Richard Feynman on What It Means | Blank on Blank | PBS Digital Studios

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- [Voiceover] My father, you see,

interested me in patterns
at the very beginning

and then later in things,
like we would turn over stones

and watch the ants carry the little

white babies down deeper into the hole.

We would look at worms.

We’d go for walks and we’d
look at things all the time,

the stars, the way birds fly.

He was always telling
me interesting things.

I mean this story’s a rumor,
as far as I’m concerned,

but the story is that before I was born,

he told my mother that,

“If it’s a boy, he’ll be a scientist.”

My father used to sit me on his lap

and the one book we did use all

the time was the Encyclopedia Britannica

and he used to sit me on
his lap when I was a kid

and read out of the damned thing.

There would be pictures of
dinosaurs and then he would read,

you know the long words,
the dinosaur so and so

attains a length of so and so many feet.

He would always stop and he would say,

“You know what that means?

"It means, if the dinosaur’s
standing on our front yard

"and your bedroom window, you
know, is on the second floor

"you’d see out the window his
head standing looking at you."

He would translate everything

and I learned to translate everything,

so it’s the same disease.

When I read something,

I always translate it in the best I can

into what does it really mean.

I can remember my father
talking, talking, talking.

When you go into the museum, for example,

there are great rocks
which have long cuts,

grooves in them, from glacier

and I remember, the
first time going there,

he stopped there and explained to me

about the ice moving and grinding.

I can hear the voice, practically

and then he would tell me,

“How do you think we know

"there were glaciers in the past?”

He’d point out, “That's
what we're looking at,

"that these rocks are found in New York

"and so there must have
been ice in New York.”

He understood.

A thing that was very
important about my father

was not the facts, but the process.

How we find out.

What is the consequence
of finding such a rock?

But that’s the kind of guy he was.

I don’t think he ever
successfully went to college.

However, he did teach
himself a great deal.

He read a lot.

He liked the rational mind

and liked those things which

could be understood by thinking.

So it’s not hard to understand
I got interested in science.

I got a laboratory in my room.

We also played a trick on my mother there.

We put sodium ferrocyanide in the towels

and another substance, an iron salt,

probably alum, in the soap

and when they come together,
they make blue ink.

So we were supposed to
fool my mother, you see.

She would wash her hands and
then when she dried them,

her hands would turn blue,

but we didn’t think the
towel would turn blue.

Anyway, she was horrified,

the screams of, “My good linen towels!”

But she was always cooperative.

She never was afraid of the experiments.

The bridge partners, would tell her,

“How can you let the
child have a laboratory?

"He'll blow up the house,"
and all this kind of talk

and she just said, “It’s worth it.”

I mean, “ It’s worth the risk.”

I took later solid
geometry and trigonometry.

In solid geometry was the first time

I had any mathematical difficulties.

It was my only experience with how

it must feel to the ordinary human being

a then I discovered what was wrong.

The diagrams that were being drawn

on the blackboard were three-dimensional

and I was thinking of
them as plane diagrams

and I couldn’t understand
what the hell was going on.

It was a mistake in the orientation.

When he would draw pictures
and I would see a parallelogram

and he called it a square,

because it was tilted out
of the plane, you know

and I, “Oh God, this thing
doesn’t make any sense.

"What is he talking about?”

It was a terrifying experience.

Butterflies in my stomach kind of feeling.

But it was just a dumb mistake.

But I suspect that this
kind of a dumb mistake

is quite common to people
learning mathematics.

Part of the missing
understanding is to mistake

what it is you’re supposed to know.

It isn’t the question of
learning anything precisely,

but of learning that there’s
something exciting over there

and I think that the same
thing happened with my father.

My father never really
knew anything in detail,

but would tell me what’s
interesting about the world

and where, if you look, you’ll
find still more interests,

so that later I would say,
“Well, this is going to be good.

"I know this has got
something to do with this,

"which is hot stuff.”

This kind of feeling of what was important

and that is the key.

The key was somehow to
know what was important

and what was not important,
what was exciting,

because I can’t learn everything.

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The thing that I loved was,

everything that I read was serious,

wasn’t written for a child.

I didn’t like children’s things.

Because, for one thing I was very,

very, and still am, very sensitive

and very worried about was that
the thing to be dead honest,

that it isn’t fixed up so it looks easy.

Details purposely left out

or slightly erroneous explanations,

in order to get away with it.

This was intolerable.

I kind of try to imagine what would

have happened to me if
I’d lived in today’s era.

I’m rather horrified.

I think there are too many books,

that the mind gets boggled.

If I got interested, I would
have so many things to look at,

I would go crazy.

It’s too easy.

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