At this school I was allowed to learn things which interested me: French, History, lots of Poetry by heart, and above all Riding and Swimming. The impression of those years makes a pleasant picture in my mind, in strong contrast to my earlier schoolday memories.
Originally asked
Vox, to writers and thinkers, 9 Questions, 2017
This exact prompt is one of Vox's nine recurring questions about intellectual habits.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Excerpt from “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”, Engineering and Science / Caltech Magazine, 1985 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 8 →I wanted to know. I asked a lot of questions and she would say, "Read, read."…So she inspired me a great deal.
Ultimately, it’s a man who was teaching us English Literature in what we call matricula, the last 2 years of high school. He really was quite extraordinary. When he spoke of a Shakespearean play, you almost thought that he grew up with Shakespeare! He was very good, yes. A black guy who was fantastic and gave us a deep love for literature.
I got very interested in so-called “knockout mouse” technology. Knockout mouse is a way to study the function of genes. You know, both human and mouse have approximately 20,000 genes. With knockout mouse technology, we can select one gene out of those 20,000 genes, and completely destroy that one particular gene so that we can understand the function of that particular gene. I got very interested in that technology. It was 1992 or 1993 when I graduated from my Ph.D. school. So I decided to study — I decided to learn about knockout mouse technology. But at that time in Japan, only a few scientists were working on knockout mouse technology. That’s why I decided to move to the States, San Francisco
More from Richard Feynman
View profile →So I wish to you—I have no more time, so I have just one wish for you—the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organization, or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity. May you have that freedom. May I also give you one last bit of advice: Never say that you'll give a talk unless you know clearly what you're going to talk about and more or less what you're going to say.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.
We'd walk in the canyons, and we'd often walk with Bethe, and Von Neumann, and Bacher. It was a great pleasure.
It's made me a very happy man ever since.
So I find that teaching and the students keep life going, and I would never accept any position in which somebody has invented a happy solution for me where I don’t have to teach. Never.
the colonel said I shouldn't tell them how the neutrons work and all the details because we want to keep things separate, so just tell them what to do to keep it safe.
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