“Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”: Adventures of a Curious Character
Richard Phillips Feynman, Edward Hutchings, Ralph Leighton
He Fixes Radios by Thinking!
Sometimes it took quite a while. I remember one particular time when it took the whole afternoon to find a burned out resistor that was not apparent. That particular time it happened to be a friend of my mother, so I had time—there was nobody on my back saying, “What are you doing?” Instead, they were saying, “Would you like a little milk, or some cake?” I finally fixed it because I had, and still have, persistence. Once I get on a puzzle, I can’t get off. If my mother’s friend had said, “Never mind, it’s too much work,” I’d have blown my top, because I want to beat this damn thing, as long as I’ve gone this far. I can’t just leave it after I’ve found out so much about it. I have to keep going to find out ultimately what is the matter with it in the end.
Notes:
Feynman on persistence - he calls it Puzzle Drive
| Location: 154 |
Color: yellow |
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. So I got a fancy reputation. During high school every puzzle that was known to man must have come to me. Every damn, crazy conundrum that people had invented, I knew.
| Location: 161 |
Color: blue |
I realized then that if I’m going to talk to anybody else, I’ll have to use the standard symbols, so I eventually gave up my own symbols.
| Location: 214 |
Color: blue |
Who Stole the Door?
It was the same as with any other language, except for one thing: as they’re making signs to each other, their heads were always turning from one side to the other. I realized what that was. When someone wants to make a side remark or interrupt you, he can’t yell, “Hey, Jack!” He can only make a signal, which you won’t catch unless you’re in the habit of looking around all the time.
| Location: 391 |
Color: yellow |
They were all excited by this “discovery”—even though they had already gone through a certain amount of calculus and had already “learned” that the derivative (tangent) of the minimum (lowest point) of any curve is zero (horizontal). 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!
| Location: 412 |
Color: yellow |
I noticed that they were always in a hurry, rushing around, so one day, just for fun, I left my tip, which was usually ten cents (normal for those days), in two nickels, under two glasses: I filled each glass to the very top, dropped a nickel in, and with a card over it, turned it over so it was upside down on the table. Then I slipped out the card (no water leaks out because no air can come in—the rim is too close to the table for that). I put the tip under two glasses because I knew they were always in a hurry. If the tip was a dime in one glass, the waitress, in her haste to get the table ready for the next customer, would pick up the glass, the water would spill out, and that would be the end of it. But after she does that with the first glass, what the hell is she going to do with the second one? She can’t just have the nerve to lift it up now! On the way out I said to my waitress, “Be careful, Sue. There’s something funny about the glasses you gave me—they’re filled in on the top, and there’s a hole on the bottom!” The next day I came back, and I had a new waitress. My regular waitress wouldn’t have anything to do with me. “Sue’s very angry at you,” my new waitress said. “After she picked up the first glass and water went all over the place, she called the boss out. They studied it a little bit, but they couldn’t spend all day figuring out what to do, so they finally picked up the other one, and water went out again, all over the floor. It was a terrible mess; Sue slipped later in the water. They’re all mad at you.” I laughed. She said, “It’s not funny! How would you like it if someone did that to you—what would you do?” “I’d get a soup plate and then slide the glass very carefully over to the edge of the table, and let the water run into the soup plate—it doesn’t have to run onto the floor. Then I’d take the nickel out.” “Oh, that’s a goood idea,”
| Location: 429 |
Color: yellow |
The Chief Research Chemist of the Metaplast Corporation
The Chief Research Chemist of the Metaplast Corporation
Notes:
Great business story
| Location: 664 |
Color: yellow |
“Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”
So MIT was good, but 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.
| Location: 841 |
Color: yellow |
Meeeeeeeeeee!
So 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.
| Location: 921 |
Color: yellow |
A Map of the Cat?
