January 29, 2019

📚 Book Notes: Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!

Here are my notes from Surely you’re Joking Mr Feynman: Adventures of a Curious Character:

1. Learn what the rest of the world is like. The variety is worthwhile.

2. When it came time for me to give my talk on the subject, I started off by drawing an outline of the cat and began to name the various muscles.
   The other students in the class interrupt me: “We know all that!”
   “Oh,” I say, “you do? Then no wonder I can catch up with you so fast after you’ve had four years of biology.” They had wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes.

3. But that was my big moment: I gave a seminar in the biology department of Harvard! I always do that, get into something and see how far I can go.

4. I decided that was too hard for me and went back to Princeton.

5. I don’t believe I can really do without teaching. The reason is, I have to have something so that when I don’t have any ideas and I’m not getting anywhere I can say to myself, “At least I’m living; at least I’m doing something; I’m making some contribution” — it’s just psychological.

6. “You know, you’re never going to draw again.”
   “What? That’s ridiculous! Why should I never…”
   “Because you’ve had a one-man show, and you’re only an amateur.”

7. When you’re young, you have all these things to worry about — should you go there, what about your mother. And you worry, and try to decide, but then something else comes up. It’s much easier to just plain decide. Never mind — nothing is going to change your mind. I did that once when I was a student at MIT. I got sick and tired of having to decide what kind of dessert I was going to have at the restaurant, so I decided it would always be chocolate ice cream, and never worried about it again — I had the solution to that problem. Anyway, I decided it would always be Caltech.

8. This question of trying to figure out whether a book is good or bad by looking at it carefully or by taking the reports of a lot of people who looked at it carelessly is like this famous old problem: Nobody was permitted to see the Emperor of China, and the question was, What is the length of the Emperor of China’s nose? To find out, you go all over the country asking people what they think the length of the Emperor of China’s nose is, and you average it. And that would be very “accurate” because you averaged so many people. But it’s no way to find anything out; when you have a very wide range of people who contribute without looking carefully at it, you don’t improve your knowledge of the situation by averaging.

9. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.

10. So I have just one wish for you — the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where you do not feel heed by a need to maintain your position In the organization, or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity. May you have that freedom.

If you liked the above content, I’d definitely recommend reading the whole book. 💯

Until We Meet Again…
🖖 swap