Evolution of Love 2

Right Questions

Before Richard Feynman decoded the universe, his father—a uniform salesman—taught him one lesson: knowing the name of something means nothing. Understanding it means everything.
Melville Feynman was born in Minsk in 1890 and came to America at age five. He dreamed of becoming a doctor, maybe a scientist. But his family couldn't afford medical school. So Melville tried various businesses, never quite succeeding, until he finally settled as a sales manager for a uniform company, selling to police officers, postal workers, and military personnel.
He spent his days convincing people that the right uniform would make them look important.
But Melville knew better. He knew that underneath every fancy uniform was just a person—no smarter, no better, no more worthy of respect than anyone else. And he taught his son Richard this truth from the very beginning: titles and appearances are meaningless. What matters is what's inside.
When Lucille Feynman was pregnant with their first child in 1918, Melville declared: "If it's a boy, he'll be a scientist."
It was. And Melville set out to make it happen—not by forcing his son to memorize facts, but by teaching him how to think.
When Richard was still small enough to need a high chair, Melville brought home a bag of old rectangular bathroom floor tiles from Long Island City. After dinner, they'd set the tiles on end, one next to another, and Richard would push the first one, watching with delight as they all toppled in sequence.
Simple enough. But then Melville upgraded the game.
"Now," he'd say, "one white, two blues, one white, two blues."
Richard would reach for another blue tile. "No," his father would say gently. "It has to be white."
Patterns. Sequences. Mathematical thinking. All disguised as play.
Melville never told his son to become a scientist. He never lectured him about formulas or forced him to study. Instead, he read to him from the Encyclopedia Britannica—not the children's encyclopedia, the real one. He took him on walks through the woods. He brought him to the Natural History Museum while other children played in parks.
And most importantly, he asked questions.
One Sunday, the neighborhood mothers decided that all the fathers should take their sons on nature walks. It was meant to be educational. So the fathers dutifully marched their children into the woods, and the next day at school, one boy approached Richard.
"See that bird on the stump?" the boy said. "What's its name?"
Richard didn't know.
"It's a brown-throated thrush," the boy announced triumphantly. "Your father doesn't teach you much about science, does he?"
Richard smiled to himself. Because his father had already taught him something far more important.
Melville had once pointed to a bird and said: "See that bird? It's called a brown-throated thrush. But in Germany, they call it a halzenfugel. In Chinese, they call it a chung ling. And even if you know all those names in every language in the world, you still know nothing whatsoever about the bird. You only know something about people—what they call the bird. Now that bird—watch what it does. That's what matters."
Names were labels. Understanding was everything.
On their walks, Melville would stop and point. "Look," he'd say. "Notice that the bird is always pecking at its feathers. Why do you think it does that?"
Richard, maybe ten years old, thought about it. "Maybe the feathers get ruffled when it flies, and it's trying to straighten them out."
His father didn't say "good guess" or "wrong." He said: "Okay. So when would the feathers be most ruffled?"
"Right after it lands from flying."
"Then what should we observe?"
"Birds that just landed should peck more than birds that have been walking on the ground for a while."
"Let's watch."
So they stood there, father and son, observing birds. And after a while, Richard realized his hypothesis was wrong. The birds pecked just as much whether they'd been flying or walking.
"I don't know," Richard admitted.
That's when Melville explained: "Birds have lice. Little creatures that live in their feathers and eat the flakes that come off. And the lice have mites that live on them and eat the wax from the lice's joints. And the mites produce waste that's full of sugar, and in that waste live even tinier creatures."
Richard Feynman would later admit that the specific details his father taught him about parasites-on-parasites weren't scientifically accurate. But that didn't matter. What mattered was the method.
His father taught him: observe, hypothesize, test, revise.
Melville taught Richard that the natural world was full of mysteries waiting to be solved—not by memorizing what someone else discovered, but by looking closely, asking questions, and thinking for yourself.
Years later, when Feynman became one of the most celebrated physicists of the 20th century—Nobel Prize winner, co-creator of quantum electrodynamics, bongo-playing genius—reporters would ask him: "Was your work worthy of the Nobel Prize?"
Feynman would bristle. "I don't like honors," he'd say. "Honors are epaulettes. Honors are uniforms. My papa brought me up this way. I can't stand it."
He'd seen his father spend decades selling uniforms to people who thought the costume made them important. Melville had taught him that it didn't. A general in full military dress was just a human being. The real honor wasn't in wearing medals—it was in doing work that other people found useful, that inspired them, that advanced human understanding.
Melville Feynman died on October 8, 1946. His son Richard fell into a deep depression. For months, he couldn't do physics. The grief was too heavy.
But eventually, Richard returned to what his father had taught him: curiosity. Wonder. The joy of figuring things out just because it's fun.
He went back to solving physics problems not because they were important or because they'd win him prizes, but because watching a spinning plate in a cafeteria fascinated him, and he wanted to understand the mathematics of its wobble.
That playful curiosity—the kind Melville had cultivated with bathroom tiles and bird-watching—led Richard Feynman to some of the most profound discoveries in 20th-century physics.
Feynman diagrams. The path integral formulation. Quantum electrodynamics. Contributions to nanotechnology and quantum computing. Work that changed how we understand the fundamental nature of reality.
All because a uniform salesman who never got to be a scientist himself decided to teach his son not what to think, but how to think.
Melville Feynman never earned a Ph.D. He never published a paper. He never won a Nobel Prize.
But he raised a son who did all of those things—and who credited everything to a father who understood that genius isn't born from memorization.
It's born from wonder.
From a father who asks: "Why do you think the bird does that?"
From a parent who doesn't give you answers, but teaches you how to find them yourself.
Richard Feynman once said that his father made him a scientist by making him curious about the world, skeptical of authority, and unafraid to question everything—even things that everyone else accepted as true.
Great geniuses don't just learn from books.
They learn from parents who teach them that every name is just a label, every uniform is just fabric, every title is just words.
And underneath it all is the real question: Why?
Melville Feynman sold uniforms for a living.
But what he really did was teach his son to see past the surface of everything—and to never stop asking what's underneath.
And that's how you raise a genius.
Not with the right schools or the right books.
But with the right questions.