Summary

Pursue your curiosity, be a practitioner, explain the theoretical practically, and a variety in skills and experiences does wonders, as exhibited and retold in this polymath and Nobel laureate’s autobiography.

Key Takeaways

• Puzzle drive: discovering what was the matter, and figuring out what you have to do to fix it.
• Another thing I did in high school was to invent problems and theorems. I mean, if I were doing any mathematical thing at all, I would find some practical example for which it would be useful.
• That was a very good way to get educated, working on the senior problems.
• Why Princeton was getting results: they were working with the instrument.
• Learn what the rest of the world is like. The variety is worthwhile.
• To be a practical man was, to me, always a virtue.
• When somebody is explaining something that I’m trying to understand: I keep making up examples.
• Tell people the why and productivity and motivation soar.
• The questions of the students are often the source of new research.
• There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was.
• I can’t understand anything in general unless I’m carrying along in my mind a specific example and watching it go.
• I never pay any attention to anything by “experts.” I calculate everything myself.
• On positive reinforcement in teaching: everything that I thought was a mistake, he used to teach me something in a positive way. He never said it was wrong; he never put me down. So I kept on trying, and I gradually got a little bit better, but I was never satisfied.
  • The teacher didn’t tell people much. Instead, he tried to inspire us to experiment with new approaches.
• Until I began to learn to draw, I was never much interested in looking at art.
• On (free) marketing: She offered to pose three times free if I would give her a drawing. “On the contrary,” I said. “I’ll give you three drawings if you’ll pose once for nothing.”
• It isn’t the stuff, but the power to make the stuff, that is important.
• If you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid – not only what you think is right about it.
• The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.

What I got out of it

Plenty of life lessons to be gleaned from Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman. Chief among them:

• Pursue curiosity.
• Be a practitioner (reminded me of Taleb’s Skin in the Game)

Some other lessons:

• Puzzle syndrome: treat problems like a puzzle to be solved
• Experiment with oneself
• Simplify everything
• Argue both sides
• Analogies: relate everything theoretical to something in the real world
• Application and explanation > memorization and theory
• Remain a child: follow curiosity, ask questions and enjoy
• There’s a psychological, not just intellectual, benefit to teaching
• Stretch yourself constantly: work on more difficult problems or come up with your own (theories and proofs to solve – reminded me of Herbert Simon)
• People don’t challenge themselves to read, try, test, experiment and as a result lack imagination
• Variety in experiences, learnings and people
• Decision-making: keep it simple, decide once and never decide again
• Variety of skills: lockpicking, dancing, Portuguese, Brazilian bongo drum, drawing, Mayan hieroglyphics

Summary Notes

Part 1 – From Far Rockaway to MIT

He Fixes Radios by Thinking!

The main reason people hired me was the Depression. They didn’t have any money to fix their radios, and they’d hear about this kid who would do it for less. So I’d climb on roofs to fix antennas, and all kinds of stuff. I got a series of lessons of ever-increasing difficulty. Ultimately I got some job like converting a DC set into an AC set, and it was very hard to keep the hum from going through the system, and I didn’t build it quite right. I shouldn’t have bitten that one off, but I didn’t know.

When a person has been negative to you, and then you do something like that, they’re usually a hundred percent the other way, kind of to compensate. He got me other jobs, and kept telling everybody what a tremendous genius I was, saying, “He fixes radios by thinking!” The whole idea of thinking, to fix a radio -a little boy stops and thinks, and figures out how to do it – he never thought that was possible.

I had, and still have, persistence. Once I get on a puzzle, I can’t get off.

That’s a puzzle drive. It’s what accounts for my wanting to decipher Mayan hieroglyphics, for trying to open safes. I remember in high school, during first period a guy would come to me with a puzzle in geometry, or something which had been assigned in his advanced math class. I wouldn’t stop until I figured the damn thing out – it would take me fifteen or twenty minutes. But during the day, other guys would come to me with the same problem, and I’d do it for them in a flash. So for one guy, to do it took me twenty minutes, while there were five guys who thought I was a super-genius.

“Is there a way to see it?”

