“Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”: Adventures of a Curious Character

Before I got there, they sent around a list of “books you might find interesting to read, and please send us any books you want others to read, and we will store them in the library so that others may read them.”

So here comes this wonderful list of books. I start down the first page: I haven’t read a single one of the books, and I feel very uneasy—I hardly belong. I look at the second page: I haven’t read a single one. I found out, after looking through the whole list, that I haven’t read any of the books. I must be an idiot, an illiterate! There were wonderful books there, like Thomas Jefferson OnFreedom, or something like that, and there were a few authors I had read. There was a book by Heisenberg, one by Schrodinger, and one by Einstein, but they were something like Einstein, MyLaterYears and Schrodinger, WhatIsLife–different from what I had read. So I had a feeling that I was out of my depth, and that I shouldn’t be in this. Maybe I could just sit quietly and listen.

I go to the first big introductory meeting, and a guy gets up and explains that we have two problems to discuss. The first one is fogged up a little bit—something about ethics and equality, but I don’t understand what the problem exactly is. And the second one is, “We are going to demonstrate by our efforts a way that we can have a dialogue among people of different fields.” There was an international lawyer, a historian, a Jesuit priest, a rabbi, a scientist (me), and so on.

Well, right away my logical mind goes like this: The second problem I don’t have to pay any attention to, because if it works, it works; and if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work—we don’t have to prove that we can have a dialogue, and discuss that we can have a dialogue, if we haven’t got any dialogue to talk about! So the primary problem is the first one, which I didn’t understand.

I was ready to put my hand up and say, “Would you please define the problem better,” but then I thought, “No, I’m the ignoramus; I’d better listen. I don’t want to start trouble right away.”

The subgroup I was in was supposed to discuss the “ethics of equality in education.” In the meetings of our subgroup the Jesuit priest was always talking about “the fragmentation of knowledge.” He would say, “The real problem in the ethics of equality in education is the fragmentation of knowledge.” This Jesuit was looking back into the thirteenth century when the Catholic Church was in charge of all education, and the whole world was simple. There was God, and everything came from God; it was all organized. But today, it’s not so easy to understand everything. So knowledge has become fragmented. I felt that “the fragmentation of knowledge” had nothing to do with “it,” but “it” had never been defined, so there was no way for me to prove that.

Finally I said, “What is the ethical problem associated with the fragmentation of knowledge?” He would only answer me with great clouds of fog, and I’d say, “I don’t understand,” and everybody else would say they did understand, and they tried to explain it to me, but they couldn’t explain it to me!

So the others in the group told me to write down why I thought the fragmentation of knowledge was not a problem of ethics. I went back to my dormitory room and I wrote out carefully, as best I could, what I thought the subject of “the ethics of equality in education” might be, and I gave some examples of the kinds of problems I thought we might be talking about, For instance, in education, you increase differences. If someone’s good at something, you try to develop his ability, which results in differences, or inequalities. So if education increases inequality, is this ethical? Then, after giving some more examples, I went on to say that while “the fragmentation of knowledge” is a difficulty because the complexity of the world makes it hard to learn things, in light of my definition of the realm of the subject, I couldn’t see how the fragmentation of knowledge had anything to do with anything approximating what the ethics of equality in education might more or less be.

The next day I brought my paper into the meeting, and the guy said, “Yes, Mr. Feynman has brought up some very interesting questions we ought to discuss, and we’ll put them aside for some possible future discussion.” They completely missed the point. I was trying to define the problem, and then show how “the fragmentation of knowledge” didn’t have anything to do with it. And the reason that nobody got anywhere in that conference was that they hadn’t clearly defined the subject of “the ethics of equality in education,” and therefore no one knew exactly what they were supposed to talk about.