"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman"

Richard Feynman was described as a brilliant and eccentric scientist. While reading this book, i can feel his enthusiasm for science and life radiate through the pages. And it is hard not to laugh out loud while reading some of the really hilarious stories, and yes, people do stare at you in the MRT.

A different box of tools

Feynman was a self taught mathematician. During physics class in high school, he's always up to mischief in class as he had covered all the basic physics stuff on his own. His physics teacher gave him a book "Advanced Calculus" that was meant for senior courses in college to occupy him. He learnt an operation to differentiate parameters under the integral sign (i dunno what that is?!?). This method was not very much taught in universities.

So when the brilliant mathematician at Princeton or MIT couldn't solve a 'chim' intergration, they'll bring the problem to Feynman. The 'diffentiate under integral sign' method often works. Quote from the book "So I got a great reputation for doing integrals, only because my box of tools was different from everybody else's, and they had tried all their tools on it before giving the problem to me."

It makes me wonder how often are we struggling with simple problems only because we do not know there's some fundamental tools out there that can solve it easily. Thus one of my goals for the rest of my uni days is to gather such useful tools and try to apply it actively.

The dignified professor (and that Nobel Prize)

After Feyneman got appointed as a professor at Cornell, he felt burnt out from all the preparation work in order to give good lectures. (so please appreciate all the good teachers.profs out there.) He even said the physics disgusts him a little, but he used to enjoy physics. THEN, he adopted a new attitude, he is going to play with physics, just like when he reads Arabian Nights [note to jiechao(: ] for pleasure. He shall not worry about importance or prestige or whatsoever.

Soon, he saw some guy spinning a plate in the air. And he noticed that red medallion of Cornell was going around faster the wobbling of the plate. From that, he worked out the 'wobble rate' and the 'rotation rate'. As he work out the equation for the wobble, he thought about how electron orbits start to move in relativity. He said that all this 'work' that went into the diagrams, theories and equations doesn't feel like work at all! It flowed effortlessly as he was having too much fun! Yep, he won a Nobel Prize for this theory.

How fortunate am i to be studying something i really enjoy. I just hope that everyone out there who's studying wouldn't let 'academic rigour' kills off that last bit of curiosity in us. Remember when we asked questions like 'why does the sun rise from the east?', 'why is the sea blue?', 'does the moon goes to sleep in the day?'.

Have fun learning, enjoy the process of discovering new things.

Please, please dun let that curious creature die.