Six Easy Pieces by Richard P. Feynman

In grade 13 I had a teacher who loved Richard Feynman. He did a whole ... unit, I guess you could call it... on Richard Feynman. We watched a movie called Infinity, about Feynman's younger years, after he got his Ph.D from Princeton and while he was working on the Manhattan project, and while his first wife was dying of cancer. Hmm... that's interesting. I wonder if there's some kind of link there... Manhattan project, wife dying of cancer...

Anyways, that was the first I ever heard of him, but he was such an interesting guy. Smart, funny, really, really funny. I mean, he was the kind of guy who did just about everything... storytelling, yeah, story telling--a nobel prize winning physicist, storytelling, samba drums, drawing, and safecracking. Yes, safecracking. It was one of his many, many hobbies. Before he died, one of his last ambitions was to travel to Tuva, near the border between Russia and Mongolia because he wanted to learn how to do throat singing. But he died before he could get clearance to go there. There's a book by Ralph Leighton all about that.

Here's an interesting anecdote. While he was working on the Manhattan project, he was stationed at a remote top-secret base in the desert. The barracks where he was living was a short drive from the station where the research was going on, but to get into the station he had to go through a checkpoint and sign in. One morning, he found a hole in the fence surrounding the station, but instead of telling anyone about it, he signed in and then left the station through the hole and went back to the check point and signed in again. He did this a bunch of times before they realized that he was signing in, but not signing out and started wondering what was up. Yeah, I thought that was funny too.

Anyways, I found Richard Feynman so fascinating that I decided to buy a couple of his books. He wrote a bunch of textbooks on physics as well as a few books like The Pleasure of Finding Things Out and The Meaning of it All. He also delivered a series of freshman lectures on physics over two years at the California Institute of Technology. These lectures were so popular that seats had to be reserved for the students who had registered for the lectures because if they showed up a bit late, there'd be no seats left because of all the people trying to get in to hear Richard Feynman lecture. These lectures were published in 1963 into one book called Lectures on Physics. This book was later distilled into two short books, Six Easy Pieces: the Essentials of Physics Explained by its Most Brilliant Teacher and Six Not So Easy Pieces: Einstein's Relativity, Symmetry, and Space-Time. I originally wanted to buy Lectures on Physics but it costs over a hundred dollars, so I bought Six Easy Pieces and Six Not So Easy Pieces at something like ten dollars apiece.

I started reading Six Easy Pieces immediately and thoroughly enjoyed the beginning of it. The first part of it is all about the basics of physics: everything is made of atoms. That's easy enough to understand. Even the stuff right after, I could get: how atoms behave, and all that. After that, though... he got into Quantum something or other and totally lost me but I persevered until chapter four, where he started talking about the theory of the Conservation of Energy and I was like, okay, yeah, I get that. And he used a really neat little example, where Dennis the Menace has twenty eight blocks (or is it twenty three) and keeps hiding them on his mom, who is pretty obsessive about finding these blocks and counting them. And then he went on about how perpetual motion is impossible and a small part of me died inside. But I didn't really understand much else of it, so there's still a bit of hope left. Anyways, after that, I pretty much gave up on the book... I'd need to have a background in physics to understand it and I didn't even take physics in High School. I took biology instead. And failed it. The closest I've ever come to studying physics, aside from reading the first three and a half chapters of this book is arguing with my brother about perpetual motion. You see, I have this fantasy that a physicist will one day discover perpetual motion and then we'll all have free energy and the world will be ushered into a lengthy age of peace, socialism, and space travel. Yeah. But my brother actually understands physics because he's an engineer, you see (or is he an engineer because he understands physics?) and he knows that perpetual motion is impossible, so every time we talk about it, he's intent on crushing my fantasy, which disappoints me tremendously.

Anyways, back to the book: it's a fantastic book. Really well written. If only I could understand it.