I was very young when I read myfirst book by Richard P. Feynman. It was ‘Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!’ : Adventures of a Curious Character. And I think it was then that I was hooked. When I heard that Richard P. Feynman passed away, I was truly disappointed… because he would have been the person I would have loved to meet in person. Unfortunately, I cannot claim to understand the intricacies of the hard core Quantum Electrodynamics theory proposed by Feynman, but reading about his opinions, his way of life and his actions leaves me in awe.

Among the other Feynman books that I have read (some which I’m still in the process of reading…) are What Do You Care What Other People Think?: Further Adventures of a Curious Character, Meaning of It All : Thoughts of a Citizen Scientist, Six Not-So-Easy Pieces : Einstein’s Relativity, Symmetry and Space-Time and the one which I’m currently reading – The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman.

One of the short works by Feynman in the latter book is titled The Role of Scientific Culture in Modern Society. As I read this section, it truly gave me the motivation to write a blog entry about it — after a fairly long time. Why? Because Feynman asks such pertinent questions and makes such remarks which I feel should be pre-requisite reading for any person who considers himself or herself to have an iota of scientific thinking. If I could I would replicate the entire work here in this blog, but though I’m sure Feynman wouldn’t mind, the publishers of his book would probably not like me very much for it. So I will post a few key excerpts from it and highly recommend that you get the book to read the full section. Note: This lecture was given in 1964, for someone to have this much insight and applicability to the world even as it stands today truly marks Feynman as a visionary. (But please, don’t try and equate his ability to think ahead be it in the context of society, computing, nanotechnology or physics with that of the like of Nostradamus… that would be an insult to the memory and the contribution of Feynman to the world).

“… I believe that one of the greatest dangers to modern society is the possible resurgence and expansion of ideas of thought control; such ideas as Hitler had, or Stalin in his time, or th Catholic religion in the Middle Ages, or the Chinese today. I think that one of the greatest dangers is that this shall increase until it encompasses all of the world”

“And now finally, as I’d like to show Galileo our world, I must show him something with a great deal of shame. If we look away from the science and look at he world around us, we find out something rather pitiful: the the environment that we live in is so actively, intnsely unscientific. Galileo could say: “I noticed that Jupiter was a ball with moons and not a god in the sky. Tell me, what happened to all the astrologers?” Well, they print their results in the newspapers, in the United States at least, in every daily paper every day. Why do we still have astrologers?”

Feynman goes on to talk about a lot of different ways in which modern society is highly unscientific and irrational. But I will let you go read Feynman’s views directly — because as hey made me think of thinks, they may make you think of things as well.

I’ve always argued with my mother from an early age about religion, beliefs and tradition, because to me, none of it makes much sense. It lacks sensibility and therefore, I should not need to adhere to it. One of my friends parents were talking to me about being more “tolerant” going along with it if it makes someone happy. But I cannot accept that either. That is about the same as saying follow the pied piper simply because everyone else does. Gandhi said “Be the change that you want to see in the world.” So does that not mean that those of us who are willing to question the norm and seek to bring about a change in the hackneyed belief systems of religion, belief and tradition have to have the courage and the conviction to stand up and “be the change we want to see in the world.” Yes, it may be a losing batter or even a Pyrrhic (that’s my new favorite word of the day) victory at the cost of the happiness of those close to you who believe, but someone has to stand up and make people think…

As each of us grow up we get exposed to what I can only describe as sturctured competition — competition where the metrics of success or failure are clearly measurable. You either pass or you fail. You either come first or you don’t. You win the game or you don’t. But in each case, the metrics are clear. They are well defined. The amount of time is well defined.

Say for example a video game, you have a fixed number of lives, or a fixed amount of time to rescue the good guys and finish off the bad guys. If you do it you win. If you don’t it is simply “Game Over”. If only everything was that simple.

More and more after having gotten out of school, I’ve encountered things in which the metrics are not well defined. There is no clear marker to signify that yes, you’re done. Because eveytime you reach that point, the markers moved a step further. A little harder, a little further, a little faster.

There have been key incidences which have helped to shape my outlook on competition. I am fiercely competitive — not in sports or doing stupid things, not for just doing things which I say I would like to do, but fiercely competitive for things which I have personally committed to myself to do. The competition is internal. It’s manifestation may or may not be external.

