After Feynman: Closing the Book, Wandering Alone, the Scenery Along the Way

Humans evolved from animals, and the evolution of our minds is like inventing a new tool that still has all kinds of flaws and is not very easy to use. The uniquely human mind has its defects - one of which is that it can be clouded and misled by its own superstitions. The discovery of the scientific method finally showed it a way out, enabling it to reflect the objective world, so that scientists can take a small step toward some research direction and make a little progress, rather than going in circles and standing still.

- Richard Feynman

The physicist Richard Feynman has a collection of speeches and interviews, translated into Chinese as The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. It gathers his interviews and speeches on various occasions. The book covers a wide range: Feynman on education, Feynman on his research experience, and Feynman's reflections on science and human society. It is well worth reading.

Most people enjoy anecdotes like Feynman's safe-cracking pranks, but few take the time to understand his thought. Feynman's ideas are profound and fascinating, and they offer great inspiration.

Feynman was a scientist of strong individuality. From boyhood, under his father's guidance, he was deeply interested in science, especially physics and mathematics. His father was a gifted educator; in Feynman's affectionate recollections we see a kind, patiently teaching father.

When Feynman was small, his father used stories from the Encyclopædia Britannica to teach him. Unlike most parents, his father was skilled at guiding him to observe and imagine the world. When talking about the size of dinosaurs, he did not stop at the book's description of how big and wide a dinosaur's head was or how tall and long its body, but used concrete comparisons. He told the boy that a dinosaur would be about as tall as the second story of their house, and its head larger than their window. His father often took Feynman for walks in the woods; on seeing a bird, he would tell him its English, Japanese, Chinese, and Latin names, and then say: knowing what the bird is called is not very useful; the key is to observe the bird. So he would take Feynman to carefully observe the bird's various features.

Guided by his father, Feynman learned to observe the world carefully from childhood. Moreover, his father's education filled him with curiosity and interest. Feynman immersed himself in the joy of pursuing knowledge and lived happily all his life.

An artist once said to Feynman: you scientists are so dull; when you see a flower, you think only how to dissect it layer by layer, while we artists can appreciate its beauty. Feynman dismissed this as nonsense. The beauty of the flower, he said, you can appreciate, and so can we.

Beyond the beauty visible to the naked eye, we can also see the beauty that exists in the smaller microscopic world within the flower, the beauty inside its cells. We can realize that flowers have color in order to attract insects to pollinate them, which means insects can also see color. This raises a question: can lower animals also perceive beauty? Questions about the microscopic world like this only add to the flower's beauty and mystery, making people even more intrigued and awestruck. This very pleasure is the joy of discovery that absorbed Feynman for a lifetime.

From this exchange of Feynman's we can see the imprint of his father's early education, and how profound the influence of a good education can be on a person's life. I regret coming across this interview so late; had I read it years earlier, I am sure I would have drawn on Feynman's father's approach in raising my own children.

Feynman's father also taught him, when young, not to bow and scrape before the powerful. His father ran a uniform business and told him that a great man like the Pope, out of his uniform, was no different from an ordinary person. Under his father's influence, Feynman never worshiped authority. As everyone knows, to make creative contributions in science one must free oneself from superstition and worship of authority.

Feynman later worked on the development of the atomic bomb, and he showed strong individuality among the scientists, daring to voice dissenting views and even bluntly telling his own superior that his ideas were those of a madman and completely wrong. Had Feynman learned to be a yes-man in childhood, he would never have dared. Happily, those around him could appreciate his talent and did not regard his irreverence as treason. His superior in particular kept promoting him to more important work.

At a scientists' conference at the American atomic-bomb research site, when the great physicist Niels Bohr spoke, no one else dared question his authority; only the young, unknown Feynman showed a questioning spirit. After his lecture, Bohr set everyone else aside and called Feynman over to talk. Feynman bluntly refuted the parts of Bohr's views he thought wrong, and Bohr - a titan of physics whom almost no one dared challenge - had to keep revising his opinions because of the young Feynman. This shows Bohr was also an outstanding man: he did not listen to flatterers and was more interested in the opinions that opposed him.

In Feynman's conduct we again see his father's early influence. Feynman scorned all the uniforms that supposedly made one superior; he was not vain. After he was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences, he found that the main business of the so-called academicians was meeting together to decide who else qualified, an utterly boring affair, so he resigned his membership. Even his Nobel Prize he regarded with extraordinary equanimity. He thanked the scientific community for recognizing his discoveries, yet did not feel those discoveries were anything special.

Compared with the glamorous life of an academic star, Feynman preferred mischief. Throughout his life he invented all kinds of harmless pranks, the most amusing being his knack for cracking safes. While working at the atomic-bomb site, his letters to his wife and father were reviewed by a censorship board to prevent leaks; to amuse themselves, he wrote to them in code. His childlike curiosity never faded, and it was the source of his constant happiness.

Feynman's profound reflections on the world are also immensely rewarding. He loved science but also held it under constant reflection. After the atomic bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Feynman even fell into depression. He and his colleagues realized that modern science had created something terrible.

Further reflection led Feynman to warn that the most frightening thing in the future world might not be the side effects of physics but those of biology. He feared that one day people would use biological knowledge to manufacture viruses and harm humanity. He also worried that biologists would one day discover a way to live forever, plunging the Earth into catastrophe.

However, I disagree with Feynman's latter worry. I do not believe multicellular organisms can be immortal, especially a multicellular organism like us humans, with tens of trillions of cells. As cells divide and differentiate, it is utterly impossible to make no mistakes at all; as long as some cell errs, we cannot escape cancer and death. So Feynman was crying for the sky - though he was not above such worry; after the atomic bomb he once thought humanity would soon perish.

Feynman disliked the superstition and thought control that are everywhere in the world; he believed that only if scientists spared no effort in popularizing science could superstition and thought control be reduced. I deeply agree. Scientific common sense is like light: when it illuminates places once dark, superstition and thought control, which can only survive in darkness, lose their foothold. But this road is long and requires the effort of countless generations.

In middle age, Feynman realized that a person has no duty to shoulder a mission for the whole world. This realization lightened him considerably. It was von Neumann who first told Feynman not to live under such pressure; later Feynman gradually came to see that setting down this burden brought ease. Many people carry a strong sense of mission that weighs on them heavily. I, too, only realized in middle age that there is no need to impose life missions and tasks on oneself.

Feynman walked a road few have traveled; his questioning spirit gave him the awareness and ability to innovate. But for the vast majority of people, accepting that all the knowledge they have learned and all their life experience may be unreliable is very hard. Scientists must maintain this spirit of questioning everything all their lives, because only by questioning everything can we discover exceptions, and only by discovering exceptions can we open door after door and window after window to see a vaster world.

Anyone who chooses a life path similar to Feynman's must have enough courage to live in solitude. My mentor, perhaps sensing my loneliness some time ago, comforted me with eight characters: walking alone, the scenery along the way. I feel these eight words describe Feynman's life even better, and I am willing to use them to encourage myself, telling myself not to fear loneliness on the road ahead.