Confidence in Your Ideas

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool.” (Feynman, 343)

Throughout much of his autobiography, Richard Feynman tells stories about his collaborations with famous minds ranging from the theoretical, such as Albert Einstein, to the much less so, such as Nick the Greek. During his time at Los Alamos, he worked with many of the great names in physics, such as Edward Teller and J. R. Oppenheimer, assisting them with calculations. He found that many of these physicists, with such illustrious accolades and distinctions, chose to discuss their theories with him before anyone else. At first he questioned this practice, since he was hardly as qualified as many of his contemporaries. However, it was Neils Bohr who explained to him the difficulty there was in finding someone with whom he could openly discuss theories without that person being intimidated by reputation. Feynman found that when he discussed theories and ideas, he focused on the concept as opposed to the person who was conveying it. Feynman uses this anecdote to explain his quotation above. Often times, people have a tendency to second-guess themselves and reject their own ideas. This tendency brings up the hidden difficulty in the thought process of defending one’s own ideas. This, again, comes back to the idea of having a comprehensive knowledge-base in order to defend ideas. However, from the quotation above, Feynman tells that having such a knowledge-base is never enough. Having the courage and vigour to follow through with the idea is just as necessary. He draws attention to the famous example of Millikan’s oil-drop experiment that was used to find the elementary charge constant (electric charge of a single electron). Millikan’s experiment found the value, but had a fundamental flaw in it: he incorrectly measured the viscosity of air. Thus, for years, scientists who reproduced the experiment would bias their results towards the accepted value of the time. Never had the possibility entered their minds that Millikan’s value could be wrong because they lacked the confidence to defend their own results.