You are joking, of course, Mr. Feynman

My acquaintance with Mr. Feynman began with the translation of Eric Lippert ’s article “What would Mr. Feynman do” . In this remarkable article, in the form of a comic story, answers are given to “non-standard questions”, so beloved by some small-scale companies when selecting candidates for work. And since Mr. Feynman always loved “non-standard questions” and gave them even less “standard answers”, the interview turned out to be fun and, as I learned later, very similar to the unpublished chapter from the book “You are, of course, joking, Mr. Feynman”.

The book itself is a collection of funny and touching stories about the life of a "simple" person, named Richard Phillips Feynman, the most insignificant achievement of which (in his own mind) was the Nobel Prize in Physics. This is a book about a wonderful person, intelligent, talented, stubborn; a man whose thirst for knowledge, experimentation and solving various puzzles was almost limitless.


Quote : I wonder why. I wonder why. I wonder why I wonder. I wonder why I wonder why I wonder why I wonder?
')
As a twelve-year-old child, this guy made a simple security alarm in his “laboratory”; he made a control box for his own stand, which had a light bulb that lit up in case of malfunctions; he repaired the radios of the whole district "thinking". It is clear that in the thirties of the last century, radio receivers were very simple devices, but, nevertheless, how many guys at this age can make their own fuse or make a voltmeter from an ammeter?

Quote : I have little idea what happens to people: they do not learn by understanding. They learn in some other way - by mechanical memorization or in some other way. Their knowledge is so fragile!

In this book there is no clear story, there is no particular topic and idea, as there are none in our life. We live, we grow, we study, we love, we take a great interest in something; and this book, being autobiographical, is similarly structured. But there is one topic to which Feynman returns again and again: these are topics of education, knowledge, science. He constantly writes that people should learn by understanding, not by mechanical memorization, and that textbooks should contribute to this. Since science is aimed at understanding the laws of nature, there should be examples in textbooks connecting scientific laws with the outside world, so that a schoolchild or student does not just “jagged” the definition, but understood what was behind it and could then verify it independently in practice . While still a high school student, Richard invented interesting problems in geometry, since he sincerely believed that the examples in existing textbooks are dull. All this, ultimately, led to the emergence of the famous “Feynman lectures in physics”, which for more than 50 years have been considered one of the best courses in physics.

Quote : Once I started messing around with a computer and noticed something very peculiar. If you take a unit and divide by 243, you get 0.004115226337448 ... Curious ... I decided that this was pretty funny.

A couple of years ago, long before reading this book, I was flipping through John Bentley’s wonderful book, The Pearls of Programming (**). Then my attention was attracted by the seventh chapter entitled “Preliminary Estimates”, in which the author offers to test his “intuition” on some questions, and then shows the usefulness of the “preliminary assessments” for the developer. After that, almost at the very end of the chapter the following quotation is given:

“I often heard that preliminary assessments called Fermi’s approximate estimates by the name of a famous physicist. History says that Enrico Fermi, Robert Oppenheimer and other members of the Manhattan Project waited for the first atomic bomb to explode behind a low wall a few kilometers from the epicenter. Fermi narwhal a lot of small pieces of paper that he threw into the air when he saw the explosion flash.When the shock wave passed them, he measured the distance that pieces of paper were thrown and quickly calculated the power of the explosion atomic bomb, which was later accurately confirmed by expensive measuring equipment . "

I safely forgot whose name the preliminary assessments were called, and indeed I couldn’t remember where I read about them for a long time. While reading the book about “Mr. Feynman” I had a constant feeling of deja vu, so often and skillfully Feynman used his ability to say “how the answer will approximately look, or, when the answer is received, explain why it is exactly like that”. Yes, in the above quotation Feynman could not be the main character, because at that time he was looking at a nuclear explosion through the windshield of the truck, because he knew that his eyes could not suffer from a bright flash, but namely from ultraviolet light, which would be safely absorbed by this glass (***).

Quote : - And where did you get it?

- In your closet.

- But I locked it!

“I know you locked him up.” But locks - junk!

This book is interesting to read, not only because it is easily written, it has a lot of humor and interesting stories. It is also interesting to read it because one can learn a lot of interesting things from it. The book shows an excellent example of the fact that it is not necessary to go in cycles in one thing in your life. Besides the fact that “Mr. Feynman” was an excellent physicist, he professionally painted and played drums and frigideur; he studied Portuguese and Japanese; he hacked safes and studied the Maya writing, challenging the opinion of world experts in this field; and Bernard Werber (****) would envy his experiments with ants. In short, Richard Feynman is an excellent example of how a person can be talented in many different fields. And for this, nothing is needed: craving and “some” zeal.

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(*) Of course, this whole article is pure fiction, but the atmosphere and style of the story are very similar. Not for nothing, this Eric's note, despite its non-technical character and the absence of the slightest information about C # and compilers, turned out to be so popular.

(**) The review of the book by John Bentley is absent from my list of reviews , but a small opinion about it can be found in the article “Classic books on programming” .

(***) To be honest, I doubt the veracity of the quote given by John Bentley for one simple reason: if that were true, then Feynman, also being a member of the Manhattan project, would probably know about it, and would definitely mention their "notes". But what you really can not argue with is the fact that Fermi was the greatest master of preliminary assessments, and even excelled Feynman in his mastery, which the latter repeatedly mentions.

(****) This is a popular modern writer, the author of the famous three-volume "Ants" .