We were there at the right place, we were doing the right things, but I was doing things as an amateur—stupid and sloppy.
| Location: 1029 |
Color: yellow |
That’s the trouble with not being in your own field: You don’t take it seriously. I did write something informally on it. I sent it to Edgar, who laughed when he read it.
| Location: 1032 |
Color: yellow |
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.
| Location: 1048 |
Color: yellow |
Mixing Paints
To me, no real man ever paid any attention to poetry and such things. How poetry ever got written—that never struck me! So I developed a negative attitude toward the guy who studies French literature, or studies too much music or poetry—all those “fancy” things. I admired better the steel-worker, the welder, or the machine shop man. I always thought the guy who worked in the machine shop and could make things, now he was a real guy! 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, but the second was crazy.
| Location: 1121 |
Color: yellow |
But 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.”
Notes:
if you are arguing that X cant be possible ,there two outcomes. if you are right, you look smart and you win. if you're wrong, you actually learn why X is possible, you might look naive but you've learnt something new
| Location: 1155 |
Color: yellow |
A Different Box of Tools
So we joked with the mathematicians: “We have a new theorem—that mathematicians can prove only trivial theorems, because every theorem that’s proved is trivial.”
| Location: 1171 |
Color: yellow |
So I always won. If I guessed it right, great. If I guessed it wrong, there was always something I could find in their simplification that they left out.
| Location: 1183 |
Color: yellow |
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.
| Location: 1207 |
Color: yellow |
The Amateur Scientist
I also found out the trail wasn’t directional. If I’d pick up an ant on a piece of paper, turn him around and around, and then put him back onto the trail, he wouldn’t know that he was going the wrong way until he met another ant. (Later, in Brazil, I noticed some leaf-cutting ants and tried the same experiment on them. They could tell, within a few steps, whether they were going toward the food or away from it—presumably from the trail, which might be a series of smells in a pattern: A, B, space, A, B, space, and so on.)
| Location: 1323 |
Color: yellow |
I tried at one point to make the ants go around in a circle, but I didn’t have enough patience to set it up. I could see no reason, other than lack of patience, why it couldn’t be done.
| Location: 1327 |
Color: pink |
“What can I do to stop them from coming to my larder without killing any ants? No poison; you gotta be humane to the ants!” What I did was this: In preparation, I put a bit of sugar about six or eight inches from their entry point into the room, that they didn’t know about. Then I made those ferry things again, and whenever an ant returning with food walked onto my little ferry I’d carry him over and put him on the sugar. Any ant coming toward the larder that walked onto a ferry I also carried over to the sugar. Eventually the ants found their way from the sugar to their hole, so this new trail was being doubly reinforced, while the old trail was being used less and less. I knew that after half an hour or so the old trail would dry up, and in an hour they were out of my larder. I didn’t wash the floor; I didn’t do anything but ferry ants.
| Location: 1360 |
Color: pink |
Fizzled Fuses
So it turned out that this lieutenant whom we were trying to keep from telling us anything ended up telling us something very important that we had forgotten in the design of this device: the possibility that the gun and the observing station are not at the same place! It was a big mess to fix it.
| Location: 1428 |
Color: pink |
Testing Bloodhounds
We did a few more experiments, and I discovered that while bloodhounds are indeed quite capable, humans are not as incapable as they think they are: it’s just that they carry their nose so high off the ground!
| Location: 1473 |
Color: yellow |
Los Alamos from Below [ 1 ]
So everybody is disagreeing, all around the table. I am surprised and disturbed that Compton doesn’t repeat and emphasize his point. Finally at the end, Tolman, who’s the chairman, would say, “Well, having heard all these arguments, I guess it’s true that Compton’s argument is the best of all, and now we have to go ahead.”
| Location: 1522 |
Color: yellow |
It was such a shock to me to see that a committee of men could present a whole lot of ideas, each one thinking of a new facet, while remembering what the other fella said, so that, at the end, the decision is made as to which idea was the best—summing it all up—without having to say it three times. These were very great men indeed.
| Location: 1524 |
Color: yellow |
I don’t know what the symbols on the blueprint mean! There is some kind of a thing that at first I think is a window. It’s a square with a little cross in the middle, all over the damn place. I think it’s a window, but no, it can’t be a window, because it isn’t always at the edge. I want to ask them what it is. 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.” So they rolled up the blueprints and away they went and we walked out. And Mr. Zumwalt, who had been following me all the way through, said, “You’re a genius. I got the idea you were a genius when you went through the plant once and you could tell them about evaporator C-21 in building 90-207 the next morning,” he says, “but 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. Another kind
| Location: 1800 |
Color: yellow |
Well, 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. You have these switches—if it’s an even number you do this, if it’s an odd number you do that—and pretty soon you can do more and more elaborate things if you are clever enough, on one machine.
| Location: 1848 |
Color: yellow |
But if you’ve ever worked with computers, you understand the disease—the delight in being able to see how much you can do.
