In order to progress ,human beings need to draw inspiration . inspiration is there all around us. As we take a deeper delve into the history of human civilisation we see there have been so many people who thought something different ,had the courage to step out of the crowd to propagate the wheels of human civilisation forward . They worked relentlessly towards progress,to make mankind take a step forward towards solving the great jigsaw puzzle of knowledge.
One such man who made the human race take a great leap towards their goal of understanding the universe was Richard P. Feynman . I was in the 9th Grade when I first came across Feynman's autobiographical book "what do you care what other people think" and I realised how much Feynman had to teach us. I would like to write something about him. Feynman was born in New York in 1918 from an early age he showed curiosity in the smallest of happenings .As children we always asked the question WHY. Feynman's father did not let the curiosity in him die. As Feynman recounts his father taught him at a very early age the difference between knowing and knowing the name of something . As Feynman grew up he developed an out of the box way of looking at things. And at the age of 24 he became the youngest scientist to become a part of the Manhattan Project, after the war he continued with his research which changed the codes of quantum physics and in 1965 he shared the Nobel Prize in physics with Julian Schwinger and Sin Itero Tomanaga .
This is just a small part of the physicist's achievement. Feynman was a magician and such personalities are immortal their ideals cherished even decades after have physically left the world. Feynman is a personality I look up to ,someone like the brightest star in the night sky ,someone I can never reach but a personality whose ideals if I follow I can definitely learn a lot and live life to my fullest. After reading his autobiography I was moved. His way of looking at success and failure ,his curiosity gave me food for thought. The last chapter of the book made me believe that if I truly love science and embark on a path towards learning I have nothing to loose.
After having finished "what do you care what other people think ".I went to the library to read his book " the pleasure of finding things out " for I felt I always wanted more of Feynman's words for inspiration and after that I realised to actually appreciate and understand Feynman I must do it through physics. it was Then I bought the Feynman lectures on physics three definitive volumes. I knew he was unconventional as a person and as a scientist now I saw he was even out-of-the-box as a teacher. I could not understand some of the mathematics involved in the book. I read each after many times over to understand it all over again what a surprising experience. And then at school my teacher told me that even a grad student who has read the lectures 10 times over revisit for the 11th time to see something new .If that is not magic what is?
I once read an article saying that we human beings have progressed so much in the last 500,000 years of revolution that we have gone from stone tools to silicon gadgets where does it all end? And to that came a reply quoting Wittgenstein "I don't know why we are here but I know we're not here to have fun". Mavericks like Feynman teach us that the purpose of the human race is to complete the great jigsaw puzzle of knowledge which would eventually answer the question "why is it the way it is?". Richard Feynman has taught me the importance of curiosity ,the magic in physics and the belief that "yes we all can embark on the journey towards knowledge".