Pun Salad

I remembered this title earlier this year while reading a very good history book about Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell. It was originally published in 1999, and was part of the "Feynmania" of that era. And I had never read it, and the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library still had a copy on its "530" shelf, so…

It's a 13-chapter hodgepodge of interview transcripts, speeches, talks, magazine articles, etc. And also Feynman's devastating "minority report" on the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, which excoriated NASA's "well, we got away with it this time, so…" attitude toward risk evaluation, criticism that the rest of the Rogers Commission found unable to support. (Or maybe understand.)

The lightly-edited interviews are uneven. Things can get jumbled when you or I think faster than we can talk. Reader, Feynman could think much faster than you or I, and things get very jumbled here on occasion. But still interesting, if you can follow him over the leaps and bounds.

Feynman's famous musing on "cargo cult science" shows up multiple times; he was fascinated by the Pacific natives who tried to keep World War II benefits coming to their islands by crafting aircraft models, runways, control towers, and so on. He saw analogous behavior in some contemporaries, who adopted the superficial aspects of science, but lacked understanding and self-doubt. As his famous quote, aimed at 1974 Caltech grads, goes (included here): "You must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool."

Many chapters here can also be found "out there" on the web. I found my favorite one was a transcript of his 1966 talk to the National Science Teachers Association, "What is Science?" You can read it here. It contains yet another quote that should be more famous: "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts."