# Richard Feynman

###### tags: `thread`

I've been reading "Stop, Mr. Feynman" recently. Richard Feynman is a very charming man, and this book is like a biography of Feynman's life (the title is also said to be chosen by Feynman), compiled from recorded conversations between Feynman and his drumming friends.

As a theoretical physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project (the development of the atomic bomb) and won the Nobel Prize in Physics, much of the book is devoted to Feynman's interesting "experiments" and "pranks" (especially the pranks) from childhood to adulthood, and Feynman's pride in Feynman's pride in these pranks far exceeds that of winning the Nobel Prize.

Feynman was a very funny man, who maintained a very strong curiosity throughout his life, lived an interesting life with no limits, and was always a maverick with a reputation for irresponsibility, a physicist I really liked.


We can see this book because of his drummer friend Ralph: Feynman once went to a good friend's house for dinner, and then his friend's son ran over and asked him if he wanted to play drums together, and Feynman joined them.

After that, [every time he played the drums](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKTSaezB4p8), Feynman started talking about his story, and Ralph called him "chief" and recorded him and encouraged him to tell it, and finally someone compiled the recorded material and published this interesting book (thanks Ralph).

Feynman has some very unique views on life that I agree with, and I'm going to include them and update them later. 👇

### Like to learn how things work by hands

Feynman had a small lab in his house when he was very young (about 11 or 12 years old), he was tinkering with some gadgets at home, it was [the 30s era](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roaring_Twenties), so almost every house in America had a radio, and Feynman had nothing to do but take the radio apart to see what was inside.

Feynman was not satisfied with this, he often went to the second-hand market to find some very cheap radios, and then find their own way to fix them, many times these radios are not connected to the wires, a coil needs to be replaced and other minor problems, for Feynman is very simple, so often a repair will be good.

Slowly Feynman had some small reputation in the neighborhood, everyone knew that Feynman would repair things after they went to him, because at that time the United States was in the "Great Depression", and Feynman was a child so the fee was very cheap, Feynman learned a lot of knowledge between repairing various things.

Feynman describes in great detail his experience and feelings when he first repaired a radio, "One night, I was on one of the repaired radios and actually received a radio broadcast from WACO in Waco city. At that moment, there was an indescribable excitement", it can be seen that these experiences had a great impact on Feynman, and he can still vividly recall the details years later.

Feynman was curious about everything and wanted to understand everything himself. He recalled that the first thing he did when he went to Princeton University as a graduate student was to see the "cyclotron" they had made, which left a deep impression on Feynman.

He found that Princeton's gas pedal was not a clean room, but a messy room with wires of all colors in the corners, physicists walking around, and cooling water flowing out of the pipes from time to time.

He realized at once that Princeton's cyclotron had been assembled by the physicists themselves so that they would know all the details, and the performance of each module.

(In contrast, most physicists elsewhere would just leave that work to the engineers.)

Later, Feynman also conducted his own experiments in front of a national audience at the "Space Shuttle Challenger Explosion Investigation" hearings to prove that the cause of the explosion was the "rubber ring".

I often say "break the pot to the bottom", and after that I might add "to prove that you really understand something, do it".

### learn it, not just know the name

Feynman hated rote memorization and formulae, and he also hated formalism, he liked to really understand the problem and get pleasure from it.

Once Feynman met a sophisticated physicist, and this physicist was a research assistant of Einstein (who had a deep understanding of gravity), and Feynman asked him a very pleasing question.

"If you sit in a rocket liftoff, there is a clock in the rocket, there is a clock on the ground, the requirement that the clock on the ground to go 1h when the rocket must return to Earth, so how to adjust the speed to get the clock on the rocket as far ahead as possible (Feynman told him, because Einstein's theory, the higher the rocket the less gravity, the slower the time goes) ".

It took this professor a long time to figure out that this problem was no different from all free-fall problems, which simply require launching an object into the sky and requiring it to return in no more than an hour (from one of Einstein's fundamental laws of gravity, namely [PROPER TIME](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proper_time)).

Later, Feynman gave many examples, including the "Feynman method of learning", which was summarized by later generations, about the importance of "getting it". Feynman also reminded us not to be afraid of learning knowledge slowly, but to be afraid of learning knowledge is not solid enough, if you do not really understand these basic concepts, on this basis to do everything will be wrong.

### Don't be afraid of risks, try boldly

Feynman also told us not to be afraid of risk and to be brave enough to make some attempts (but his attempts sometimes turned out to be the last one).

Feynman was curious about a question: "If a water pipe has been spraying water and the water pressure is large enough, put on the ground may be clockwise rotation, then if a water pipe has been sucking water, will rotate in what direction.

At that time, many physics students were discussing this problem, and they used many mathematical formulas and calculations, but Feynman felt that this was not enough, and he wanted to do an experiment himself.

He went to the cyclotron laboratory at Princeton, found a copper tube bent into an S-shape, and then shoved a rubber tube into the hole in the copper tube, with an air compressor at one end of the rubber tube and a pool of water at the other (so that the tube sucked the water in), so the experiment began.

At first it went pretty well, but Feynman wanted to add atmospheric pressure to get more data, and that's when the tube exploded, glass shards and water splashed around, and the teacher next to him was drenched :).

Feynman thought he would be expelled, but he was just taught that "first-year experiments should be done in first-year labs", and Chen Ning Yang once commented on the difference between Chinese and American education, saying "[If Feynman had been born in China, he would have either gone to jail or gotten a nervous breakdown!](https://www.ixigua.com/6917611965313614343) ".

Robert Noyce, the founder of Intel (and one of the inventors of the integrated circuit), was also very naughty when he was young, he stole a pig from the farmer's house next door and killed it for dinner. Finally, the judge and the school spared him once.

So sometimes taking risks is necessary (killing pigs may not be), and when you have to take risks, you might as well go out and make some bold attempts.