# "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"  ## Metadata - Author: [[Richard P. Feynman, Ralph Leighton, Edward Hutchings, and Albert R. Hibbs]] - Full Title: "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" - Category: #books ## Highlights - I finally fixed it because I had, and still have, persistence. Once I get on a puzzle, I can’t get off. If my mother’s friend had said, “Never mind, it’s too much work,” I’d have blown my top, because I want to beat this damn thing, as long as I’ve gone this far. I can’t just leave it after I’ve found out so much about it. I have to keep going to find out ultimately what is the matter with it in the end. ([Location 219](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003V1WXKU&location=219)) - Tags: [[blue]] - One thing was for sure: It was practically impossible to do the problem in any conventional, straightforward way, like putting “A is the number of red books, B is the number of blue books,” grind, grind, grind, until you get “six books.” That would take you fifty seconds, because the people who set up the timings on these problems had made them all a trifle short. So you had to think, “Is there a way to see it?” Sometimes you could see it in a flash, and sometimes you’d have to invent another way to do it and then do the algebra as fast as you could. It was wonderful practice, and I got better and better, and I eventually got to be the head of the team. So I learned to do algebra very quickly, and it came in handy in college. When we had a problem in calculus, I was very quick to see where it was going and to do the algebra—fast. ([Location 245](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003V1WXKU&location=245)) - Tags: [[blue]] - 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! ([Location 462](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003V1WXKU&location=462)) - Tags: [[blue]] - So I prepared the talk, and when the day came, I went in and did something that young men who have had no experience in giving talks often do—I put too many equations up on the blackboard. You see, a young fella doesn’t know how to say, “Of course, that varies inversely, and this goes this way…” because everybody listening already knows; they can see it. But he doesn’t know. He can only make it come out by actually doing the algebra—and therefore the reams of equations. ([Location 1099](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003V1WXKU&location=1099)) - Tags: [[blue]] - the experimental physicists had nothing to do until their buildings and apparatus were ready, so they just built the buildings—or assisted in building the buildings. ([Location 1549](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003V1WXKU&location=1549)) - Tags: [[blue]] - 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. When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves, OK? So they don’t get an idea for a while: They have every opportunity to do something, and they’re not getting any ideas. I believe that in a situation like this a kind of guilt or depression worms inside of you, and you begin to worry about not getting any ideas. And nothing happens. Still no ideas come. Nothing happens because there’s not enough real activity and challenge: You’re not in contact with the experimental guys. You don’t have to think how to answer questions from the students. Nothing! ([Location 2403](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003V1WXKU&location=2403)) - Tags: [[blue]] - 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. It wouldn’t do me any harm to think about them again and see if I can go any further now. The students may not be able to see the thing I want to answer, or the subtleties I want to think about, but they remind me of a problem by asking questions in the neighborhood of that problem. It’s not so easy to remind yourself of these things. ([Location 2419](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003V1WXKU&location=2419)) - Tags: [[blue]] - It was a brilliant idea: You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It’s their mistake, not my failing. ([Location 2526](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003V1WXKU&location=2526)) - Tags: [[blue]] - It wasn’t a failure on my part that the Institute for Advanced Study expected me to be that good; it was impossible. It was clearly a mistake—and the moment I appreciated the possibility that they might be wrong, I realized that it was also true of all the other places, including my own university. I am what I am, and if they expected me to be good and they’re offering me some money for it, it’s their hard luck. ([Location 2528](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003V1WXKU&location=2528)) - Tags: [[blue]] - It was effortless. It was easy to play with these things. It was like uncorking a bottle: Everything flowed out effortlessly. I almost tried to resist it! There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate. ([Location 2556](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003V1WXKU&location=2556)) - Tags: [[blue]] - He thinks I’m following the steps mathematically, but that’s not what I’m doing. I have the 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!” ([Location 3642](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003V1WXKU&location=3642)) - Tags: [[blue]] - when I became interested in beta decay, directly, I read all these reports by the “beta-decay experts,” which said it’s T. I never looked at the original data; I only read those reports, like a dope. Had I been a good physicist, when I thought of the original idea back at the Rochester Conference I would have immediately looked up “how strong do we know it’s T?”—that would have been the sensible thing to do. I would have recognized right away that I had already noticed it wasn’t satisfactorily proved. ([Location 3797](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003V1WXKU&location=3797)) - Tags: [[blue]] - DURING the Middle Ages there were all kinds of crazy ideas, such as that a piece of rhinoceros horn would increase potency. Then a method was discovered for separating the ideas—which was to try one to see if it worked, and if it didn’t work, to eliminate it. This method became organized, of course, into science. And it developed very well, so that we are now in the scientific age. It is such a scientific age, in fact, that we have difficulty in understanding how witch doctors could ever have existed, when nothing that they proposed ever really worked—or very little of it did. But even today I meet lots of people who sooner or later get me into a conversation about UFOs, or astrology, or some form of mysticism, expanded consciousness, new types of awareness, ESP, and so forth. And I’ve concluded that it’s not a scientific world. ([Location 5051](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003V1WXKU&location=5051)) - Tags: [[blue]] - 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. ([Location 5129](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003V1WXKU&location=5129)) - Tags: [[blue]]