Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“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 up to me with a puzzle in geometry […] I wouldn’t stop until I figured the damn thing out.”

Feynman foreshadows anecdotes he will recount later by describing his interest in puzzles even in his youth. Feynman finds pleasure in working logically on puzzles and problems until he finds satisfactory solutions.

“Another thing I did in high school was to invent problems and theorems. I mean, if I were doing any mathematical thing at all, I would find some practical example for which it would be useful.”

Feynman frequently emphasizes concrete examples in his thinking and attributes this habit to how he learned to learn as a young man. He demonstrates his practice of connecting practical examples and abstract theorems.

“I learned there that innovation is a very difficult thing in the real world.”

Working at his aunt’s hotel, Feynman invents a system for more quickly slicing green beans and another for answering the telephone switchboard. Though initially proud of the results, the first invention cuts him and the second is inexplicable to other people. What appear to be good ideas are sometimes failures, especially if they cannot be understood by others.

“I was not very good socially. I was so timid that when I had to take the mail out and walk past some seniors sitting on the steps with some girls, I was petrified.”

As a freshman at MIT, Feynman notes his social anxieties, especially as they impact his relationship with women. The socially awkward genius is a stereotype that Feynman often uses in the memoir to describe himself.

“I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding; they learn by some other way – by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!”

Understanding, to Feynman, implies grasping a concept so it can be used and manipulated in new ways. Being able to repeat what one has read or been told is not true understanding. He critiques educational systems in the US and abroad for teaching without cultivating understanding.

“People often think I’m a faker, but usually I’m honest, in a certain way – in such a way that often nobody believes me!”

Playing pranks is one way Feynman indulges his sense of play and his puzzle drive. He does not play tricks to humiliate others, but his jokes often lead people to see him as somewhat dishonest. This disconnection between perception and reality pleases Feynman even more. People think he is joking when he is serious and vice versa.

“Now Princeton had a certain aspect of elegance. It was an imitation of an English school, partly.”

The Ivy League institution looks glamorous, but the glamor is fake. What appears polished and proper is a reproduction rather than something authentic in its own right. This feature of Princeton offers a contrast with the way Feynman believes others perceive him.

“I had no social abilities whatsoever.”

Feynman recurringly exaggerates his lack of social skills. What he calls a lack of social abilities is a mark of social eccentricity that mirrors his intellectual difference. Playing the role of the awkward genius or the absentminded professor is a way of finding a social niche into which to fit.

“They had wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes.”

Feynman expresses his frustration at highly educated people who waste their time learning details that are available to anyone at a glance instead of gaining a broader, more comprehensive understanding of the problems. Feynman is both amazed and dismayed that he can so quickly become “advanced” in the study of biology just by teaching himself.

“What bothered me was, I thought he must have done the calculation. I only realized later that a man like Wheeler could immediately see all that stuff when you gave him the problem. I had to calculate, but he could see.”

John Wheeler has the intellectual ability and experience to understand complex problems without working through all the details. Wheeler grasps the “big picture” while Feynman must immerse himself in the specifics to make a judgment.

“To be a practical man was, to me, always somehow a positive virtue, and to be ‘cultured’ or ‘intellectual’ was not. The first was right, but the second was crazy.”

Feynman admires practical people so much that he developed an aversion to theory. Abstract things seem less valuable to him at early points in his life than practical things. He admits that he was incorrect in his prejudice, which is probably a beneficial change in his thinking that helps him win a Nobel Prize for abstract theories in quantum electrodynamics.

“Because I was self-taught using that book, I had a peculiar method of doing integrals […] So I got a great reputation for doing integrals, only because my box of tools was different from everybody else’s.”

For Feynman, being an autodidact has the advantage of offering fresh perspectives on common problems. Not having learned math concepts the same way everyone else makes Feynman something of an oddball but a highly useful one. He suggests that his math knowledge might be deeper than that of his peers because he has not been trapped by an inadequate pedagogy.

“The trouble with playing a trick on a highly intelligent man like Mr. Teller is that the time it takes him to figure out from the moment he sees there is something wrong till he understands exactly what happened is too damn small to give you any pleasure.”

Even great intellects like the father of the hydrogen bomb can be fooled, but they catch on quickly. They are adept at distinguishing between appearance and reality. Playing games of wits is very satisfying for Feynman, but much less so when a person can see through his ruse quickly.

