizons into fields such as safecracking and artistic expression.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Feynman recalls that as far back as his early teens, he was already tinkering with electronics. For him, it was more like play than formalized science or engineering. He didn\u2019t follow any standard procedures\u2014instead, he fiddled with wires, gears, and bulbs and observed what worked and what didn\u2019t. He bought broken radios and tried to fix them, ran electrical wires all over his home, devised his own burglar alarm system, and almost inadvertently set his house on fire. Every project, both his failures and successes, was accomplished by nonstop trial and error. What Feynman took away from his early years was that persistence is the key to solving problems.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Feynman was so driven to solve problems that in school, he\u2019d invent math puzzles for himself. This pushed him ahead of other students, who\u2019d come to him with problems of their own. Feynman claims to have worked out many of the principles of trigonometry just for kicks and even invented his own form of mathematical notation because he didn\u2019t like the ones used in his textbooks. All of this garnered him a reputation as a budding genius, a label that he frequently downplays, instead attributing his success to perseverance. He also says that by approaching math and science as play<\/em>, he worked out shortcuts to mathematical problems that made him seem smarter than he actually was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One thing Feynman discovered through his childhood exploration was that the world was a more complicated place than the simplified version in his textbooks, and this drove his curiosity further. When in college, he\u2019d carry a toy microscope around campus so he could observe things such as ant behavior. When he took a summer job at a metal-plating company, he worked out chemical processes by trial and error, even though he wasn\u2019t an expert in the field. Even in the case of puzzles where he could have looked up the answer, Feynman says that he didn\u2019t because that would have spoiled the fun. To scratch his curiosity\u2019s itch, he felt compelled to figure things out for himself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While Feynman injected his lifelong learning<\/a> with a casual sense of fun and exploration, one thing he took very seriously was his role as a teacher. <\/em>Feynman explains that teaching serves two vital functions in his life: It keeps him engaged with the underlying principles of his field, and it allows him to make a positive contribution to the world. In his memoir, he describes the personal benefits he derives from teaching and highlights two specific examples where his beliefs on the subject clashed with those of others, once in Brazil and once in California.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Feynman is insistent that he\u2019d never consider working in a nonteaching position. From a purely personal perspective, it forces him to review and reassess everything he assumes that he knows about the field of physics. He finds that the process of teaching those ideas will occasionally lead to questioning them and finding new approaches to problems and theories that wouldn\u2019t have occurred to him otherwise. Teaching also keeps his mind active on those occasions when he doesn\u2019t have a pressing theoretical problem to solve. In other words, teaching is good for the mind, as much for the instructor as it is for the students<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n During a sabbatical year in Brazil in which Feynman taught science to prospective science teachers, he came across a peculiar phenomenon. His students appeared to have learned many scientific facts without understanding anything about them. When he pushed them to apply their knowledge through practical exercises, they couldn\u2019t. He discovered that previously, his students had learned by rote memorization<\/a> in order to pass a standardized test. Feynman recalls being horrified that this was how future teachers were trained, and he said so during a lecture he gave to the Brazilian teaching establishment. He explained that passing tests isn\u2019t the point of education. Without practical application, there can be no learning.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n This truth came home for Feynman years later when he served on a California state committee responsible for selecting math and science textbooks. This was during a time when the US was trying to catch up with the Russians post-Sputnik by emphasizing science and math. When Feynman actually read the texts under review, he was shocked to find that the books\u2019 authors apparently didn\u2019t understand their own subjects. The books also tended to be full of abstract concepts without applications that students could try on their own. Feynman insisted the textbooks he reviewed would do students a disservice and discourage learning instead of providing a real-world foundation for knowledge that would serve students later in life. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It was all for naught. Budget cuts to California\u2019s Board of Education put the program on a back burner and severely restricted the number and quality of textbooks Feynman\u2019s committee could recommend. When asked to do the same for science textbooks the following year, Feynman declined to participate any further.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Feynman believes that teaching math and science is especially important in the modern age, and not just because of technological advances. He argues that understanding math and science requires a level of intellectual honesty that other fields lack.<\/strong> Feynman\u2019s experience in the scientific world shines a light on the value of questioning others, questioning yourself, and having the integrity to admit when you\u2019re wrong<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\nOverview of Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The Life of Richard Feynman<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
The Manhattan Project<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Back to Academia<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Richard Feynman\u2019s Values<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Curiosity and Persistence<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
The Importance of Teaching<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Scientific Rigor<\/h4>\n\n\n\n