Notes:
THE Delight!
| Location: 1856 |
Color: yellow |
Then 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.
Notes:
bieng honest and at times brutal, even when the person in front of you is of stature
| Location: 1962 |
Color: yellow |
After the thing went off, there was tremendous excitement at Los Alamos. Everybody had parties, we all ran around. I sat on the end of a jeep and beat drums and so on. But one man, I remember, Bob Wilson, was just sitting there moping. I said, “What are you moping about?” He said, “It’s a terrible thing that we made.” I said, “But you started it. You got us into it.” You see, what happened to me—what happened to the rest of us—is we started for a good reason, then you’re working very hard to accomplish something and it’s a pleasure, it’s excitement. And you stop thinking, you know; you just stop. Bob Wilson was the only one who was still thinking about it, at that moment.
| Location: 2001 |
Color: yellow |
I returned to civilization shortly after that and went to Cornell to teach, and my first impression was a very strange one. I can’t understand it any more, but I felt very strongly then. I sat in a restaurant in New York, for example, and I looked out at the buildings and I began to think, you know, about how much the radius of the Hiroshima bomb damage was and so forth… How far from here was 34th Street?… All those buildings, all smashed—and so on. And I would go along and I would see people building a bridge, or they’d be making a new road, and I thought, they’re crazy, they just don’t understand, they don’t understand. Why are they making new things? It’s so useless. But, fortunately, it’s been useless for almost forty years now, hasn’t it? So I’ve been wrong about it being useless making bridges and I’m glad those other people had the sense to go ahead.
| Location: 2007 |
Color: yellow |
Safecracker Meets Safecracker
Los Alamos was a very cooperative place, and we felt it our responsibility to point out things that should be improved. I’d keep complaining that the stuff was unsafe, and although everybody thought it was safe because there were steel rods and padlocks, it didn’t mean a damn thing.
| Location: 2035 |
Color: yellow |
These new filing cabinets were an immediate challenge, naturally. I love puzzles. One guy tries to make something to keep another guy out; there must be a way to beat it!
| Location: 2046 |
Color: yellow |
I had first to understand how the lock worked, so I took apart the one in my office. The way it worked is this: There are three discs on a single shaft, one behind the other; each has a notch in a different place. The idea is to line up the notches so that when you turn the wheel to ten, the little friction drive will draw the bolt down into the slot generated by the notches of the three discs.
| Location: 2047 |
Color: yellow |
Somebody would say, “Hey, Feynman! Christy’s out of town and we need a document from his safe—can you open it?” If it was a safe I knew I didn’t have the last two numbers of, I would simply say, “I’m sorry, but I can’t do it now; I’ve got this work that I have to do.” Otherwise, I would say, “Yeah, but I gotta get my tools.” I didn’t need any tools, but I’d go back to my office, open my filing cabinet, and look at my little piece of paper: “Christy—35, 60.” Then I’d get a screwdriver and go over to Christy’s office and close the door behind me. Obviously not everybody is supposed to be allowed to know how to do this! I’d be in there alone and I’d open the safe in a few minutes. All I had to do was try the first number at most twenty times, then sit around, reading a magazine or something, for fifteen or twenty minutes. There was no use trying to make it look too easy; somebody would figure out there was a trick to it! After a while I’d open the door and say, “It’s open.” People thought I was opening the safes from scratch. Now I could maintain the idea, which began with that accident with Staley, that I could open safes cold. Nobody figured out that I was picking the last two numbers off their safes, even though—perhaps because—I was doing it all the time, like a card sharp walking around all the time with a deck of cards,
| Location: 2124 |
Color: yellow |
Of course I was able to open the safe because of my perpetual habit of taking the last two numbers off. While in Oak Ridge the month before, I was in the same office when the safe was open and I took the numbers off in an absentminded way—I was always practicing my obsession. Although I hadn’t written them down, I was able to vaguely remember what they were. First I tried 40-15, then 15-40, but neither of those worked. Then I tried 10-45 with all the first numbers, and it opened.
