Passages I highlighted in my copy of “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”

I recently started taking the subway regularly and soon ran into the problem that Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons, which currently constitutes my main reading material, is simply too dense to follow on my morning commute. This prompted the need to find something that is easier to understand and more story driven. And now you know the exciting story how I started reading “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”

The book is a collection of stories that follow Mr. Feynman through his life.

I often liked to play tricks on people when I was at MIT. One time, in mechanical drawing class, some joker picked up a French curve (a piece of plastic for drawing smooth curves – curly, funny-looking thing) and said, “I wonder if the curves on this thing have some special formula?”
I thought for a moment and said, “Sure, they do. The curves are very special curves. Lemme show ya,” and I picked my French curve and began to turn it slowly. “The French curve is made so that the lowest point on each curve, no matter how you turn it, the tangent is horizontal.” All the guys in the class were holding their French curve up at different angles, holding their pencil up to it at the lowest point and laying it along, and discovering that, sure enough, the tangent is horizontal. They were all excited by this “discovery” – even though they had already gone through a certain amount of calculus and had already “learned” that the derivative (tangent) of the minimum (lowest point) of any curve is zero (horizontal). They didn’t put two and two together. They didn’t even know what they “knew.”
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! I did the same kind of trick four years later in Princeton when I was talking with an experienced character, an assistant of Einstein, who was surely working with gravity all the time. I gave him a problem: You blast off in a rocket which has a clock on board, and there’s a clock on the ground. The idea is that you have to be back when you come back, your clock will go faster, because the higher something is in a gravitational field, the faster its clock goes. But if you try to go to high, since you’ve only got an hour, you have to go so fast to get there that the speed slows your clock down. So you can’t go too high. The question is exactly what program of speed and height should you make so that you get the maximum time on your clock?
The assistant of Einstein worked on it for quite a bit before he realized that the answer is the real motion of matter. If you shoot something up in a normal way, so that the time it takes the shell to go up and come down is an hour, that’s the correct motion. It’s the fundamental principle of Einstein’s gravity – that is what’s called the “proper time” is at a maximum for the actual curve. But when I put it to him, about a rocket with a clock, he didn’t recognize it. It was just like the guys in mechanical drawing class, but this time it wasn’t dumb freshmen. So this kind of fragility is, in fact, fairly common, even with more learned people.

Feynman on whether you should stay at one university or switch around:

So MIT was good, but Slater was right to warn me to go to another school for my graduate work. And I often advise my students the same way. Learn what the rest of the world is like. The variety is worthwhile.

Feynman on being hypnotized

He started to work on me and soon I got into a position where he said, “You can’t open your eyes.”
I said to myself, “I bet I could open my eyes, but I don’t want to disturb the situation: Let’s see how much further it goes.” It was an interesting situation: You’re only slightly fogged out, and although you’ve lost it a little bit, you’re pretty sure could open your eyes. But of course, you’re not opening your eyes, so in a sense you can’t do it.
He went through a lot of stuff and decided that I was pretty good.
When the real demonstration came he had us walk on stage, and he hypnotized us in front of the whole Princeton Graduate College. This time the effect was stronger; I guess I had learned how to become hypnotized. The hypnotist made various demonstrations, having me do things that I couldn’t normally do, and at the end he said that after I came out of hypnosis, instead of returning to my seat directly, which was the natural way to go, I would walk all the way around the room and go to my seat from the back.
All through the demonstrations I was vaguely aware of what was going on, and cooperating with the things the hypnotist said, but this time I decided, “Damn it, enough is enough! I’m gonna go straight to my seat.”
When it was time to go get up and go off the stage, I started to walk straight to my seat. But then an annoying feeling came over me: I felt so uncomfortable that I couldn’t continue. I walked all the way around the hall.
I was hypnotized in another situation some time later by a woman. While I was hypnotized she said, “I’m going to light a match, blow it out, and immediately touch the back of your hand with it. You will feel no pain.”
I thought, “Baloney!” She took a match lit it, blew it out, and touched it to the back of my hand. It felt slightly warm. My eyes were closed through all of this, but I was thinking, “That’s easy. She lit one match, but touched a different match to my hand. There’s nothing to that; it’s a fake!”
When I came out of the hypnosis and looked at the back of my hand, I got the biggest surprise. There was a burn on the back of my hand. Soon, a blister grew, and it never hurt at all, even when it broke.
So I found hypnosis to be a very interesting experience. All the time you’re saying to yourself, “I could do that, but I won’t” – which is just another way of saying that you can’t.

