Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman

I'm oppositional. If everyone is doing things one way, I'll ask, why does it have to be that way? And then I'll probably do the exact opposite of whatever everyone else is doing. My whole life, the people around me advised me that this was not a good plan. To get ahead in life, it's better to keep one's head down, blend in, and not try to prove other people wrong.

My first realization that sometimes, everyone else is wrong, is when I read Richard Feynman's textbook about physics. In it, by the 2nd chapter, he tells the reader that what they taught us in school year after year about electrons spinning around a nucleus is just plain wrong. He makes clear what is actually happening is actually too complicated for the human mind to fathom, except with a series of math formulas. But, why are they teaching students the wrong thing, if they will need to unlearn it later on if they go to graduate school?

He was speaking my language and I had to learn more about this teacher. I would be Luke to his Yoda. Or Daniel to Mr Miyagi. I lived in Milwaukee, and Professor Feynman in Pasadena, California and had passed away a few years earlier, so this apprenticeship would have to be through the medium of books and writings.

Richard Feynman's groundbreaking testimony about “O-rings” being the cause of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster came up in the media again and again. Reading one of these articles, I saw a reference to a book that he had recently been put together: Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman.

Reading the table of contents, I saw he also worked at Los Alamos, after being recruited by Richard Oppenheimer. How could this one man, who loved to break rules and shun convention, have been involved in two of the biggest events of the century? He was either incredibly lucky, or something else. And the something else was that he was entertaining.

By his own account, when he wasn't practicing drumming, he appeared to have spent most of his time at Los Alamos breaking into other people's safes and leaving surprises within their secret documents.

And, he wouldn't have been at Los Alamos at all if he had been drafted into the army during the early days of World War 2.

In his account, Richard didn't want to fight in the military. In the early years of the war, he had received a draft notice and reported at an inspection center in New Jersey. He faked every medical condition he could think of to escape the draft, but so had everyone else, and the medical doctor passed his physical.

The next check was psychological, which Richard failed by being completely honest.

"When you are outside, do you feel people are watching you?"

"Yes, sometimes."

"Are they watching you right now?"

While the psychiatrist was looking down at his clipboard. Richard turned around. It was a crowded recruitment center, and the next ten recruits behind him were sitting on a bench with nothing to do except watch what was happening to the person in front of them.

"Yes, a lot of eyes are watching me.”

“And, are they talking about you?”

The recruits had seen Richard looking back at them, and started making comments with each other.

“Yes. They're talking about me.”

The psychiatrist scribbled something down on his checklist, and a few weeks later Richard Feynman received a rejection notice from the US Army.

**

An entertaining excerpt from the book, "Cargo Cult Science"

https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm

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