I've been spending my morning coffee breaks reading, with great pleasure, the letters of Richard Feynman, collected and edited by his daughter, Michelle. Probably it says more about me than it does about Feynman, but I have thought, ever since I held the volume in my hand, of Henry David Thoreau. There is the title, Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From the Beaten Track, lifted from a letter criticizing the kind of mathematics education that penalizes students for solving problems in novel ways not authorized by their textbooks. I think his daughter must have chosen the phrase for her title because she thought it captured her father's approach to all of life, and the words would not seem out of place in a letter of Thoreau's, either. Then, on the back cover, in one of the advertising blurbs, Julian Schwinger deploys possibly the most famous metaphor in Walden to describe Feynman, his fellow Nobel laureate in physics in 1965: "An honest man, the outstanding intuitionist of our age, and a prime example of what may lie in store for anyone who dares to follow the beat of a different drum."
There is much between the covers that seems similarly Thoreauvian--the contempt for "uniforms" and all types of "authorities," the insistently repeated exhortation to "think for yourself," the refusal of honorary degrees, the indifference toward money, a somewhat cranky public spiritedness, and, very specifically, a letter he wrote his mother on August 30, 1954--look it up or, if at all inclined, get the book and read the whole thing.
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