Another thing I did in high school was to invent problems and theorems. I mean, if I were doing any mathematical thing at all, I would find some practical example for which it would be useful.

The whole problem of discovering what was the matter, and figuring out what you have to do to fix it – that was interesting to me, like a puzzle.

String Beans 

But now, when I think back on it, I realize that the other desk clerk, the professional, had really known what to do – tell the other guy to take the risk of getting into trouble. He put me to the job of training this fella to give tips. He never said anything; he made me do it!

Who Stole The Door

One group was teaching the other how to think, while the other guys were teaching them how to be social.

That was a very good way to get educated, working on the senior problems and learning how to pronounce things.

I don’t have to know. It’s just fun, seeing what’s going to happen; it’s an adventure!

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!
This kind of fragility is, in fact, fairly common, even with more learned people.

Sometime later I finally admitted to taking the other door, and I was accused by everybody of lying. They couldn’t remember what I had said. All they could remember was their conclusion after the president of the fraternity had gone around the table and asked everybody, that nobody admitted taking the door. The idea they remembered, but not the words.

Latin or Italian? 

This “stream of consciousness” reminded me of a problem my father had given to me many years before. He said, “Suppose some Martians were to come down to earth, and Martians never slept, but instead were perpetually active.

Suppose they didn’t have this crazy phenomenon that we have, called sleep. So they ask you the question: ‘How does it feel to go to sleep? What happens when you go to sleep? Do your thoughts suddenly stop, or do they move less aannddlleeessss rraaaaapppppiidddddllllllllyyyyyyyyyyy yyy? How does the mind actually turn off?”

I got interested. Now I had to answer this question: How does the stream of consciousness end, when you go to sleep?

So every afternoon for the next four weeks I would work on my theme, I would pull down the shades in my room, turn off the lights, and go to sleep. And I’d watch what happened, when I went to sleep.

After four weeks of sleeping all the time, I wrote my theme, and explained the observations I had made. At the end of the theme I pointed out that all of these observations were made while I was watching myself fall asleep, and I don’t really know what it’s like to fall asleep when I’m not watching myself.

I continued to be curious, and I kept practicing this watching myself as I went to sleep. One night, while I was having a dream, I realized I was observing myself in the dream. I had gotten all the way down into the sleep itself!

You might like to know how this process of observing my dreams stopped. Somehow I had become tired of making these observations, and my brain had invented some false reasons as to why I shouldn’t do it any more.

Part 2 – The Princeton Years

“Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”

I suddenly realized why Princeton was getting results. They were working with the instrument. They built the instrument; they knew where everything was, they knew how everything worked, there was no engineer involved, except maybe he was working there too.

MIT was good, hut 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.

“Which way do you think it goes around?”

Wheeler said, “Yesterday, Feynman convinced me that it went backwards.

Today, he’s convinced me equally well that it goes around the other way. I don’t know what he’ll convince me of tomorrow!”

I’ll tell you an argument that will make you think it’s one way, and another argument that will make you think it’s the other way, OK?

Meeeeeeeeeee! 

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.

A Map of the Cat? 

In the Graduate College dining room at Princeton everybody used to sit with his own group. I sat with the physicists, but after a bit I thought: It would be nice to see what the rest of the world is doing, so I’ll sit for a week or two in each of the other groups.

When it came time for me to give my talk on the subject, I started off by drawing an outline of the cat and began to name the various muscles.
The other students in the class interrupt me: “We know all that!”

“Oh,” I say, “you do? Then no wonder I can catch up with you so fast after you’ve had four years of biology.” They had wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes.

We were there at the right place, we were doing the right things, but I was doing things as an amateur – stupid and sloppy.

The other work on the phage I never wrote up – Edgar kept asking me to write it up, hut I never got around to it. That’s the trouble with not being in your own field: You don’t take it seriously.

While I was at Harvard that week, Watson suggested something and we did an experiment together for a few days. It was an incomplete experiment, but I learned some new lab techniques from one of the best men in the field.

But that was my big moment: I gave a seminar in the biology department of Harvard! I always do that, get into something and see how far I can go.

