Thougts on Feynman's "The pleasure of finding things out"

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 10:39:24 GMT

Today I read parts of a book, which is actually an anthology of short stories and speeches given by Richard Feynman. It made me reconsider a lot of the biases and perceptions that I had about physicists and scientists in general. I've always viewed scientists as cold, callous people who are too self absorbed in their curiosity to have any care for the world. It is because of that reason I have held scientific research that has no apparent practical applications in very low regard.

What I've learned from the book, in addition to a few more concepts in Physics, of which Feynman is a very capable teacher, is scientists as people of their own right. They are a different class of people with a different personality who truly enjoy the material that they are researching. I've never understood that curiosity uninhibited by practical purpose and probably never will; because I'm those class of people for which everything I do has to serve a purpose. I thrive in situations in which there is a close ended, well defined goal to achieve. I've never had much patience or much skill in pursuing the "open" ended problems; for which there is no immediate apparent "right" answer;the continuous discovery of knowledge, which according to Feynman is what scientific research is really about.

Another thing I learned from reading the book is to respect knowledge, but to also question critically everything I read. I had somehow gotten into a mode where I lost the pleasure of asking questions; I think what happened is the number of questions become overwhelming and I had to stop asking them. But the important lesson that Feynman taught me through the book is that it's important to keep asking questions; because you will never really have a "guaranteed" answer to anything, and that's ok.

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Thougts on Feynman's "The pleasure of finding things out"