Book Review: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
This book is a collection of Feynman’s lectures and interviews where he reflects on various instances in his life that guided his thought process and inspired him to be inquisitive. He talks about the value of being curious by recounting certain experiences, questions and rationales in different situations in life. He begins by talking about how his father, in his childhood, taught him to ask questions about the simplest of things, such as a bird, and insisted on not just knowing its name but also observing its habits and features, and noticing what it was doing. He encouraged him to ask questions about its ruffled feathers, why it pecked, and the pattern with which it did so. Through this, he says, his father also ended up teaching him about parasitism. The book is about such observations, the art of asking questions, and how scientific thought is developed much earlier in life. In one of the chapters, Feynman outlines the techniques of scientific investi...