In sophomore year I was thinking a bit too much for my own good — similar to what I’m probably doing these days. Thinking about things which most people probably think about at a later stage of their life than while they are in college. I got to the point there that I had to literally pull myself out of it and realize that the things I was thinking about had no easy answers and in order to be able to maintain any semblance of order in my life, what I had to do was create milestones… short steps — the markers which signified that yes, this is done!

The first few markers were obiously academic – and in that effort I put in more time and more effort towards achiving those markers than I would ever want to again. Taking upto 78 units (26 credits in a single semester) and having absolutely no semblance of a life whatsoever. The next marker was to build a company — that marker was passed as well and it just moved on to a new position.

The problem with the markers of personal and professional life is that they move to easily… they are redefined to esily. I guess that is why I am tempted to go back into a more structured environment of academia… where the goals are well defined and there is an end — in most cases.

Since I was in the LA area and had never really been to a beach, I decided to drive over to Venice Beach. The beach was prety much what I expected – sand, water, people, birds and all kinds of stuff washed up on the shore. What I did not expect however was the crazy things people were hawking along the sidewalk close to the beach – every other tent/stall was a Psychic, Tarot card reader, spiritual healer, chinese masage therapy from Dr. John all dressed up in a lab coat, tattoos and piercings, sunglasses and the list goes on and on. But the number of people claiming to be psychic far exceeded any others. I guess the one good thing about the gullibility and the stupidity of the people is that it makes for a fairly easy profession that almost anyone can take up as long as they can spin a incredulous tale!

I just finished watching the A&E Biography for Alexander Graham Bell. Though all of us know of Bell as the inventor of the telephone, his work for the cause of the hearing impaired, aviation, the hydrofoil, assisted respiration and even the pre-cursor to x-rays – a device to locate bullets in the human body are less known.

Similarly, a couple of months ago, while on my roadtrip through most of New England, I also listened to Time‘s compilation of The 100 Most Influential People of the 20th Century — and each one of them was truly amazing. From the leaders like Churchil, FDR, Hitler (even though he may be screwed in the head, he was a leader), Roosevelt, Kennedy, Mandela, Gandhi to Watson and Crick, Henry Ford, Bill Gates, Martin Luther King, Einstein, Alexander Flemming, Sigmund Freud, William Shockley, Tim Berners-Lee, Akio Morita, Sam Walton and even Bart Simpson! It boggles my mind to consider the greatness that has been achieved by these people. And while they reached the pinnacle of their contribution to humanity — they were all people. Each one with their own flaws. None perfect.

As I listened to Salman Rushdie’s piece on Gandhi, I realized that what we are taught in schools and in the media is the image of the person. he image the media wants us to see. But the real person behind that image may not be perfect. May not be the idealized human we expect them to be. Rushdie started his description of Gandhi by describing the multi-million dollar “Think Different” advertising campaign launched by Apple Computer in which they showed Gandhi and the words “Think Different”. And Rushdie asks the question as to when did this icon for peace become the medium to sell more computers and notebooks to consumers? Rushdie also pointed out that Gandhi too had character flaws — surprise surprise.

Besides learning about the amazing accomplishments of these amazing people, I think one of the things that made it that much more memorable for me was that these were all real people. They all had their weaknesses — which makes them like us — it doesn’t belittle their achievements, but instead tells us that despite our own flaws, we too can do things to leave our mark and make our own history.

It is truly an exhilarating experience for me to watch and listen to the successes of people who have gone over and above what most even dream of achieving in their lifetime. To all those who have done so in he past and to all those who are doing it today and to all those who will do it in the future — you are all amazing people.

Every once in a while I go from one extreme to the other in terms of craving interaction with other people. For the most part I enjoy interacting with other people. But there are days in which I’m highly ambivalent about being around people. Those are days on which I prefer to watch people but not necessarily interact with them. Today was definitely one of those days.

So my answer to this was to go to Starbucks, armed with my notebook full of MP3s, a DVD player, a bag full of DVD movies and audio books from the Carnegie Library and he ultimate weapon in creating your onw personal world… the Bose Noise Reduction headphones.

As I context-switched between a multitude of tasks ranging from writing this blog entry, to writing essays for graduate school applications, to watching Elizabeth on DVD or playing with CSS for my website the headphones made sure I was always in my own personal world and though my peripheral vision would catch people moving around and talking I could only see their lips move and not hear a sound outside of what I chose to pump through winamp or PowerDVD – just the way I like it.

A public solitude — all of my own. A public place with my own space. The ideal place for a pseudo-recluse.