| Location: 2146 |
Color: yellow |
The colonel had sent a note around to everyone in the plant which said, “During his last visit, was Mr. Feynman at any time in your office, near your office, or walking through your office?” Some people answered yes; others said no. The ones who said yes got another note: “Please change the combination of your safe.” That was his solution: I was the danger. So they all had to change their combinations on account of me. It’s a pain in the neck to change a combination and remember the new one, so they were all mad at me and didn’t want me to come near them: they might have to change their combination once again. Of course, their filing cabinets were still left open while they were working!
| Location: 2182 |
Color: yellow |
Uncle Sam Doesn’t Need You!
“Just what do you think insanity is?” he says, angrily. “It’s a strange and peculiar disease in human beings,” I say honestly. “There’s nothing any more strange or peculiar about it than appendicitis!” he retorts. “I don’t think so. In appendicitis we understand the causes better, and something about the mechanism of it, whereas with insanity it’s much more complicated and mysterious.” I won’t go through the whole debate; the point is that I meant insanity is physiologically peculiar, and he thought I meant it was socially peculiar.
| Location: 2395 |
Color: yellow |
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.
| Location: 2503 |
Color: yellow |
Then 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. When I was in high school, I’d see water running out of a faucet growing narrower, and wonder if I could figure out what determines that curve. I found it was rather easy to do. I didn’t have to do it; it wasn’t important for the future of science; somebody else had already done it. That didn’t make any difference: I’d invent things and play with things for my own entertainment. So I got this new attitude. Now that I am burned out and I’ll never accomplish anything, I’ve got this nice position at the university teaching classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the Arabian Nights for pleasure, I’m going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.
| Location: 2648 |
Color: yellow |
O Americano, Outra Vez!
I got to the Brazilian Academy of Sciences meeting, and the first speaker, a chemist, got up and gave his talk—in English. Was he trying to be polite, or what? I couldn’t understand what he was saying because his pronunciation was so bad, but maybe everybody else had the same accent so they could understand him; I don’t know. Then the next guy gets up, and gives his talk in English! When it was my turn, I got up and said, “I’m sorry; I hadn’t realized that the official language of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences was English, and therefore I did not prepare my talk in English. So please excuse me, but I’m going to have to give it in Portuguese.” So I read the thing, and everybody was very pleased with it. The next guy to get up said, “Following the example of my colleague from the United States, I also will give my talk in Portuguese.” So, for all I know, I changed the tradition of what language is used in the Brazilian Academy of Sciences. Some years later, I met a man from Brazil who quoted to me the exact sentences I had used at the beginning of my talk to the Academy. So apparently it made quite an impression on them.
| Location: 3127 |
Color: yellow |
The people from the airlines were somewhat bored with their lives, strangely enough, and at night they would often go to bars to drink. I liked them all, and in order to be sociable, I would go with them to the bar to have a few drinks, several nights a week. One day, about 3:30 in the afternoon, I was walking along the sidewalk opposite the beach at Copacabana past a bar. I suddenly got this treMENdous, strong feeling: “That’s just what I want; that’ll fit just right. I’d just love to have a drink right now!” I started to walk into the bar, and I suddenly thought to myself, “Wait a minute! It’s the middle of the afternoon. There’s nobody here, There’s no social reason to drink. Why do you have such a terribly strong feeling that you have to have a drink?”—and I got scared. I never drank ever again, since then. I suppose I really wasn’t in any danger, because I found it very easy to stop. But that strong feeling that I didn’t understand frightened me. You see, I get such fun out of thinking that I don’t want to destroy this most pleasant machine that makes life such a big kick. It’s the same reason that, later on, I was reluctant to try experiments with LSD in spite of my curiosity about hallucinations.
