The Art of Living is an occasional series about people who seemed to know something about living.
There have been and are many physicists, but the one Richard Feynman was nothing short of legendary. His timeline crossed the heart of the American century, he was born in 1918 and he died in 1988. He was part of the Manhattan Project and he also investigated the Challenger disaster. He won the Nobel Prize, he taught for years at Caltech, and was well-remembered by many. But he was a legend not just because of his accomplishments, but because of his personality and the way he shared physics and a love of life with generations of students. He was well-remembered not just for his genius, but for teaching his students safe-cracking and the right way to light a cigarette.
I can almost guarantee that you can’t read Richard Feynman’s memoir, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, without smiling. Richard Feynman grew up in New York City, a very curious kid with encouraging parents. He had a little laboratory in the house, he fixed radios, and he asked interesting questions. He never stopped with those questions. What was remarkable about Feynman’s questions was that he could ask them without worrying about who he was asking. In his book, he recalls that, as an adult, he could be shy or nervous, but when he was thinking about or talking about physics, he was never afraid of who he was talking to. He always lived that way when it came to science. In Surely You’re Joking, he tells readers “It’s nice. It’s pleasant. If you can, do it. I’m lucky in my life that I can live that way.” That may have made him a pain in the neck to some people, but it also meant that when Niels Bohr came to Los Alamos, he wanted to talk to Feynman—young and not especially famous—because he knew he would ask hard questions and not be deferential.
If his questions weren’t annoying, some of his other traits must have been to many people. In his own words, “I was always trying to straighten people out.” That meant things like breaking into allegedly secure file cabinets and safes to prove their lack of safety—something he did with some frequency. And he didn’t turn it off depending on the environment. He was a notorious safe-cracker at Los Alamos. He always wrote to his wife in code from there, too, because it was his habit to send coded messages back and forth with friends and family. You can imagine how well the wartime censors liked that. He loved to find flaws in systems and inconsistencies and better solutions to all kinds of little problems. He wasn’t afraid to point those things out to people, even if they didn’t seem particularly interested.
He got into cracking safes the same way he got into many things—curiosity and a love of being challenged. He was always setting up challenges for himself. In graduate school, he took classes outside of his discipline, just to see what everyone else was thinking about. He got involved in experiments outside his discipline, too. At one point he got into doing calculations himself instead of using tables or calculators, because he wanted to see how fast he could get. During a period of work in Brazil, he joined a band. He learned to play the frigideira and took part in street performances. Later, he decided to learn how to draw. He had an artist friend teach him some things and he took a correspondence course. He ended up selling and showing some of his art. It’s not surprise he took some dips in a sensory deprivation tank.
Something stressed in Surely You’re Joking is Feynman’s philosophy of “active irresponsibility” about life. There were certain things he just decided he didn’t care about. He didn’t spend all of his time obsessing about using his talents for science, though he thought about science all the time. He didn’t spend much of his time trying to be respectable. He was a regular at a topless bar. He wasn’t trying to climb the ladder. If you’ve seen Oppenheimer, he’s the minor character who always has the bongos. That was one of his hobbies. He was open to all kinds of experiences and interacted with all kinds of people.
One secret to Richard Feynman’s success was not taking himself too seriously. He could have had prestigious positions where all he did was research, but he refused to accept a position that didn’t involve teaching. He didn’t need the extra elevation and he rightly recognized that teaching is great for thinking. He did care about preserving his mental faculties—it’s why he stopped drinking as an early adult—but he wasn’t afraid to be wrong. He wasn’t afraid to be silly. He wasn’t afraid to look ridiculous. He was willing to try new things. All kinds of things. All that put him in the place to really learn and grow.
Richard Feynman was admirable in many ways, but far from perfect. He was a womanizer. In his later career, he was unpopular with some students because of sexist jokes. He was fairly intolerant of religion, which he believed made no sense. He sometimes chose to ignore social niceties. I’m sure his philosophy of “active irresponsibility” got old with friends and family. Yet it seems nearly impossible not to love some things about Richard Feynman.
When it comes to the art of living, Richard Feynman was pretty smart. He stayed curious. He enjoyed being challenged. He was open to new experiences. He didn’t take himself too seriously. This means we have all kinds of interesting anecdotes about him alongside his actual work in physics. He seemed to want to know everything and he was willing to try to investigate or understand most things. Richard Feynman was the kind of person who “lived life to the full.” And if you ask me, I’d much rather watch a television series about young Feynman than young Sheldon.