And here it is! (drum roll) The much anticipated Part 2 of 2. It’s for your own protection really. I had posted it all at once yesterday, the lord only knows what would have happened. As you may recall, I posted about “Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman” back at the beginning of March when I started reading it and posted my immediate thoughts about the book on my Goodreads account and in my (now weekly) newsletter. I hope you’ll go read those!
Don’t forget to go back and read Wrap Up Notes from Surely You’re Joking – Part 1 of 2!
“In any thinking process there are moments when everything is going good and you’ve got wonderful ideas. Teaching is an interruption, so it’s the greatest pain in the neck in the world. And then there are the longer periods of time when not much is coming to you. You’re not getting any ideas, and if you’re doing nothing at all, it drives you nuts! You can’t even say ‘I’m teach my class.’”
This reminded me of all the things that writers (or any artist really) do all their lives. We always tell ourselves, “If I had no distractions, I’d get so much more done!” But we wouldn’t. Sometimes the distractions are just the time filler between bursts of brilliance. They can also be excuses to the masses why you haven’t produced anything lately.
“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.”
Words to live by.
“…they could pass the examinations, and “learn” all this stuff, and not know anything at all, except what they had memorized.”
Speaking of engineering school in Brazil. I could write a whole post on this from an “unschoolers” perspective. This is what K-12 schools in the U.S. have perfected these days. They can pass a test, regurgitate facts, but have no solid knowledge of what they are studying. They don’t understand how history, literature, religion, and science are all related. That’s how I graduated high school with honors, standing on the stage thinking, “We’re screwed if I’m one of the smarter people here because I have no idea what I’m doing. I just followed the directions and got an A on the test.”
“That night when he came home from work, he was depressed. She finally got it out of him: He thought it would be nice to buy her that picture (at a museum they had visited earlier), but when he went back to the exhibit, he was told that the picture had already been sold. So she had it to surprise him with on his birthday.
What I got out of that story was something still very new to me: 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.”
Reminds me of something Sheldon would say on the Big Bang Theory!
“…pompous fools drive me up the wall. Ordinary fools are all right; you can talk to them, and try to help them out. But pompous fools – guys who are fools and are covering it all over and impressing peoples as to how wonderful they are with all this hocus pocus – THAT, I CANNOT STAND”
Also sounds like a Sheldon quote, but I agree.
“But then I began to think, what else is there that we believe? (And I thought then about the witch doctors, and how easy it would have been to check on them by noticing that nothing really worked.) So I found things that even more people believe, such as that we have some knowledge of how to educate. There are big schools of reading methods and mathematics methods, and so forth, but if you notice, you’ll see the reading scores keep going down – hardly going up – in spite of the fact that we continually use these same people to improve the methods. There’s a witch doctor remedy that doesn’t work. It ought to be looked into; how do they know that their method should work? Another example is how to treat criminals. We obviously have made no progress – lots of theory, but no progress – in decreasing the amount of crime by the method that we use to handle criminals.”
I have no commentary on this other than, “Yeah, dammit.”
“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.”
What a concept! What if we lived in a world where you couldn’t vote to force people to do or pay for things you believe are beneficial? Instead, you had to present them with the facts in ways they can grasp and use, and then step back and allow people to make their own decisions…like say…vaccinations, health habits, and social issues.
The end and NEXT!
If you’d like to get a copy of “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” and read it for yourself, check out Thriftbooks.com. Used books, free shipping, and points to redeem toward free books?! Yes, please! It’s a wonderful book, highly entertaining and left met thinking a little better about these weird physicists types.