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RICHARD FEYNMAN INTERVIEW

We had the Encyclopedia Britannica at home and even when I was a small boy he used to sit me on his lap and read to me from the Encyclopedia Britannica. We would read, say, about dinosaurs and maybe it would be talking about the . . . Tyrannosaurus Rex, and it would say something like this thing is twenty-five feet high and the head is six feet across, you see. So he'd stop all this and say, "Let'

s see what that means. That would mean that if he stood in our front yard, he would be high enough to put his head through the window but not quite because thehead is a little bit too wide and it would break the window as it came by." Everything we'd read would be translated as best we could into some reality and so that I learned to do that--everything that I read I try to figure out what it really means, what it's really saying by translating. So I used to read the encyclopedia when I was a boy but with translation, you see, so it was very exciting and interesting to think there were animals of such magnitude. I wasn't frightenedthat there would be one coming in my window as a consequence of this, I don't t

hink, but I thought that it was very, very interesting, and that they all died out and that at the time nobody knew why.

We used to go to the Catskill mountains. We lived in New York and the Catskill mountains is the place where people went in the summer. There was a big group ofpeople there but the fathers would all go back to New York to work during the week and only come back over the weekend. On the weekends, when my father came, hewould take me for walks in the woods and would tell me . . . about interesting

things that were going on in the woods--which I'll explain in a minute. But theother mothers see this, of course, thought it was wonderful and that the other fathers should take their sons for walks. They tried to work on them but they didn't get anywhere at first. And they wanted my father to take all the kids, but he didn't want to because he had a special relationship to me--we had a personalthing together. So it ended up that the other fathers had to take their childrenfor walks the next weekend. The next Monday when they were all back to work we

were, all the kids were playing in the field and one kid said to me, "See that b

ird, what kind of bird is that?" And I said, "I haven't the slightest idea whatkind of bird it is." He says, "It's a brown-throated thrush," or something, "Your father doesn't tell you anything." But it was the opposite, my father had taught me, looking at a bird he says, "Do you know what that bird is? It's a brown throated thrush--but in Portuguese it's a ---, in Italian a ---." He says, In Chinese it's a ---, in Japanese a ---," etc. "Now," he says, "You know all the languages, you want to . . . know what the name of that bird is and when you've finished with all that," he says, "you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about thebird. You only know about humans in different places and what they call the bir

d. Now," he says, "let's look at the bird and what it's doing."

Once we were again walking somewhere and he picked up a leaf off a tree or somet

hing. This leaf had a flaw--a thing we never look at much--but a little brown line that started in the middle of the leaf like a C-shape. You've seen, they're sort of deteriorated, a leaf's got brown from something. This little brown line was like the shape of a C, starting somewhere in the middle of the leaf and in acurl and came to the edge. And he said, "You look at this and you see it's narrow at the beginning and it's wider as it goes out to the edge. Now what this is,"he said, "is that a fly has come, a blue fly with yellow eyes and green wings c

omes and lays an egg on this leaf. Then, when the egg hatches into a small caterpillar like the maggot-like thing, which has its whole life eating this leaf, that's where it gets its food. That's why the egg is left there, and as it eats along, it leaves behind this trail of eaten leaf which is brown. As the maggot grows, you see, the trail grows wider until he's grown to full length at the end ofthe leaf, where he turns into a fly--a blue fly with yellow eyes and green wing

s--who flies away and lays an egg on another leaf." Now I knew that he didn't know it was a blue fly with green wings and yellow eyes . . . but the idea that hewas trying to tell me was the amusing part of life--that the whole thing was ju

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st reproduction. No matter how complicated the business is, the main point is todo it again, to have it come out again.

He had taught me to notice things. One day when I was playing with what we callan "express wagon," which is a little wagon which has a railing around it for children to play with what they pull around--it had a ball in it . . . and I pulled the wagon and I noticed something about the way the ball moved. So I went to m

y father and I said, "Say, Pop, I noticed something. When I pull the wagon, theball rolls to the back of the wagon; it rushes to the back of the wagon. And when I'm pulling it along and I suddenly stop, the ball rolls to the front of the wagon," and I say, "Why is that?" And he . . . says nobody knows. He said, "The general principle is that things that are moving try to keep on moving, and things that are standing still tend to stand still unless you push on them hard." Andhe says, "This tendency is called inertia, but nobody knows why it's true." Nowthat's a deep understanding. He doesn't give me a name. He knew the difference

between knowing the name of something and knowing something, which I learned very early. He went on to say, "If you look close, you'll find that the ball does not rush to the back of the wagon, but it's the back of the wagon that you're pulling against the ball . . . That the ball stands still, or as a matter of fact,

from the friction starts to move forward, really, and doesn't move back.

So I ranback to the little wagon and set the ball up again and pulled the wagon from under it and looking sideways and seeing indeed he was right. The ball never movedbackwards in the wagon when I pulled the wagon forward. It moved backward relat

ive to the wagon, but relative to the sidewalk, it moved forward a little bit.

So that's the way I was educated by my father, with those kind of examples and discussions--no pressure, just lovely interesting discussions.