I always doubted whether hypnosis was real, this shifted my opinion significantly.

Feynman on masculinity

The reason why I say I’m “uncultured” or “anti-intellectual” probably goes all the way back to the time when I was in high school. I was always worried about being a sissy; I didn’t want to be too delicate. To me, no real man ever paid any attention to poetry and such things. How poetry ever got written—that never struck me! So I developed a negative attitude toward the guy who studies French literature, or studies too much music or poetry—all those “fancy” things. I admired better the steelworker, the welder, or the machine shop man. I always thought the guy who worked in the machine shop and could make things, now he was a real guy! That was my attitude. 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, of course, but the second was crazy.

On understanding things:

I have a scheme, which I still use today when somebody is explaining something that I’m trying to understand: I keep making up examples. For instance, the mathematicians would come in with a terrific theorem, and they’re all excited. As they’re telling me the conditions of the theorem, I construct something which fits all the conditions. You know, you have a set (one ball) – disjoint (two balls). Then the balls turn colors, grow hairs, or whatever, in my head as they put more conditions on. Finally they state the theorem, which is some dumb thing about the ball which isn’t ture for my hairy green ball thing, so I say, “False!”
>If it’s true, they get all excited, and I let them go on for a while. Then I point out my counterexample.
“Oh. We forgot to tell you that it’s Class 2 Hausdorff homomorphic.”
“Well, then”, I say, “It’s trivial! It’s trivial!” By that time I know which way it goes, even though I don’t know what Hausdorff homomorphic means.

On ants:

In my room at Princeton I had a bay window with a U-shaped windowsill. One day some ants came out on the windowsill and wandered around a little bit. I got curious as to how they found things. I wondered, how do they know where to go? Can they tell each other where food is, like bees can? Do they have any sense of geometry?
This is all amateurish; everybody knows the answer, but I didn’t know the answer, so the first thing I did was to stretch some string across the U of the bay window and hang a piece of folded cardboard with sugar on it from the string. The idea of this was to isolate the sugar from the ants, so they wouldn’t find it accidentally. I wanted to have everything under control.
Next I made a lot of little strips of paper and put a fold in them, so I could pick up ants and ferry them from one place to another. I put the folded strips of paper in two places: Some were by the sugar (hanging from the string), and the others were near the ants in a particular location. I sat there all afternoon, reading and watching, until an ant happened to walk onto one of my little paper ferries. Then I took him over to the sugar. After a few ants had been ferried over to the sugar, one of them accidentally walked onto one of the ferries nearby, and I carried him back.
I wanted to see how long it would take the other ants to get the message to go to the “ferry terminal.” It started slowly, but rapidly increased until I was going mad ferrying the ants back and forth.
But suddenly, when everything was going strong, I began to deliver the ants from the sugar to a different spot. The question now was, does the ant learn to go back to where it just came from, or does it go where it went the time before?
After a while there were practically no ants going to the first place (which would take them to the sugar), whereas there were many ants at the second place, milling around, trying to find sugar. So I figured that they went where they just came from.

On meeting John Von Neumann:

Then there was John Von Neumann, the great mathematician. We used to go for walk on Sunday. We’d walk in the canyons, often with Bethe and Bob Bacher. It was a great pleasure. And Von Neumann gave me an interesting idea: that you don’t have to be responsible for the world that you’re in. So I have developed a very powerful sense of social irresponsibility as a result of Von Neumann’s advice. It’s made me a very happy man ever since. But it was Von Neumann who put the seed that grew into my active irresponsibility.

I am sure that not caring about others made Von Neumann happy, but what about the other people (who he does not care about)? I strongly disagree here.

On interacting with his students:

The questions of the students are often the source of new research. They often ask profound questions that I’ve throught 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.

