Review: Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Richard Feynmann)
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Richard Feynman Surely Youre Joking Mr Feynman v5 ebook download free pdf this is a fun, easy to read book. i was told to read it by a friend. i read it to avoid doing the linguistics tests im supposed to do. useful procrastination ftw! As usual, comments and quotes below ------------------------------------------ Another thing I did in high school was to invent problems and theorems. I mean, if I were doing any mathematical thing at all, I would find some practical example for which it would be useful. I invented a set of right-triangle problems. But instead of giving the lengths of two of the sides to find the third, I gave the difference of the two sides. A typical example was: There's a flagpole, and there's a rope that comes down from the top. When you hold the rope straight down, it's three feet longer than the pole, and when you pull the rope out tight, it's five feet from the base of the pole. How high is the pole? tricky, but certainly doable for primary school children. the smart of them. im fairly certain that a lot of high school students wud not be able to solve this. - I tried to explain--it was my own aunt--that there was no reason not to do that, but you can't say that to anybody who's smart, who runs a hotel! I learned there that innovation is a very difficult thing in the real world. truth! this is politics in a nutshell, any kind of politics: national, local, office... - The other guy's afraid, so he says no. So I take the two girls in a taxi to the hotel, and discover that there's a dance organized by the deaf and dumb, believe it or not. They all belonged to a club. It turns out many of them can feel the rhythm enough to dance to the music and applaud the band at the end of each number. It was very, very interesting! I felt as if I was in a foreign country and couldn't speak the language: I could speak, but nobody could hear me. Everybody was talking with signs to everybody else, and I couldn't understand anything! I asked my girl to teach me some signs and I learned a few, like you learn a foreign language, just for fun. Everyone was so happy and relaxed with each other, making jokes and smiling all the time; they didn't seem to have any real difficulty of any kind communicating with each other. It was the same as with any other language, except for one thing: as they're making signs to each other, their heads were always turning from one side to the other. I realized what that was. When someone wants to make a side remark or interrupt you, he can't yell, "Hey, Jack!" He can only make a signal, which you won't catch unless you're in the habit of looking around all the time. never thought of that, but true! - When it came time for me to give my talk on the subject, I started off by drawing an outline of the cat and began to name the various muscles. The other students in the class interrupt me: "We know all that!" "Oh," I say, "you do? Then no wonder I can catch up with you so fast after you've had four years of biology." They had wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes. ive heard this complaint lots of time about biology. i rather like evolutionary biology, which surely cannot be learned in 15 mins, but i dunno abouy plant cell biology or whatever. is biology mostly just remembering stuff? surely things like genetics, pop* genetics, evolutionary theory are hard. - At the Princeton graduate school, the physics department and the math department shared a common lounge, and every day at four o'clock we would have tea. It was a way of relaxing in the afternoon, in addition to imitating an English college. People would sit around playing Go, or discussing theorems. In those days topology was the big thing. I still remember a guy sitting on the couch, thinking very hard, and another guy standing in front of him, saying, "And therefore such-and-such is true." "Why is that?" the guy on the couch asks. "It's trivial! It's trivial!" the standing guy says, and he rapidly reels off a series of logical steps: "First you assume thus-and-so, then we have Kerchoff's this-and-that; then there's Waffenstoffer's Theorem, and we substitute this and construct that. Now you put the vector which goes around here and then thus-and-so . . ." The guy on the couch is struggling to understand all this stuff, which goes on at high speed for about fifteen minutes! Finally the standing guy comes out the other end, and the guy on the couch says, "Yeah, yeah. It's trivial." We physicists were laughing, trying to figure them out. We decided that "trivial" means "proved." So we joked with the mathematicians: "We have a new theorem--that mathematicians can prove only trivial theorems, because every theorem that's proved is trivial." i thought of that befor. it makes certain theories of tautologies rather implausible. if tautologies, or necessary truths are all trivial, and just restating things - why arent they all obvius? ... - One thing I never did learn was contour integration. I had learned to do integrals by various methods shown in a book that my high school physics teacher Mr. Bader had given me. One day he told me to stay after class. "Feynman," he said, "you talk too much and you make too much noise. I know why. You're bored. So I'm going to give you a book. You go up there in the back, in the corner, and study this book, and when you know everything that's in this book, you can talk again." i wish my teachers wud hav don that to me! or that i had grown up with Khan academy! - In another experiment, I laid out a lot of glass microscope slides, and got the ants to walk on them, back and forth, to some sugar I put on the windowsill. Then, by replacing an old slide with a new one, or by rearranging the slides, I could demonstrate that the ants had no sense of geometry: they couldn't figure out where something was. If they went to the sugar one way and there was a shorter way back, they would never figure out the short way. It was also pretty clear from rearranging the glass slides that the ants left some sort of trail. So then came a lot of easy experiments to find out how long it takes a trail to dry up, whether it can be easily wiped off, and so on. I also found out the trail wasn't directional. If I'd pick up an ant on a piece of paper, turn him around and around, and then put him back onto the trail, he wouldn't know that he was going the wrong way until he met another ant. (Later, in Brazil, I noticed some leaf- cutting ants and tried the same experiment on them. They could tell, within a few steps, whether they were going toward the food or away from it--presumably from the trail, which might be a series of smells in a pattern: A, B, space, A, B, space, and so on.) I tried at one point to make the ants go around in a circle, but I didn't have enough patience to set it up. I could see no reason, other than lack of patience, why it couldn't be done. yes, that DOES happen by accident in nature.