“Von Neumann gave me an interesting idea: that you don’t have to be responsible for the world you’re in. So I have developed a very powerful sense of social irresponsibility as a result of Von Neumann’s advice.”

Working on the first atomic bomb, scientists faced both a practical challenge (to create a device the world has never seen before) and an ethical one (the consequences of inventing and using it). Because scientific advances can be put to unethical use, scientists could become paralyzed by the moral consequences of their work. Developing a lack of social responsibility was a way for Feynman to move forward.

“It was complete luck! Now I really had a reputation for opening safes.”

What Feynman calls “complete luck” is the result of methodical experimentation. He never opened a safe on the first try but spent time testing methods of breaking into them. In this instance, he came across the right number at an opportune time, but it was an educated guess. He seems to claim he is a fake, but he is a genuine safecracker and his reputation is deserved.

“The questions of the students are often the source of new research. They often ask profound questions that I’ve thought about at times and then given up on, so to speak, for a while.”

Teaching satisfies Feynman because it brings him back to the premises of physics and surrounds him with curious young minds—curiosity being a prerequisite for good research. Teaching can benefit both the teacher and the student.

“I kept working on it, but I always felt inferior, that I was some kind of trouble, and wasn’t really up to it.”

Speaking here about his musical ability, Feynman emphasized both the value of practice and his sense of inferiority that often colors his social and intellectual life. No matter how smart or talented others perceive him to be, his perfectionism leaves him unsure of himself.

“I can’t remember how we got started, but his idea was that I presumably worked for a living, and it really was quite a silly thing to do that.”

Feynman wants making a living to be pleasurable. Curiosity, wonder, and play fuel his drive to teach and research. A life without these qualities is absurd to him.

“He thinks I’m following the steps mathematically, but that’s not what I’m doing. I have a specific, physical example of what he’s trying to analyze, and I know from instinct and experience the properties of the thing. So when the equation says it should behave so and so, and I know that’s the wrong way around, I jump up and say, ‘Wait! There’s a mistake.’”

A colleague misunderstands the way Feynman solves problems. Feynman still relies on specific examples as the basis for his thinking. However, he also has learned to work from a broad picture toward the details, making him more like the “big minds” he admired as a younger man.

“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.’”

Feynman’s sister points out that he processes information in a specific way. Understanding is a process, and different learners have different processes that they must follow to be successful. Feynman finds that he must solve problems in his way to achieve understanding.

“It’s an appreciation of the mathematical beauty of nature, of how she works inside; a realization that the phenomena we see result from the complexity of the inner workings between atoms; a feeling of awe – of scientific awe – which I felt could be communicated through a drawing to someone who had also had this emotion. I could remind him, for a moment, of this feeling about the glories of the universe.”

Feynman appears to be talking about the reasons he wants to learn to draw. However, his focus on scientific awe also points out something else: Feynman was famous for his diagrams, called “Feynman diagrams,” which illustrate how atomic particles interact. These diagrams are part of what earned him a Nobel Prize. Moreover, much of the fun and wonder he experiences in science stems from the beauty he finds in nature.

“There were a lot of fools at that conference—pompous fools—and pompous fools drive me up the wall. Ordinary fools are all right; you can talk to them, and try to help them out. But pompous fools—guys who are fools and covering it all over and impressing people as to how wonderful they are with all this hocus pocus—THAT I CANNOT STAND! An ordinary fool isn’t a faker; an honest fool is all right. But a dishonest fool is terrible!”

Feynman believes that genuine thinkers try to share their ideas as clearly as possible. Ordinary fools might have mistaken ideas, but they are open to reason and changing their minds. Pompous fools, by contrast, are mistaken but believe they are certain; they share their ideas to boost their egos and reputations. Genuine thinkers, who might also sometimes be honest fools, are consistent recipients of Feynman’s admiration.

“Everything was written by somebody who didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, so it was a little bit wrong, always! And how we are going to teach well by using books written by people who don’t quite understand what they’re talking about, I cannot understand. I don’t know why, but the books are lousy; UNIVERSALLY LOUSY!”

Feynman despairs over the quality of textbooks. They seem to be written by people with little expertise—fakers who are more interested in rote learning than real understanding. Even worse, he finds himself to be one of the few people who cares.