I wonder if this no longer happens or this is a feature of the hard sciences. During my studies, I always had the feeling that the topics presented in the lecture were established knowledge and the actual research was so far removed from there, that you couldn’t meaningfully contribute my asking questions.

On the Manhattan Project:

Cornell told me that I would be teaching a course in mathematical methods of physics, and they told me what day I should come – November 6, I think, but it sounds funny that it could be so late in the year. I took the train from Los Alamos [where the atomic bomb was developed] to Ithaca, and spend most of my time writing final reports for the Manhattan Project. I still remember that it was on the night train from Buffalo to Ithaca that I began to work on my course.
>You have to understand the pressures at Los Alamos. You did everything as fast as you could everybody worked very, very hard; and everything was finished at the last minute. So, working out my course on the train a day or two before the first lecture seemed natural to me.

On his enjoyment of physics:

Then I had another thought: Physics disgusts me a little bit now, but I used to enjoy doing physics. Why did I enjoy it? I used to play with it. I used to do whatever I felt like doing—it didn’t have to do with whether it was important for the development of nuclear physics, but whether it was interesting and amusing for me to play with. When I was in high school, I’d see water running out of a faucet growing narrower, and wonder if I could figure out what determines that curve. I found it was rather easy to do. I didn’t have to do it; it wasn’t important for the future of science; somebody else had already done it. That didn’t make any difference: I’d invent things and play with things for my own entertainment.
So I got this new attitude. Now that I am burned out and I’ll never accomplish anything, I’ve got this nice position at the university teaching classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the Arabian Nights for pleasure, I’m going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.
Within a week I was in the cafeteria and some guy, fooling around, throws a plate in the air. As the plate went up in the air I saw it wobble, and I noticed the red medallion of Cornell on the plate going around. It was pretty obvious to me that the medallion went around faster than the wobbling.
I had nothing to do, so I start to figure out the motion of the rotating plate. I discover that when the angle is very slight, the medallion rotates twice as fast as the wobble rate—two to one. It came out of a complicated equation! Then I thought, “Is there some way I can see in a more fundamental way, by looking at the forces or the dynamics, why it’s two to one?”
I don’t remember how I did it, but I ultimately worked out what the motion of the mass particles is, and how all the accelerations balance to make it come out two to one.
I still remember going to Hans Bethe and saying, “Hey, Hans! I noticed something interesting. Here the plate goes around so, and the reason it’s two to one is…” and I showed him the accelerations.
He says, “Feynman, that’s pretty interesting, but what’s the importance of it? Why are you doing it?”
“Hah!” I say. “There’s no importance whatsoever. I’m just doing it for the fun of it.” His reaction didn’t discourage me; I had made up my mind I was going to enjoy physics and do whatever I liked.
I went on to work out equations of wobbles. Then I thought about how electron orbits start to move in relativity. Then there’s the Dirac Equation in electrodynamics. And then quantum electrodynamics. And before I knew it (it was a very short time) I was “playing”—working, really—with the same old problem that I loved so much, that I had stopped working on when I went to Los Alamos: my thesis-type problems; all those old-fashioned, wonderful things.
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.

On alcoholism:

The people from the airlines [who lived at the same hotel as Feynman] were somwhat bored with their lives, strangely enough, and at night they would often go to bars to drink I liked them all, and in order to be sociable, I would go with them to the bar to have a few drinks, several nights a week.
One day, about 3:30 in the afternoon, I was walking along the sidewalk opposite the beach at Copacabana past a abar. I suddenly got this tremendous, strong feeling: “That’s just what I want; that’ll fit just right. I’d love to have drink right now!”
I started to walk into the bar, and I suddenly thought to myself, “Wait a minute! It’s the middle of the afternoon. There’s nobody here. There’s no social reason to drink. Why do you have such a terribly strong feeling that you have to have a drink?”—and I got scared.
I never drank ever again, since then. I suppose I really wasn’t in any danger, because I found it very easy to stop. But that strong feeling that I didn’t understand frightened me. You see, I get such fun out of thinking that I don’t want to destroy this most pleasant machine that makes life such a big kick. It’s the same reason that, later on, I was reluctant to try experiments with LSD in spite of my curiosity about hallucinations.