Science & ideas

"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"

Richard P. Feynman

A Nobel physicist's stories of fixing radios, opening safes and teaching, and what they show about curiosity and honest thinking

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  • 12 key ideas
  • Text
  • Published 1985

Introduction

Richard Feynman, one of the leading physicists of the twentieth century and a winner of the Nobel Prize, tells stories from his life as he told them over many years to his friend Ralph Leighton. The book is not an argument but a collection of adventures: fixing radios as a boy, an awkward first tea at Princeton, opening safes and arguing with censors while working on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, teaching in Brazil, and finding a new law of nature. What ties them together is his way of thinking: curiosity about everything, refusal to accept an answer he has not checked himself, and a strong dislike of pretense.

The book has five parts, from his childhood in Far Rockaway and his student years at MIT, through Princeton, the war years, Cornell, Brazil and Caltech, to the world of a famous physicist. This summary chooses the stories that show what he learned about thinking and about science, in the order of the book's parts, and ends with his talk on “Cargo Cult Science”. It follows the 1985 text.

  1. 1Feynman says that as a boy he learned to fix radios by thinking before acting, driven by a puzzle drive that never let a problem go
  2. 2Feynman argues that knowledge learned by rote is fragile, and that real understanding comes from working things out for yourself
  3. 3Feynman says that moving to Princeton, from an awkward first tea to a messy basement lab, taught him the value of seeing how the rest of the world works
  4. 4Feynman shows that a different set of tools and a habit of making up examples let him solve problems that stumped others
  5. 5Feynman's experiments with ants show curiosity at work in everyday life, and his time in biology shows what careless amateur work costs
  6. 6At Los Alamos, Feynman says, plain talk about physics, whatever the other person's rank, made a young unknown useful to the greatest physicists
  7. 7Feynman found that people work better, and more safely, when they are told what their work is for
  8. 8Feynman's games with censors and safes show that security can look strong and be weak, and that people may blame the messenger instead of fixing the habit
  9. 9Feynman says he escaped burnout by dropping other people's expectations and playing with physics again, and the play led to his Nobel work
  10. 10In Brazil Feynman found students who had memorized everything and understood nothing, and he said so in public
  11. 11Feynman learned to check things himself rather than trust experts' reports or averaged opinions, both in finding a new law and in judging schoolbooks
  12. 12Feynman's 1974 Caltech graduation talk argues that research without complete honesty is “cargo cult science”, with the outward form of science but not its substance

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"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": summary | Daridanesh