Fantastic Book. This book shows the true meaning of a curios person. I love curios people. I also love nonchalant people. Feynman is both.

The peak of this book happened in the “O americano, outra vez!” chapter for me. Feynman stayed for a year in Brazil. And found out that they did not have real science.

Have you got science? No! You have only told what a word means in terms of other words.

I never looked at it this way. I have had this experience that a lot of people who are competent on the paper are not competent in actual work. I didn’t know what is the cause or how to describe it. This is the perfect description. Some people think knowledge is defining a word in terms of other words. It’s not the words are only useful when you actually know the concept. Knowing means experienced it. And most of the learning materials on the internet in this category. They just tell you more words to understand a word. Maybe to learn something you have to, do it?

Another story about people and understanding is when he’s at the Nobel ceremony.

She turned to me and said, “Oh! You’re one of the Nobel-Prize-winners. In what field did you do your work?” “In physics,” I said. “Oh. Well, nobody knows anything about that, so I guess we can’t talk about it.”

“On the contrary,” I answered.“It’s because somebody knows something about it that we can’t talk about physics. It’s the things that nobody knows anything about that we can discuss. We can talk about the weather; we can talk about social problems; we can talk about psychology; we can talk about international finance–gold transfers we can’t talk about, because those are understood–so it’s the subject that nobody knows anything about that we can all talk about!”

In the first chapters from his childhood to university there are stories about how got interested in many subjects. He did experiments on ribosomes in biology labs during his time at MIT. I think everyone has this invisible force that keeps them from going into other fields the way Feynman did.

He says hypnotism is interesting because when someone is performing it on you, you don’t think anything is happening until it actually happens. You keep telling yourself that you are aware of the situation and can walk out at any moment until you cannot. Which is funny because most things in life sound like that. You tell yourself something is easy I can do it. Or you can easily change something but you just don’t want it. But in the end until you actually try to do it you don’t understand you cannot.

He was at Los Alamos during WW2. He became famous for cracking all the locks and safes there. This story was the funniest. The combination of him just chasing curiosity and defeating all these people who’s job was to secure safes is funny.