My Goodreads Rating: 2 of 5 stars
The bits on doing physics are interesting; the bits on picking up aging tigers in shady New York bars, not so much.
This book will likely appeal far more to science fanboys and groupies rather than scientists themselves. The goal of the book seems mostly to convince lay people that scientists are indeed human beings who have hobbies, eat at restaurants, and have sexual intercourse (gasp!). Given that most scientists likely see themselves as human beings, I think the majority of the book would be quite boring for them. I personally far prefer Feynman’s nonfiction books and video lectures, which are served crystal-clear with a side of motivation.
However, now that I’ve thoroughly demotivated your wanting to read this book, there are two upsides.
First, to a baby scientist (a middle-schooler, high-schooler, or college freshman aspiring to become a scientist), especially one who doesn’t come from a family of scientists or hasn’t met many in their life, this book is a much more inspirational look at the life of an (atypical) scientist than the Wikipedia entry on scientist. That said, if you know a youngling leaning towards a life scientific, this is a great (dangerous?) book to pass along to them.
Second, hidden amongst the fluff are stellar pieces of advice for doing science, what I will refer to as “Feynmanisms.” Most aren’t explicit but are simply what I interpreted from Feynman’s stories on doing science. Here’s a list of my favorites:
Seek people and ideas outside your own field. There’s a great pressure in science to confine yourself to one field. This pressure comes from funding agencies and administrators who must be able to easily define which discipline your work is in, as well as from interactions with other scientists in your field, who will of course mostly suggest ideas and insights from within that field. Resist this pressure. Speak with scientists in either fields about their ideas and your own. Seek connections. It will often be hard to communicate but its always worth the effort.
Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Many a student or scientist finds himself at the end of a long lecture, completely lost because he didn’t have the courage to ask what a word on the second slide meant. Get over it. You are and will always be a student and there will always be things you don’t know.
Think in examples. It’s easy to get lost if you think about every new concept you learn in terms of another new concept you only learned ten minutes ago. Yet this is often the way books try to teach. Instead, when trying to follow an explanation, think in a concrete example and add features slowly. It might be “faster” to use jargon and buzzwords to explain a concept, but there’s no use in this compression if you don’t understand what’s going on.
Don’t fool yourself into thinking you know something you don’t. It is surprisingly easy to convince the human brain that it understands something that it most certainly does not. Knowing the name of something is not the same as understanding what it is. Throwing around buzzwords is an easy way to fake understanding to others, but it’s impossible to be creative or have any fun if all you can do is mix and match buzzwords.
Never stop playing. Remember why you enjoyed physics (or whichever field) in the first place; it’s fun to play with ideas! No administrator or scientific colleague is ever going to ask you to spend more time playing, but that is often crucial to coming up with new ideas as well as having fun.
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