Oh, the curiosities that we have

I haven't been posting my travel blogs for a while. The reason is quite simple, I didn't travel. For as much as we want to explore the new territories, our physical body chained us down. For me, there are frozen joint, aching back, and even worse, I have discovered a mysterious food allergy to some nasty shell fish. After adding all the other constraints in life, the job, the family ... all of these, made traveling not as attractive as it used to be.

Seeing yourself getting old, sometimes you just don't have the cheer...

But even we don't physically travel to new destinations, our mind can still go to places. Sometime we also call it reading a book. From book, I have discovered various things. And the most interesting things are the curious characters like Richard Feynman.

He is famous, he won Nobel Prize in 1965, he was part of Manhattan project that developed nuclear bombs, and he investigated the Challenger disaster. He was a Cal Tech professor and his books are the favorite souvenir if you go to the college bookstore.  

He is still everywhere even after he died 26 years ago. If you want to learn introductory physics, he authored the best book out there. His words, his stories get to be told over and over again by different people. If you open a book on physics of the future, he is there, talking about theoretical physics. You open a book about inspiration, he is there, talking about metaphysics and nature.You go to Yourtube, he is there, talking about other various subject about science and human in general.

 Feynman's small talk on flowers - http://vimeo.com/55874553

But he is not a typical Nobel Prize winner. Yes he is a genius and he has done a lot of great things for scientific discovery, but his IQ is rather adequate at 125 only (I mean jeez my son has a higher IQ according those online test and that didn't help with not getting a F in his math test). Most people don't understand anything about his work on Quantum physics or electromagnetic theories, yet a lot people came to say "We love you, Dick" after he died. He never really cared or strived to gain popularity yet he is loved so much. Why?

He is a curious character. Feynman's great trait isn't his intelligence; it's his passion to understand, his sheer doggedness. From a boy, he was taught to figure things out. Then one day he saw a dinner plate tossed vertically into the air like a Frisbee and began to wonder about its wobble. After that there was many years of long, slow, hard work, slogging away at a difficult scientific problem with all his strength until it was solved. That ultimately led to a Nobel Prize in physics. In his book "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman", he talked about how he enjoyed cracking national security safes, and playing pranks on people, with a marvelous sense of humor. It seems like he treated all sorts of problems as puzzles and got great pleasure for solving them.

People also got to know him through his many faces outside physics because his curiosity moved well beyond things scientific. He is a poet and a musician. He can write in Chinese and he played world level Bongo drum and he sings well. He even sign silly songs like "I want my orange juice", see video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKTSaezB4p8. He did other crazy things, like resiging from the national academy of science, like dating undergraduate students, hanging out with strippers, he even stood in court to support a nude bar he frequented. He was eccentric in all ways but he was always himself. And when he followed his nature, he sees the connection of events. And yet he was a simple man, who could laugh and made other people laugh. His love of life spilled over to all the people he met during his adventure in this planet.

Reading about Richard Feynman, it seems that getting old may not be that bad, as long as you have a curious heart.