The majority of disciplines are taught as a checklist. In particular, Physics has a tendency to arrive in classroom readymade. The material is given to the student in the same way one receives a fully furnished apartment: every table and chair in its proper place, while the question of why they sit there is courteously dismissed.

Richard Feynman could never be made to live in such an apartment. He was the sort of individual who had to lift the furniture, examine underneath, and strip the upholstery off into pieces to determine how it was all put together. More than his Physics Nobel, or the diagrams that now bear his name, it was this ardour and compulsion that made him irresistible. 

When he was a middle-schooler in Far Rockaway, he decided that he was dissatisfied with the standard notation for trigonometric functions which he found to be too ambiguous:

While I was doing all this trigonometry, I didn’t like the symbols for sine, cosine, tangent, and so on. To me, “sin f” looked like s times i times n times f! So I invented another symbol, like a square root sign, that was a sigma with a long arm sticking out of it, and I put the f underneath. For the tangent it was a tau with the top of the tau extended, and for the cosine I made a kind of gamma, but it looked a little bit like the square root sign.

From Part I of Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!

Young Feynman would derive trigonometric identities from triangles he drew himself, then calculate cosines by half-angle formulas because the library book that he had once read to understand them was gone. He would rather rebuild an entire system, no matter how imperfectly, than look up the solution. Funnily enough, it would never occur to him that this was strange.

One decade later, that same forensic instinct has him cracking open safes at Los Alamos. While the experts of the Manhattan Project are solving the most critical equations of the century, Feynman notices that the filing cabinets containing all the secrets of the atomic bomb are sealed with locks that seem more decorative than functional. Just to prove it, he takes it upon himself to unlock every single one of them. For the padlocked cabinets, child’s play. He gets through by sliding the papers out through a poorly designed slot in the back. The combination cabinets took longer (a year and a half!), but he figured out that he could wobble the dial absent-mindedly to obtain the last two digits while he distracted his colleague reading a memo.

Some years after Los Alamos, during his year teaching abroad in Brazil, the curiosity that had once been directed at quantum electrodynamics turned to the sunlit sands of Copacabana. Feynman writes how he fell in love with a small samba school, the Farcantes de Copacabana (Fakers from Copacabana):

I chose to play a thing called a “frigideira” which is a toy frying pan made of metal, about six inches in diameter, with a little metal stick to beat it with. It’s an accompanying instrument which makes a tinkly, rapid noise that goes with the main samba music and rhythm and fills it out. So I tried to play this thing and everything was going all right. We were practicing, the music was roaring along and we were going like sixty, when all of a sudden the head of the bateria section, a great big black man, yelled out, “STOP! Hold it, hold it—wait a minute!” And everybody stopped. “Something’s wrong with the frigideiras!” he boomed out. “O Americano, outra vez!” (“The American again!”) 

From Part IV of Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!

What made Richard Feynman so extraordinary was the joy with which he refused to take anything at face value. All of the anecdotes from his autobiography (which is just a compilation of transcripts from conversations with his best friend Ralph Leighton) share the same underlying principle: I question something, I take it apart, I rebuild it, most times clumsily, sometimes brilliantly, but always myself. Feynman ethos was to never trade curiosity for competence, the open-ended question for the closed answer, or the child’s wonder for the grown-up’s acceptance. He  kept ALL of it, carried all of it with him, and the pleasures of his life lay in the delicate, exact instant when the world parted, ever so slightly, and let him in.