I learned a lot of things in biology, and I gained a lot of experience. I got better at pronouncing the words, knowing what not to include in a paper or a seminar, and detecting a weak technique in an experiment. But I love physics, and I love to go back to it.

Monster Minds 

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.

Mixing Paints 

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, hut the second was crazy.

That shows you how much I trusted these “real guys.” The painter had told me so much stuff that was reasonable that I was ready to give a certain chance that there was an odd phenomenon I didn’t know. I was expecting pink, but my set of thoughts were, “The only way to get yellow will be something new and interesting, and I’ve got to see this.”

I’ve very often made mistakes in my physics by thinking the theory isn’t as good as it really is, thinking that there are lots of complications that are going to spoil it – an attitude that anything can happen, in spite of what you’re pretty sure should happen.

A Different Box of Tools

There was a certain amount of genuine quality to my guesses. I had a scheme, which I still use today when somebody is explaining something that I’m trying to understand: I keep making up examples.

That book also showed how to differentiate parameters under the integral sign – it’s a certain operation. It turns out that’s not taught very much in the universities; they don’t emphasize it. But I caught on how to use that method, and I used that one damn tool again and again. So because I was self-taught using that book, I had peculiar methods of doing integrals.

The result was, when guys at MIT or Princeton had trouble doing a certain integral, it was because they couldn’t do it with the standard methods they had learned in school. If it was contour integration, they would have found it; if it was a simple series expansion, they would have found it. Then I come along and try differentiating under the integral sign, and often it worked. So I got a great reputation for doing integrals, only because my box of tools was different from everybody else’s, and they had tried all their tools on it before giving the problem to me.

Mindreaders 

When he came back he told me the whole code: “Blue is ‘Oh, Great Master,’ Green is ‘Oh, Most Knowledgeable One,’” and so forth. He explained, “I went up to him, afterwards, and told him I used to do a show in Patchogue, and we had a code, but it couldn’t do many numbers, and the range of colors was shorter. I asked him, ‘How do you carry so much information?’” The mindreader was so proud of his code that he sat down and explained the _whole works_ to my father. My father was a salesman. He could set up a situation like that. I can’t do stuff like that.

Part 3 – Feynman, the Bomb, and the Military

Los Alamos from Below 

The colonel says, “Just five minutes,” and then he goes to the window and he stops and thinks. That’s what they’re very good at – making decisions. I thought it was very remarkable how a problem of whether or not information as to how the bomb works should be in the Oak Ridge plant had to be decided and could be decided in five minutes. So I have a great deal of respect for these military guys, because I never can decide anything very important in any length of time at all.

You must have been in a situation like this when you didn’t ask them right away. Right away it would have been OK. But now they’ve been talking a little bit too long. You hesitated too long. If you ask them now they’ll say “What are you wasting my time all this time for?”

What am I going to do? I get an idea. Maybe it’s a valve.

I take my finger and I put it down on one of the mysterious little crosses in the middle of one of the blueprints on page three, and I say “What happens if this valve gets stuck?” – figuring they’re going to say “That’s not a valve, sir, that’s a window.”

So one looks at the other and says, “Well, if that valve gets stuck – ” and he goes up and down on the blueprint, up and down, the other guy goes up and down, back and forth, back and forth, and they both look at each other. They turn around to me and they open their mouths like astonished fish and say “You’re absolutely right, sir.”

“What you have just done is so fantastic I want to know how, how do you do that?”
I told him you try to find out whether it’s a valve or not.

Mr. Frankel, who started this program, began to suffer from the computer disease that anybody who works with computers now knows about.

It’s a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is you play with them. They are so wonderful.

The real trouble was that no one had ever told these fellows anything. I said that the first thing there has to be is that these technical guys know what we’re doing. Oppenheimer went and talked to the security and got special permission so I could give a nice lecture about what we were doing, and they were all excited: “We’re fighting a war! We see what it is!”
Complete transformation! They began to invent ways of doing it better. They improved the scheme. They worked at night. They didn’t need supervising in the night; they didn’t need anything. They understood everything; they invented several of the programs that we used.

