Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. Of course, you only live one life, and you make all your mistakes, and learn what not to do, and that's the end of you.

I can usually tell when I’m going to give a book 5 stars by one sign: I can’t shut up about it. Well, I couldn’t and can’t shut up about this book; it was simply great. This greatness sort of snuck up on me. I’d recently read a collection of anecdotes by a scientist (A Primate’s Memoir) and found it rather disappointing. Plus, the whole idea of reading a book of stories about a great physicist, without learning any actual physics, seemed silly. But my skepticism had withered away by the end of the first chapter; I was entranced by the man, absolutely fascinated, and remained so the whole time.

The subtitle of this book is perfect, because the two meanings of the word “curious� converge to encapsulate Feynman: he was curious in the sense of being odd, as well as curious in his love of learning. I was trying to figure out a way to describe Feynman’s personality, and this is the best I’ve come up with: Feynman is Huck Finn grown up to become a physicist. The qualities that make Mark Twain’s most famous character so endearing are also the qualities that endear Feynman to me: mischievousness, curiosity, cleverness, honesty, naiveté, friendliness, frankness, and an uncompromising moral principle. Like Huck, Feynman is always getting himself into absurd situations, and getting out of them with pure quickness of mind; like Huck, Feynman likes to fool other people and play tricks, but all without a hint of malice; and like Huck, Feynman will stick his neck out for what he feels is right.

There are some hilarious stories in here, which I won’t spoil. But what was more impressive to me was the amount of serious thought that could be found. Feynman’s criticism of the Brazilian school system—which relied overmuch on memorization by rote, and concentrated overmuch on passing tests, instead of teaching students how to make sense of the world around them—applies equally well to many aspects of the current U.S. school system. Equally relevant was Feynman’s chapter on the time he served on the board that oversaw the evaluation of math textbooks for the California school system; it was a Kafkaesque farce. But by far the most consistent intellectual theme that went through these reflections was an absolute distrust of pretension, reputation, convention, snobbery, prestige, and authority.

In my own life, one of the most interesting, and also most difficult, lessons that I’ve had to learn is that people are not nearly as competent as they’d like you to believe. When I was a kid, I had a lot of faith in all sorts of things. I thought that if an ‘expert� said something, it must be true; I assumed that there was a particular ‘expert� in every type of activity, be it business or science, to ensure that things ran the way they were supposed to. In short, I had the comforting illusion that very smart people in very white lab coats were behind the scenes, ensuring that things ran smoothly. The world certainly cooperated with this illusion for a while (after all, that’s the whole basis of advertising); but it wasn’t long after meeting people in the ‘real world� that this illusion imploded: the world is run by people underqualified and overconfident.

I include this bit about myself because I don’t think I would have reacted so emotionally to this rather lighthearted book were it not that I had that experience. In a way, a distrust of all authority is Feynman’s central social message. He is constantly running into ‘experts� who haven’t the slightest idea what they’re talking about. He goes to academic conferences full of pretentious windbags; he trusts the results of other people’s experiments, and later finds that they were seriously flawed.

So any time somebody makes a claim, he decides to test it out for himself; and the few times he doesn’t do this, he gets into trouble. This realization, that most people are inclined to trust claims from authority, is integral to his almost supernatural ability to navigate unfamiliar situations; Feynman is so easily able to bluff his way through because people take his word for things. So this central insight—to always check for youself—is both the heart of his scientific attitude, as well as his way of effortlessly gliding through the world. His ability to crack safes, for example, wasn’t due to his knowing a lot about safes, but simply realizing that most people used their safes foolishly, not resetting the factory combination or setting it to something obvious. Most of us assume that we couldn’t figure out how to crack a safe; but Feynman did what he always did, and saw for himself whether he could: and he could!

I honestly wish that this book was three times its length. Now, I must know more about Feynman. My favorite saints are the ones who would hate to be worshiped, and Feynman certainly would think this glowing review was nonsense. Well, perhaps it is; but the only way you’ll know for sure is by reading this book, and checking for yourself.