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Feynmaniacs Should Read this Review, Skip Lecture Collection, Save 22 Simoleons
David Goodstein
The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen Scientist. Richard P. Feynman. 122 pp. Addison-Wesley, 1998. $22.
If you go to the science section of your local bookstore, chances are you'll find a shelf full of books by or about Richard Feynman. He seems to be endlessly fascinating to scientists and nonscientists alike. I confess to having co-written one of those books, intended as a tribute to my friend and colleague at Caltech for more than 20 years.
Before I knew him personally, however, in April of 1963, he came to Seattle to give three public lectures under the general title "A Scientist Looks at Society," part of a series of guest lectures at the University of Washington known as the John Danz Lectures. I was at the time a graduate student in physics at U-Dub (as we called the U. of W.), and Feynman, although he had not yet won his Nobel Prize, was already a legendary figure. A visit to UDub by the great man was a very exciting occasion.
Addison-Wesley has now published Feynman's Danz Lectures under the inappropriate title The Meaning of It All. I read through the review copy that was sent to me, anxious to find those vivid moments that, even after 35 years, stand out in cherished memory. One was the point at which, much to the delight of Feynman and the rest of his audience, the entire psychology department stood as one and marched out in a huff. (Of course it may not have happened that way. This is a 35year-old memory we're talking about.) I found it in the third lecture when Feynman referred to psychoanalysts and psychiatrists as "witch doctors," because all their complicated ideas about ids and egos and so on, accumulated in almost no time at all, couldn't possibly be right. He also said that, if he were a member of a tribe and he were sick he would go to the witch doctor, because the witch doctor knows more about illness than anyone else, but, if memory serves, that was after the psychologists were already gone. In the next few pages he also savages professors of...