Notes:
feynman and drinking
| Location: 3150 |
Color: yellow |
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. So if I asked, “What is Brewster’s Angle?” I’m going into the computer with the right keywords. But if I say, “Look at the water,” nothing happens—they don’t have anything under “Look at the water”!
| Location: 3297 |
Color: yellow |
So, you see, they could pass the examinations, and “learn” all this stuff, and not know anything at all, except what they had memorized.
| Location: 3313 |
Color: yellow |
One other thing I could never get them to do was to ask questions. Finally, a student explained it to me: “If I ask you a question during the lecture, afterwards everybody will be telling me, ‘What are you wasting our time for in the class? We’re trying to learn something. And you’re stopping him by asking a question’.”
| Location: 3337 |
Color: yellow |
An Offer You Must Refuse
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. Anyway, I decided it would always be Caltech.
| Location: 3684 |
Color: yellow |
Would You Solve the Dirac Equation?
I had read that the Japanese are very polite, but very obstinate: You have to keep working on them. So I decided to be as obstinate as they, and equally polite. It was a battle of minds: It took thirty minutes, back and forth.
| Location: 3732 |
Color: yellow |
The 7 Percent Solution
I brought the paper home and said to her, “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. It reminded me of something I had done a long time ago with left and right unsymmetrical equations, Now it became kind of clear, when I looked at Lee’s formulas, that the solution to it all was much simpler: Everything comes out coupled to the left. For the electron and the muon, my predictions were the same as Lee’s, except I changed some signs around. I didn’t realize it at the time, but Lee had taken only the simplest example of muon
| Location: 3908 |
Color: blue |
I was so excited that I couldn’t think. It’s like when you’re rushing for an airplane, and you don’t know whether you’re late or not, and you just can’t make it, when somebody says, “It’s daylight saving time!” Yes, but which way? You can’t think in the excitement.
| Location: 3982 |
Color: yellow |
But Is It Art?
They were always telling me to “loosen up,” to become more relaxed about drawing. I figured that made no more sense than telling someone who’s just learning to drive to “loosen up” at the wheel. It isn’t going to work. Only after you know how to do it carefully can you begin to loosen up. So I resisted this perennial loosen-up stuff.
| Location: 4134 |
Color: yellow |
Of course nobody bought any of them, but otherwise I was a big success: I had my drawings on sale at Bullock’s! It was fun to have them there, just so I could say one day that I had reached that pinnacle of success in the art world. Most of my models I got through Jerry, but I also tried to get models on my own. Whenever I met a young woman who looked as if she would be interesting to draw, I would ask her to pose for me. It always ended up that I would draw her face, because I didn’t know exactly how to bring up the subject of posing nude.
Notes:
😂😂😂🤣
| Location: 4217 |
Color: yellow |
“I need to know what you mean by ‘acceptable to the community.’ Nothing is accepted by everybody, so what percentage of the community must accept something in order for it to be ‘acceptable to the community’?” The lawyer suggests a figure. The other lawyer objects. The judge calls a recess, and they all go into chambers for 15 minutes before they can decide that “acceptable to the community” means accepted by 50% of the community.
| Location: 4322 |
Color: yellow |
Alfred Nobel’s Other Mistake
She was really cute, a beautiful blonde. (That helped; it’s not supposed to, but it did.)
| Location: 4791 |
Color: yellow |
“In America,” I said, “we could make this more efficient. We would design a machine to shake hands.” “Yes, but there wouldn’t be very much of a market for it here,” she said, uneasily. “There’s not that much royalty.” “On the contrary, there’d be a very big market. At first, only the king would have a machine, and we could give it to him free. Then, of course, other people would want a machine, too. The question now becomes, who will be allowed to have a machine? The prime minister is permitted to buy one; then the president of the senate is allowed to buy one, and then the most important senior deputies. So there’s a very big, expanding market, and pretty soon, you wouldn’t have to go through the reception line to shake hands with the machines; you’d send your machine!”
| Location: 4889 |
Color: yellow |
Bringing Culture to the Physicists
I got a big kick out of giving my talk on “Deciphering Mayan Hieroglyphics.” There I was, being something I’m not, again.
| Location: 5026 |
Color: yellow |
Cargo Cult Science [ 4 ]
It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty—a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, 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,
| Location: 5403 |
Color: blue |
Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can—if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong—to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.
| Location: 5407 |
Color: yellow |
In summary, 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.
| Location: 5412 |
Color: pink |