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 investigation on the premise that, before a person begins, they must not already know the answer; it is essential to begin with uncertainty so that one can judge evidence well. The three techniques or steps he lays down are: i) to collect evidence well, begin by being uncertain as to what the answer is and look for evidence by conducting trials; this enforces logical consistency among the various things that we know; ii) to judge evidence well, take all of the evidence, maintain objectivity, and don’t depend on an external authority for guidance; and iii) record results in a disinterested way so that they do not try to influence the reader into an idea that is different from what the evidence indicates. 

He is often credited with starting the field of nanotechnology by talking about the concept of nanobots in surgery in one of his papers. It’s an interesting story of how his friend suggests “a possibility for relatively small machines in surgery if you could swallow the surgeon. You put the mechanical surgeon inside the blood vessel and it goes into the heart and ‘looks’ around (of course the information has to be fed out). It finds out which valve is the faulty one and takes a little knife and slices it out. Other small machines might be permanently incorporated in the body to assist some inadequately functioning organ.” This conceptual curiosity is now a well-established field of medicine.

His take on the importance of uncertainty and doubt in science is also noteworthy. He says a scientist is never certain, but it is not a question of whether a statement is true or not, “but rather how likely it is to be true or false.” According to him, one must leave room for doubt, or there is no progress and learning. Through a series of stories involving the Manhattan Project, religion, and science, Feynman arrives at certain values of science. The first is that scientific knowledge enables us to do all kinds of things and to make all kinds of things. The second is its potential for fun or intellectual enjoyment, which some people get from reading, learning, and thinking about science, and which others get from working in it. The third value is that, a scientist has a great deal of experience with ignorance, doubt, and uncertainty, and this experience according to Feynman, is of great importance in itself. He reinforces this with the example, “no one really knew how to run a government led to the idea that we should arrange a system by which new ideas could be developed, tried out, tossed out, more new ideas brought in; a trial and error system.”

He concludes the book by reflecting on the question, “What is science?” Certain takeaways from this book help frame a general understanding of this question. Science can be understood as curiosity, uncertainty, and doubt transformed into coherent knowledge through systematic steps. It is the process of channeling inquisitiveness into structured methods that help us move toward reliable answers. 

(If I interpret this in my own context, I remember that in school I always understood the definition of things, and never the how of things. So when the high order thinking skills questions started in 10th std, it was the first time that I really thought about what I learnt. And I remember that thinking to be more exciting for me than all the direct memory based answers I’d been giving throughout school life.)