So my boys really came through, and all that had to be done was to tell them what it was. As a result, although it took them nine months to do three problems before, we did nine problems in three months, which is nearly ten times as fast.

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. 

The son told me what happened. The last time he was there, Bohr said to his son, “Remember the name of that little fellow in the back over there? He’s the only guy who’s not afraid of me, and will say when I’ve got a crazy idea. So next time when we want to discuss ideas, we’re not going to be able to do it with these guys who say everything is yes, yes, Dr. Bohr. Get that guy and we’ll talk with him first.”

I was always dumb in that way. I never knew who I was talking to. I was always worried about the physics. If the idea looked lousy, I said it looked lousy. If it looked good, I said it looked good. Simple proposition. I’ve always lived that way. It’s nice, it’s pleasant – if you can do it. I’m lucky in my life that I can do this.

Safecracker Meets Safecracker 

I love puzzles. One guy tries to make something to keep another guy out; there must be a way to beat it! I had first to understand how the lock worked, so I took apart the one in my office.

Part 4 – From Cornell to Caltech, With a Touch of Brazil

The Dignified Professor

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 any ideas 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!

If you’re teaching a class, you can think about the elementary things that you know very well. These things are kind of fun and delightful. It doesn’t do any harm to think them over again. Is there a better way to present them? Are there any new problems associated with them? Are there any new thoughts you can make about them? The elementary things are _easy_ to think about; if you can’t think of a new thought, no harm done; what you thought about it before is good enough for the class. If you _do_ think of something new, you’re rather pleased that you have a new way of looking at it.

The questions of the students are often the source of new research.

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.

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.

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.

There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was.

You Just Ask Them? 

“How is it possible,” I asked, “that an ‘intelligent’ guy can be such a goddamn fool when he gets into a bar?”

The master said, “_This_ I know all about. I know exactly how it all works. I will give you lessons, so that hereafter you can get something from a girl in a bar like this.

The whole principle is this: The guy wants to be a gentleman.

He doesn’t want to be thought of as impolite, crude, or especially a cheapskate.

As long as the girl knows the guy’s motives so well, it’s easy to steer him in the direction she wants him to go.

“Therefore,” he continued, “under _no circumstances_ be a gentleman! You must _disrespect_ the girls. Furthermore, the very first rule is, don’t buy a girl _anything_ – not even a package of cigarettes – until you’ve _asked_ her if she’ll sleep with you, and you’re convinced that she _will_, and that she’s not lying.”

“Uh … you mean … you don’t … uh … you just _ask_ them?”

“OK,” he says, “I know this is your first lesson, and it may be hard for you to be so blunt. So you might buy her one thing – just one little something – before you ask. But on the other hand, it will only make it more difficult.”

O Americano, Outra Vez! 

I learned how to look at life in a way that’s different from the way it is where I come from. First, they weren’t in the same hurry that I was. And second, if it’s better for you, never mind!

I got a kick out of succeeding at something I wasn’t supposed to be able to do.

After a lot of investigation, I finally figured out that the students had memorized everything, but they didn’t know what anything meant. When they heard “light that is reflected from a medium with an index,” they didn’t know that it meant a material such as water. They didn’t know that the “direction of the light” is the direction in which you see something when you’re looking at it, and so on. Everything was entirely memorized, yet nothing had been translated into meaningful words. They could pass the examinations, and “learn” all this stuff, and not know anything at all, except what they had memorized.

I taught a course at the engineering school on mathematical methods in physics, in which I tried to show how to solve problems by trial and error. It’s something that people don’t usually learn, so I began with some simple examples of arithmetic to illustrate the method.

I explained how useful it was to work together, to discuss the questions, to talk it over, but they wouldn’t do that either, because they would be losing face if they had to ask someone else. It was pitiful!

I couldn’t see how anyone could he educated by this self-propagating system in which people pass exams, and teach others to pass exams, but nobody knows anything.

Certainly, Mr. Big! 

Then I realize that if you have a reasonably even game – forget the little losses from the take for the moment in order to understand it – the chance that you’ll win a hundred dollars versus losing your four hundred dollars is four to one. So out of five times that he tries this on somebody, four times they’re going to win a hundred dollars, he gets two hundred (and he points out to them how smart he is); the fifth time he has to pay a hundred dollars. So he receives two hundred, on the average, when he’s paying out one hundred! So I finally understood how he could do that.

