richard feynman

i used to read feynman’s lecture notes on physics back in high school. as i told you, they are very famous.

he has a way of breaking down concepts and explaining them in the simplest way. he didn’t believe in making something more complicated for the sake of it. it was a straightforward, humanistic, no-nonsense philosophy which he relentlessly applied to both science and life.

for instance, he would (if he cared) question what ‘humanistic’ is supposed to mean in that last sentence. and until he got a satisfactory answer, such as, maybe: it means he believed in uncovering the truth and presenting it simply and perfectly ordinarily. if he were to take up the craft of writing, i think he’d be among the many writers and thinkers who warn against the misleading power of words and argue for simple, honest prose (orwell, paul graham, various mitadmissions blogs, to name a few).

(i think it was) in high school i read the first memoir of his, a more famous one called “surely you’re joking, mr. feynman!”

now i’m reading this other feynman memoir, “what do you care what other people think?”, over 5 years later, and i never knew how similar we were.