Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard Feynman - Book Review & Highlights
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Table of contents
đ The Book in 3 Sentences
- Rote memorization is not learning. You have to understand concepts to learn.
- Nothing is fun when you only do it because youâre required to. Play with the subjects you love, donât just âdoâ them.
- You donât have to have a purpose for everything you do. Sometimes, itâs just enough to do things because you merely enjoy it.
đ¨ Impressions
A professor recommended this book to me. He said it was an autobiography of Feynmanâs, and it was pretty interesting. I didnât fully believe him but still read the book to see how a Nobel Prize-winning physicist thinks.
Oh boy was he right. I havenât read many autobiographies, but Iâd imagine this one is one of the funniest and most entertaining autobiographies. A lot of the content isnât hard to understandâFeynman makes it fairly easy for the general public to appreciate his stories. Although a couple of the middle chapters are convoluted, it doesnât take much away from the storytelling itself.
Feynman is an incredible mind and storyteller. I think the combination of his inquisitive nature with his frivolity makes the book an amusing read. You just have to read the book. Itâs hard to describe it.
Before reading the book, I read a negative review on Goodreads saying something along the lines of, âFeynman is funny, but his stories are very condescending.â I think, in general, itâs hard for people like Feynman not to be condescending just by nature. When people are extraordinarily gifted in their field, itâs hard not to come across as patronizing.
Star Rating
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Who Should Read It?
If youâre someone that enjoys mischievous stories about seemingly random objects/events, youâll like this book. If youâre interested in how Nobel Prize-winning scientists think, youâll like this book too.
âď¸ How the Book Changed Me
- Iâve been convinced that autobiographies can be just as entertaining as other nonfiction categories.
- The book reminded me to treat everything as a game and to have fun, even with complex topics.
- Feynman indirectly sheds light on how âgeniusesâ arenât necessarily born âbetterâ than everyone else. Rather, they fiddle with their beloved subjects more than anyone else does.
- Feynman reminded me that learning takes effort. Knowing facts about a particular topic doesnât constitute learning when you donât understand why those facts are true.
âď¸ My Top 3 Quotes
- 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. Itâs their mistake, not my failing.
- So I got this new attitude. Now that I am burned out and Iâll never accomplish anything, Iâve got this nice position at the university teaching classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the Arabian Nights for pleasure, Iâm going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.
- I feel that human beings should treat human beings like human beings.
đ Highlights
Here are a couple of important stories and lessons from Feynman:
Feynman would mess around with his roommates and fraternity a lot. At MIT, they got into âan argument as to whether urine just ran out of you by gravity, and [Feynman] had to demonstrate that that wasnât the case by showing them that you can pee standing on your head.â I think itâs rather funny that Feynman stood on his head instead of just pointing it upwards.
Feynman was at some dining hall or lounge area, and the physicists were near the mathematicians. The physicists âdecided that âtrivialâ means âproved.ââ This seems particularly true. If you look at many high school âmathematiciansâ who talk about AMC/AIME problems, theyâll call them trivial just because they know how to do them. I guess math is just a discovery of whatâs known but unproven.
When Feynman was in pre-college school (I donât remember if it was elementary, middle, or high school), his math teacher gave him a calculus textbook because he knew everything in class. So, he learned calculus through that. Later, when he was at MIT/Princeton, he helped some students integrate through a technique that he learned in the textbook, but they hadnât learned. I think this exemplifies how the âtrivializationâ of a problem often just takes a change in perspective.
This is just a random quote, but Feynman said, âHe was doing what I was supposed to be good at, ten times better. That was quite a lesson to me.â It reminds us that we all need to be humble about our accomplishments.
Feynman was burnt out with physics at some point in his career. He wasnât doing things for fun, but rather because he had to teach with his professorship. He realized he had stopped playing with physics and was just working on it. So, he decided to play with it, spun something in the air, observed it, and made some equations to describe the objectâs rotational motion. Ironically, that served as inspiration for his Nobel Prize-winning discovery. The lesson: play, play, play.
âI learned from her that every woman is worried about her looks, no matter how beautiful she is.â Itâs a good reminder that no matter what our âdream bodyâ is, weâll never be satisfied. So, we might as well love what weâre given.
At the end of the book, Feynman describes how our society is plagued with cargo cult science. Essentially, every researcherâs job is to delineate not only their hypothesis and its degree of truth and potential errors and competing theories. Science is a method of discovering the truth. Trying to hide problems or approaches that could disprove your theory because of your ego isnât needed in science.