The first schemes were designed to make him money by honest arithmetic. Now, he’s going to be out of town. The only way he’s going to make money on this scheme is not to send it – to be a real cheat. So I never accepted any of his offers. But it was very entertaining to see how he operated.

I don’t bet on the table; instead, I bet with people around the table who have prejudices – superstitious ideas about lucky numbers.

An Offer You Must Refuse 

Now that I have been at Caltech since 1951, I’ve been very happy here. It’s exactly the thing for a one-sided guy like me. There are all these people who are close to the top, who are very interested in what they are doing, and who I can talk to. So I’ve been very comfortable.

When you’re young, you have all these things to worry about – should you go there, what about your mother. And you worry, and try to decide, but then something else comes up. It’s much easier to just plain decide. Never mind – nothing is going to change your mind. I did that once when I was a student at MIT. I got sick and tired of having to decide what kind of dessert I was going to have at the restaurant, so I decided it would always be chocolate ice cream, and never worried about it again – I had the solution to that problem.

Part 5 – The World of One Physicist

Would You Solve the Dirac Equation?

They would tell me the general problem they were working on, and would begin to write a bunch of equations.

“Wait a minute,” I would say. “Is there a particular example of this general problem?”

“Why yes; of course.”

“Good. Give me one example.” That was for me: I can’t understand anything in general unless I’m carrying along in my mind a specific example and watching it go.

“How the hell did this guy, who hardly understood at the beginning, find that mistake in the mess of all these equations?”

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.

The 7 Percent Solution 

“I can’t understand these things that Lee and Yang are saying. It’s all so complicated.”

“No,” she said, “what you mean is not that you can’t understand it, but that you didn’t invent it. You didn’t figure it out your _own_ way, from hearing the clue. What you should do is imagine you’re a student again, and take this paper upstairs, read every line of it, and check the equations. Then you’ll understand it very easily.”

I took her advice, and checked through the whole thing, and found it to be very obvious and simple. I had been afraid to read it, thinking it was too difficult.

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. Since then I never pay any attention to anything by “experts.” I calculate everything myself.

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.

But Is It Art?

Everything that I thought was a mistake, he used to teach me something in a positive way. He never said it was wrong; he never put me down. So I kept on trying, and I gradually got a little bit better, but I was never satisfied.

I noticed that the teacher didn’t tell people much. Instead, he tried to inspire us to experiment with new approaches. I thought of how we teach physics: We have so many techniques – so many mathematical methods – that we never stop telling the students how to do things. On the other hand, the drawing teacher is afraid to tell you anything. If your lines are very heavy, the teacher can’t say, “Your lines are too heavy,” because some artist has figured out a way of making great pictures using heavy lines. The teacher doesn’t want to push you in some particular direction. So the drawing teacher has this problem of communicating how to draw by osmosis and not by instruction, while the physics teacher has the problem of always teaching techniques, rather than the spirit, of how to go about solving physical Problems.

Until I began to learn to draw, I was never much interested in looking at art.

I understood at last what art is really for, at least in certain respects. It gives somebody, individually, pleasure. You can make something that somebody likes so much that they’re depressed, or they’re happy, on account of that damn thing you made! In science, it’s sort of general and large: You don’t know the individuals who have appreciated it directly.

I understood that to sell a drawing is not to make money, but to be sure that it’s in the home of someone who really wants it; someone who would feel bad if they didn’t have it. This was interesting.

One of my models wanted me to make a drawing for her, but she didn’t have the money. She offered to pose three times free if I would give her a drawing. “On the contrary,” I said. “I’ll give you three drawings if you’ll pose once for nothing.” She put one of the drawings I gave her on the wall in her small room, and soon her boyfriend noticed it. He liked it so much that he wanted to commission a portrait of her. He would pay me sixty dollars.

Every woman is worried about her looks, no matter how beautiful she is.

Is Electricity Fire?