Review: Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Richard Feynmann)
Review: Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman…
Review: Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Richard Feynmann)
Richard Feynman Surely Youre Joking Mr Feynman v5 ebook download free pdf this is a fun, easy to read book. i was told to read it by a friend. i read it to avoid doing the linguistics tests im supposed to do. useful procrastination ftw! As usual, comments and quotes below ------------------------------------------ Another thing I did in high school was to invent problems and theorems. I mean, if I were doing any mathematical thing at all, I would find some practical example for which it would be useful. I invented a set of right-triangle problems. But instead of giving the lengths of two of the sides to find the third, I gave the difference of the two sides. A typical example was: There's a flagpole, and there's a rope that comes down from the top. When you hold the rope straight down, it's three feet longer than the pole, and when you pull the rope out tight, it's five feet from the base of the pole. How high is the pole? tricky, but certainly doable for primary school children. the smart of them. im fairly certain that a lot of high school students wud not be able to solve this. - I tried to explain--it was my own aunt--that there was no reason not to do that, but you can't say that to anybody who's smart, who runs a hotel! I learned there that innovation is a very difficult thing in the real world. truth! this is politics in a nutshell, any kind of politics: national, local, office... - The other guy's afraid, so he says no. So I take the two girls in a taxi to the hotel, and discover that there's a dance organized by the deaf and dumb, believe it or not. They all belonged to a club. It turns out many of them can feel the rhythm enough to dance to the music and applaud the band at the end of each number. It was very, very interesting! I felt as if I was in a foreign country and couldn't speak the language: I could speak, but nobody could hear me. Everybody was talking with signs to everybody else, and I couldn't understand anything! I asked my girl to teach me some signs and I learned a few, like you learn a foreign language, just for fun. Everyone was so happy and relaxed with each other, making jokes and smiling all the time; they didn't seem to have any real difficulty of any kind communicating with each other. It was the same as with any other language, except for one thing: as they're making signs to each other, their heads were always turning from one side to the other. I realized what that was. When someone wants to make a side remark or interrupt you, he can't yell, "Hey, Jack!" He can only make a signal, which you won't catch unless you're in the habit of looking around all the time. never thought of that, but true! - When it came time for me to give my talk on the subject, I started off by drawing an outline of the cat and began to name the various muscles. The other students in the class interrupt me: "We know all that!" "Oh," I say, "you do? Then no wonder I can catch up with you so fast after you've had four years of biology." They had wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes. ive heard this complaint lots of time about biology. i rather like evolutionary biology, which surely cannot be learned in 15 mins, but i dunno abouy plant cell biology or whatever. is biology mostly just remembering stuff? surely things like genetics, pop* genetics, evolutionary theory are hard. - At the Princeton graduate school, the physics department and the math department shared a common lounge, and every day at four o'clock we would have tea. It was a way of relaxing in the afternoon, in addition to imitating an English college. People would sit around playing Go, or discussing theorems. In those days topology was the big thing. I still remember a guy sitting on the couch, thinking very hard, and another guy standing in front of him, saying, "And therefore such-and-such is true." "Why is that?" the guy on the couch asks. "It's trivial! It's trivial!" the standing guy says, and he rapidly reels off a series of logical steps: "First you assume thus-and-so, then we have Kerchoff's this-and-that; then there's Waffenstoffer's Theorem, and we substitute this and construct that. Now you put the vector which goes around here and then thus-and-so . . ." The guy on the couch is struggling to understand all this stuff, which goes on at high speed for about fifteen minutes! Finally the standing guy comes out the other end, and the guy on the couch says, "Yeah, yeah. It's trivial." We physicists were laughing, trying to figure them out. We decided that "trivial" means "proved." So we joked with the mathematicians: "We have a new theorem--that mathematicians can prove only trivial theorems, because every theorem that's proved is trivial." i thought of that befor. it makes certain theories of tautologies rather implausible. if tautologies, or necessary truths are all trivial, and just restating things - why arent they all obvius? ... - One thing I never did learn was contour integration. I had learned to do integrals by various methods shown in a book that my high school physics teacher Mr. Bader had given me. One day he told me to stay after class. "Feynman," he said, "you talk too much and you make too much noise. I know why. You're bored. So I'm going to give you a book. You go up there in the back, in the corner, and study this book, and when you know everything that's in this book, you can talk again." i wish my teachers wud hav don that to me! or that i had grown up with Khan academy! - In another experiment, I laid out a lot of glass microscope slides, and got the ants to walk on them, back and forth, to some sugar I put on the windowsill. Then, by replacing an old slide with a new one, or by rearranging the slides, I could demonstrate that the ants had no sense of geometry: they couldn't figure out where something was. If they went to the sugar one way and there was a shorter way back, they would never figure out the short way. It was also pretty clear from rearranging the glass slides that the ants left some sort of trail. So then came a lot of easy experiments to find out how long it takes a trail to dry up, whether it can be easily wiped off, and so on. I also found out the trail wasn't directional. If I'd pick up an ant on a piece of paper, turn him around and around, and then put him back onto the trail, he wouldn't know that he was going the wrong way until he met another ant. (Later, in Brazil, I noticed some leaf- cutting ants and tried the same experiment on them. They could tell, within a few steps, whether they were going toward the food or away from it--presumably from the trail, which might be a series of smells in a pattern: A, B, space, A, B, space, and so on.) I tried at one point to make the ants go around in a circle, but I didn't have enough patience to set it up. I could see no reason, other than lack of patience, why it couldn't be done. yes, that DOES happen by accident in nature.