I got interested in Richard Feynmann’s writings after reading Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! The reason I got so much interested in these books from Richard Feynmann was that it draws a different picture of him in my mind. You see, famous scientists are known for achievements. You read about result of their work. But this book show the human side of Richard by showing his mistakes and the curiosity that led to success. I love this, it breaks the usual image of a genius doing excellent work one after another.

Early life #

This book starts with His life in high school and later how he met his first wife. Later the story is sad, but also beautiful.

She founds out she has a bump on her neck. They go to different doctors but no one can diagnose it clearly. Richard was disappointed by the incompetency of those people. He started looking into diseases with the known symptoms.

As soon as I hear about it I go down to the library at Princeton and look up lymphatic diseases, and find “Swelling of the Lymphatic Glands. (1) Tuberculosis of the lymphatic glands. This is very easy to diagnose…”—so I figure this isn’t what Arlene has, because the doctors are having trouble trying to figure it out.

I start reading about some other diseases: lymphodenema, lymphodenoma, Hodgkin’s disease, all kinds of other things; they’re all cancers of one crazy form or another. The only difference between lymphodenema and lymphodenoma was, as far as I could make out by reading it very carefully, that if the patient dies, it’s lymphodenoma; if the patient survives—at least for a while—then it’s lymphodenema.

At any rate, I read through all the lymphatic diseases, and decided that the most likely possibility was that Arlene had an incurable disease. Then I half smiled to myself, thinking, “I bet everybody who reads through a medical book thinks they have a fatal disease.” And yet, after reading everything very carefully, I couldn’t find any other possibility. It was serious.

The funny thing is later he tells Arlene(his wife) what he read and later turns out the doctor is also clueless.

One of the diseases I told Arlene about was Hodgkin’s disease. When she next saw her doctor, she asked him about it: “Could it be Hodgkin’s disease?”

He said, “Well, yes, that’s a possibility.”

When she went to the county hospital, the doctor wrote the following diagnosis: “Hodgkin’s disease—?” So I realized that the doctor didn’t know any more than I did about this problem.

So the doctors in the story were incompetent. In the end it turns out to be Hodgkin’s disease, and it’s fatal.

Then of course in this situation the hard part is how to tell the bad news. Most of the times you want to tell the truth and be direct but also you are worried that this news can ruin the rest of your time together.

Everyone except Richard is against telling the truth. They think the truth will devastate her.

A beautiful part of this story is how much Arlene and trust each other.

So I wrote Arlene a goodbye love letter, figuring that if she ever found out the truth after I had told her it was glandular fever, we would be through. I carried the letter with me all the time. The gods never make it easy; they always make it harder. I go to the hospital to see Arlene—having made this decision—and there she is, sitting up in bed, surrounded by her parents, somewhat distraught. When she sees me, her face lights up and she says, “Now I know how valuable it is that we tell each other the truth!” Nodding at her parents, she continues, “They’re telling me I have glandular fever, and I’m not sure whether I believe them or not. Tell me, Richard, do I have Hodgkin’s disease or glandular fever?”

“You have glandular fever,” I said, and I died inside. It was terrible—just terrible!

Her reaction was completely simple: “Oh! Fine! Then I believe them.” Because we had built up so much trust in each other, she was completely relieved. Everything was solved, and all was very nice.

Later in the story He has to tell her that he lied. This was the last lie.

Arlene had to stay at the hospital all the time so they kept in touch through letters. Reading this chapter I constantly imagine how hard is it to live like this. What’s the secret to wake up in the morning and not be sad about everything.

It’s hard to explain. If a Martian (who, we’ll imagine, never dies except by accident) came to Earth and saw this peculiar race of creatures—these humans who live about seventy or eighty years, knowing that death is going to come—it would look to him like a terrible problem of psychology to live under those circumstances, knowing that life is only temporary. Well, we humans somehow figure out how to live despite this problem: we laugh, we joke, we live. The only difference for me and Arlene was; instead of fifty years, it was five years. It was only a quantitative difference—the psychological problem was just the same. The only way it would have become any different is if we had said to ourselves, “But those other people have it better, because they might live fifty years.” But that’s crazy. Why make yourself miserable saying things like, “Why do we have such bad luck? What has God done to us? What have we done to deserve this?”—all of which, if you understand reality and take it completely into your heart, are irrelevant and unsolvable. They are just things that nobody can know. Your situation is just an accident of life.

Traveling to Random Places #

Do you have the same feeling that it’s hard to plan how to visit a new a country? There’s a constant feeling of what are the things that I must visit. now days it feels like if you don’t take a photo at a famous site you didn’t go there.

Contrary to this part about how they planned a trip in Japan.