I was ready to put my hand up and say, “Would you please define the problem better,” but then I thought, “No, I’m the ignoramus; I’d better listen. I don’t want to start trouble right away.”

The idea of distributing everything evenly is based on a theory that there’s only X amount of stuff in the world, that somehow we took it away from the poorer countries in the first place, and therefore we should give it back to them. But this theory doesn’t take into account the real reason for the differences between countries – that is, the development of new techniques for growing food, the development of machinery to grow food and to do other things, and the fact that all this machinery requires the concentration of capital. It isn’t the stuff, but the power to make the stuff, that is important. But I realize now that these people were not in science; they didn’t understand it. They didn’t understand technology; they didn’t understand their time.

An ordinary fool isn’t a faker; an honest fool is all right. But a dishonest fool is terrible!

Judging Books by Their Covers 

“We’d like to explain to you what our book is about …”and “We’ll be very glad to help you in any way we can to judge our books …” That seemed to me kind of crazy. I’m an objective scientist, and it seemed to me that since the only thing the kids in school are going to get is the books (and the teachers get the teacher’s manual, which I would also get), any extra explanation from the company was a distortion. So I didn’t want to speak to any of the publishers and always replied, “You don’t have to explain; I’m sure the books will speak for themselves.”

The books were so lousy. They were false. They were hurried. They would try to be rigorous, but they would use examples (like automobiles in the street for “sets”) which were almost OK, but in which there were always some subtleties. The definitions weren’t accurate. Everything was a little bit ambiguous – they weren’t smart enough to understand what was meant by “rigor.” They were faking it. They were teaching something they didn’t understand, and which was, in fact, useless, at that time, for the child.

That’s the way everything was: Everything was written by somebody who didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, so it was a little bit wrong, always! And how we are going to teach well by using books written by people who don’t quite understand what they’re talking about, I cannot understand.

This question of trying to figure out whether a book is good or bad by looking at it carefully or by taking the reports of a lot of people who looked at it carelessly is like this famous old problem: Nobody was permitted to see the Emperor of China, and the question was, What is the length of the Emperor of China’s nose? To find out, you go all over the country asking people what they think the length of the Emperor of China’s nose is, and you average it. And that would be very “accurate” because you averaged so many people. But it’s no way to find anything out; when you have a very wide range of people who contribute without looking carefully at it, you don’t improve your knowledge of the situation by averaging.

The whole thing was an unnecessary effort that could have been turned around and done the opposite way: start with the cost of the books, and buy what you can afford.

The answer was, for the wind-up toy, “Energy makes it go.” And for the boy on the bicycle, “Energy makes it go.” For everything, “Energy makes it go.” Now that doesn’t mean anything. Suppose it’s “Wakalixes.” That’s the general principle: “Wakalixes makes it go.” There’s no knowledge coming in. The child doesn’t learn anything; it’s just a word!

What they should have done is to look at the wind-up toy, see that there are springs inside, learn about springs, learn about wheels, and never mind “energy.” Later on, when the children know something about how the toy actually works, they can discuss the more general principles of energy.

Human beings should treat human beings like human beings. 

Alfred Nobel’s Other Mistake 

A friend of mine who’s a rich man – he invented some kmd of simple digital switch – tells me about these people who contribute money to make prizes or give lectures: “You always look at them carefully to find out what crookery they’re trying to absolve their conscience of.”

Cargo Cult Science

We really ought to look into theories that don’t work, and science that isn’t science.

If you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid – not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked – to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.

The idea is to try to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.

We’ve learned from experience that the truth will come out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature’s phenomena will agree or they’ll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven’t tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it’s this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in cargo cult science.

This long history of learning how to not fool ourselves – of having utter scientific integrity – is, I’m sorry to say, something that we haven’t specifically included in any particular course that I know of.

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.

If you’re representing yourself as a scientist, then you should explain to the layman what you’re doing – and if they don’t want to support you under those circumstances, then that’s their decision. One example of the principle is this: If you’ve made up your mind to test a theory, or you want to explain some idea, you should always decide to publish it whichever way it comes out. If we only publish results of a certain kind, we can make the argument look good. We must publish both kinds of results.