Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman – by Richard Feynman
ISBN: 0393316041 READ: August 2015
A fantastic book about the adventures of one of my favorite people in the world. It is a collection of outrageous stories that happened to Feynman throughout his life. His anecdotes are so entertaining, as well as they contagiously make the reader see the world in the same way that he does; through science. I could not put this one down.
Check out this video to get a sense of how Richard Feynman thought about the world.
“We’re exploring, we’re trying to find out as much as we can about the world, people say to me are you looking for the ultimate laws of physics, no I’m not, I’m just looking to find out more about the world and if turns out there’s a simple ultimate law that explains everything, so be it that would be very nice to discover but if it turns out it’s like a onion with a millions of layers and we’re just sick and tired of looking at the layers then that’s the way it is but whatever way it comes out it’s nature is there and she’s going to come out the way she is and therefore when we go and investigate it we shouldn’t pre-decide what it is what we are trying to do except to find out more about it. You see one thing is I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing, I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things but I’m not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don’t know anything about. But I don’t have to know a answer, I don’t have, I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without having any purpose which is the way it really is as far as I can tell/possible, it doesn’t frighten me.”