One afternoon we were talking to the host who was arranging our trip. He shows us a railroad map, and Gweneth sees a curved line with lots of stops in the middle of the Ise Peninsula—it’s not near the water; it’s not near anywhere. She puts her finger on the end of the line and says, “We want to go here.” He looks at it, and says, “Oh! You want to go to…Iseokitsu?” She says, “Yes.” “But there’s nothing in Iseokitsu,” he says, looking at me as if my wife is crazy, and hoping I’ll bring her back to her senses.

So I say, “Yes, that’s right; we want to go to Iseokitsu.” Gweneth hadn’t talked to me about it, but I knew what she was thinking: we enjoy traveling to places in the middle of nowhere, places we’ve never heard of, places which have nothing.

Shuttle Story #

The final story in the book is about his investigation of the NASA’s shuttle that blew up in 1986. NASA calls him and other people to figure out why there was an accident and how to improve the shuttle.

The kind of stuff you read in this chapter is crazy. Because you think this is NASA. But that’s what I said I like about this book. It destroys the polished view of achievements and reveals the failures

While doing the investigation Richard finds out how much time is wasted in big organizations like NASA. The hierarchy of people makes it hard to just talk with someone. From the beginning Richard wanted to talk with engineers who built different pieces. To know what were the operating conditions of different parts. This was not simply possible. There are layers people who must be informed before you can talk.

But Richard is also direct. So in case he cannot do anything useful. He would be vocal about it. Which turns out to be a better solution than nagging about a situation.

I went over to Mr. Rogers and said, “We’re going to Florida next Thursday. That means we’ve got nothing to do for five days: what’ll I do for five days?”

“Well, what would you have done if you hadn’t been on the commission?”

“I was going to go to Boston to consult, but I canceled it in order to work 100 percent.”

“Well, why don’t you go to Boston for the five days?”

I couldn’t take that. I thought, “I’m dead already! The goddamn thing isn’t working right.” I went back to my hotel, devastated.

Then I thought of Bill Graham, and called him up. “Listen, Bill,” I said. “You got me into this; now you’ve gotta save me: I’m completely depressed; I can’t stand it.”

He says, “What’s the matter?”

“I want to do something! I want to go around and talk to some engineers!”

He says, “Sure! Why not? I’ll arrange a trip for you. You can go wherever you want: …

After number of interviews Richard develops a hypothesis about the root cause. He performs an experiment to ensure it’s correct and in the meeting the day after he shows it to others.

There’s a video of this part. It’s a bold move to do such thing in the public. This is something you can afford when you know 100% of your idea, not just how to tell it.

After this he continues to investigate how they can prevent such failures. And this story completely shows how the failure is not only technical.

He meets Mr. Lovinghood, manager of engineers working on the engine.

Mr. Lovingood says, “I don’t think so. As a matter of fact, although I’m now a manager, I was trained as an engineer.” “All right,” I said. “Here’s a piece of paper each. Please write on your paper the answer to this question: what do you think is the probability that a flight would be uncompleted due to a failure in this engine?” They write down their answers and hand in their papers. One guy wrote “99-44/100% pure” (copying the Ivory soap slogan), meaning about 1 in 200. Another guy wrote something very technical and highly quantitative in the standard statistical way, carefully defining everything, that I had to translate—which also meant about 1 in 200. The third guy wrote, simply, “1 in 300.” Mr. Lovingood’s paper, however, said, Cannot quantify. Reliability is judged from:

• past experience
• quality control in manufacturing
• engineering judgment

“Well,” I said, “I’ve got four answers, and one of them weaseled.” I turned to Mr. Lovingood: “I think you weaseled.”

“I don’t think I weaseled.”

“You didn’t tell me what your confidence was, sir; you told me how you determined it. What I want to know is: after you determined it, what was it?”

He says, “100 percent”—the engineers’ jaws drop, my jaw drops; I look at him, everybody looks at him—“uh, uh, minus epsilon!”

So I say, “Well, yes; that’s fine. Now, the only problem is, WHAT IS EPSILON?”

He says, “10-5.” It was the same number that Mr. Ullian had told us about: 1 in 100,000.

I showed Mr. Lovingood the other answers and said, “You’ll be interested to know that there is a difference between engineers and management here—a factor of more than 300.”

Epilogue #

This book is full of interesting stories. It teaches a lot of things. And it’s not the usual things you learn when you try to learn. These are principles you learn from Richard by living parts of his life when reading the book.

Seeing how he handled some situations that might never happen in your life will give you ideas when you are having a hard time. How he navigated his way in a big organization like NASA contains a lot of good examples of how to work effectively.

I’m going to read his other books as well.