Visiting Other Fields
A former student, now longtime friend, recommended “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”: Adventures of a Curious Character. What a fun read! It's the most un-scientific book I've ever read by a Nobel Prize-winning physicist (the only other being Einstein's attempt at a layman's description of general relativity, which went over my head completely 😜).
One of the things that struck me was Feynman's description of a curious habit he picked up during his graduate studies: "In the Graduate College dining room at Princeton everybody used to sit with his own group. I sat with the physicists, but after a bit I thought: It would be nice to see what the rest of the world is doing, so I'll sit for a week or two in each of the other groups..." After a stint with the philosophy group, he ended up being invited to their weekly seminar; after a stint with the biology group, he ended up in one of their graduate courses.
In both cases, he haphazardly observed things, and ended up asking questions about, things that he figured he missed as an outsider. But in both cases, he uncovered questions that they had never thought to ask. What is an "essential object"? It turns out even the philosophers didn't know! What makes chloroplasts circulate? What is lecithin? It turns out the biologists didn't know! Another great example of the power of an outsider's perspective.
"After the war, every summer I would go traveling by car somewhere in the United States. One year, after I was at Caltech, I thought, 'This summer, instead of going to a different place, I'll go to a different field.'
"It was right after Watson and Crick's discovery of the DNA spiral. There were some very good biologists at Caltech because Delbruck had his lab there, and Watson came to Caltech to give some lectures on the coding systems of DNA. I went to his lectures and to seminars in the biology department and got full of enthusiasm..."
I loved that attitude, of visiting a different field just like you might visit a new place.
After taking a course in the department, Feynman ended up being invited by Watson to give a lecture to his biology department at Harvard! "That was my big moment: I gave a seminar to the biology department at Harvard! I always do that, get into something and see how far I can go.
"I learned a lot of things in biology, and I gained a lot of experience. I got better at pronouncing the words, knowing what not to include in a paper or a seminar, and detecting a weak technique in an experiment. But I love physics, and I love to go back to it."
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