Classic Feynman: All the Adventures of a Curious Character Book

Read as part of my ongoing shelf audit. Verdict: Oh yeah, this is a keeper.

My first encounter with Richard Feynman's work was in the mid 2000s, when my family was moving about halfway across the U.S. and my dad checked out the audiobook of "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character for the drive. I don't remember a lot of particulars, except for 'A Map of the Cat' and Feynman's story about lighting the back of his hand on fire in college, but I remember enjoying the mixture of science and humor, and feeling like it was a cool thing to share with my engineer father. I was, at the time, going into middle school.

Years later, someone gave me a Barnes and Noble gift card as a high school graduation gift, and I bought this compilation thinking a) it would be an appropriate thing to read in college and b) it would make me look very Sophisticated and Smart to have this on the shelf in my freshman dorm room. I then... did not read it. For nine more years. (I really should have, or at least the Los Alamos parts; my freshman colloquium course was all about the making of the atomic bomb.)

I'm glad that my current attempt to actually read everything on my shelf has brought me back to this, though, because Feynman's perspective is fascinating. Stylistically, these essays feel like stories you're being told by your grandfather or great uncle; there's a friendliness and openness which invites the reader in and makes you feel welcome, even when the details go right over your head. The content is... fascinating, even the parts I didn't understand, because you can feel Feynman's incredible intelligence on every page. Physics isn't my jam, but I don't need to understand exactly what he's saying to get something of value from the enthusiasm and wonder with which he approached his work. The way in which he approached science is... 'idyllic' is really the best word I have for it; he had both incredible ability and childlike curiosity, and he was always pursuing his passions and excited about wherever he was. I find myself wondering, in this time of crushing student debt and diminished research funding, if it's possible to live that way now. I hope it is, at least for some people.

There's also something fascinating about seeing ordinary facets of the world through the lens of an extraordinary person. The same curiosity that Feynman applied to physics problems was extended to many other things in his life - attending a dance organized by a club for deaf and mute people, for instance, or learning how to play the drums, or life drawing. He seems to have gone through life with this... incorrigible energy, with very little fear of failure, and I find myself wondering if maybe that's the real secret of genius - not some baked-in capability of the brain, but the desire to just keep trying new things and fiddling with problems, regardless of the potential outcomes. So many of Feynman's decisions, at least as he describes them himself, seem so simple and free of anxiety or second-guessing.

Even with that, he did experience impostor syndrome at least once - at his first teaching job, at Cornell, after WWII. Feynman's response to that, too, is startlingly simple:
Then I thought to myself, "You know, what they think of you is so fantastic, it's impossible to live up to it. You have no responsibility to live up to it!"
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.
As someone who struggles with anxiety and self-esteem frequently, it's comforting to know that even a guy who argued physics with Niels Bohr and won a Nobel Prize felt inadequate and like a fraud at one point; that's as clear a demonstration as possible that impostor syndrome thought processes have no bearing on reality. It's... something I'll try to keep in mind.

I was also deeply touched by the way Feynman talks about his first wife, Arlene, who died of tuberculosis while he was working on the Manhattan Project. While he doesn't really dig deeply into his emotions, it's still clear by the way he describes their relationship that they really loved each other. His phrasing is so simple, and yet in that simplicity is something complex: when they got married, Arlene was already sick and they knew she would be in and out of the hospital for the rest of her fairly short life expectancy. That's far from a simple situation, and yet Feynman always treats it as a foregone conclusion: "We were in love, and were already married, emotionally." Discussing her death, just five years later, he is matter-of-fact:
The only difference for me and Arlene was, instead of fifty years, it was five years. It was only a quantitative difference - the psychological problem was just the same. The only way it would have become any different is if we had said to ourselves, "But those other people have it better, because they might live fifty years." But that's crazy. Why make yourself miserable by saying things like, "Why do we have such bad luck? What has God done to us? What have we done to deserve this? - all of which, if you understand reality and take it completely into your heart. There are just things that nobody can know. Your situation is just an accident of life.
We had a hell of a good time together.

It's that last line - "We had a hell of a good time together" - which strikes me as somehow infinitely tender.

There's a lot of humor here, too, of course. Feynman followed his curiosity into odd situations and incongruous escapades, and he relates them with complete honesty, never afraid to acknowledge his own misconceptions or moments of utter absurdity. I think the most absurd is the chapter titled 'Safecracker Meets Safecracker', in which he describes learning to pick locks and open safes while working at Los Alamos which is just... I can't even imagine deciding 'hey, why don't I develop a reputation for bypassing security while working on the most high-security military project the world has known to date?' It worked out for him, but damn. Couple that decision with the revelation at the end of the chapter that 20% of the safe combinations at the installation were still set to their factory defaults... the Manhattan Project is a serious topic, but that's just ridiculous.

One aspect of the book did make me consistently uncomfortable, and that's the way Feynman talks about women in aggregate. Specific women he knew well are discussed like anyone else, but there's a strong through-line of women, in general, existing primarily as eye candy and/or potential sexual partners. It's not creepy, per se, but there is a through-line of casual objectification which is, at best, an artifact of the times. (Though from some of the quotes I've seen from the new Obama autobiography, maybe not as much of the times as I would like to think.)

Ultimately, I think this book is a reminder to me of an ethos worth striving for in science. My Bachelor's is in biology, though I'm not currently working in the field, and I think Feynman's example - of approaching science with wonder, of questioning everything, and of extending that same curiosity to the rest of life - is one worth emulating. I don't know if I'll be very good at it, but I want to give it a try, and I'll probably come back to this book in the future for a reminder.