Richard Feynman: physicist, author, artist, musician
Clay County Histories
Markus Krueger | Program Director HCSCC
markus.krueger@hcsmuseum.org
I like those end-of-year list columns. This year it occurred to me: “Hey, Markus, YOU have a column! How about you make one of those lists?” Okay. Here’s my three favorite history books I read this past year.
The Birth of Loud: Leo Fender, Les Paul, and the Guitar-Pioneering Rivalry that Shaped Rock ‘N’ Roll by Ian S. Port. This book combines music history, science, and engineering in an engaging story about how three acquaintances raced to invent a new musical instrument: the solid-body electric guitar. Les Paul was a guitar virtuoso obsessed with creating new sounds. Leo Fender was a self-taught electrical engineering genius who spent all his time in his guitar and speaker factory. Paul Bigsby was a motorcycle daredevil who bragged that he could build anything with his meticulous craftsmanship. Between 1947 and the early 1960s, these three visionaries invented electric instruments, and thanks to musicians like Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, Merle Travis, Dick Dale, Eric Clapton, and Jimi Hendrix, those inventions changed music.
The History of Ideas by David Runciman. Philosophers are usually terrible writers. Their books are long and boring and they don’t talk like normal people. That’s why I have been a longtime fan of David Runciman’s podcasts “The History of Ideas” and “Past, Present, Future.” Runciman, an English aristocrat who taught history and politics at the University of Cambridge, is smart enough to understand what these people wrote, and he explains it to us in plain English so us regular people can chew on ideas that changed the world.
Each of the twelve chapters in this book is about a big thinker wrestling with a big idea. Jean-Jeacques Rousseau tries to find the root of human nature and this thing we call “civilization” in the 1700s. Jeremy Bentham wants to restructure society around creating the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. Frederick Douglass examines the physical and psychological horrors of the system of slavery that he was born into and risked his life to escape. Simone de Beauvoir asks why women have had to put up with such unfair sexism in pretty much every culture ever. These thinkers often disagree, of course. Friedrich Neitsche tears traditional morality apart by exposing its hypocrisy, but Judith Shklar thinks that a little hypocrisy is a small price to pay if it helps us avoid the only vice that really matters: cruelty.
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard Feynman. Richard Feynman was a Nobel Prize winning physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project to create the atomic bomb during World War II. No doubt about it, this guy was smart. But he was also downright goofy, the physicist who played bongos at parties. In this autobiography, he tells a series of entertaining short stories that don’t always center around science…except that there’s science in everything everywhere. His chapters on the Manhattan Project are mostly about how, just for fun, he learned lockpicking so he could steal his coworkers’ atomic secrets (he’d always give them back). He taught physics in Brazil, but that chapter is mostly about how he joined a local samba band and played music in the streets. I can’t say I wholly approve of his chapter on the art and science of picking up girls in sleazy bars, but it is interesting how he adds a sociology experiment to his lechery. Throughout it all, he teaches us about critical thinking, project management, human nature, and the fun of plunging into something you know nothing about. Like how he didn’t understand art, so he took lessons and became an accomplished artist. His advice: “Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.”