"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" - unam.

At all these places everybody working in physics would tell me what they were
doing and I'd discuss it with them. They would tell me the general problem they were
working on, and would begin to write a bunch of equations.
"Wait a minute," I would say, "Is there a particular example of this general
problem?"
"Why yes; of course."
"Good. Give me one example." That was for me: I can't understand anything in
general unless I'm carrying along in my mind a specific example and watching it go.
Some people think in the beginning that I'm kind of slow and I don't understand the
problem, because I ask a lot of these "dumb" questions: "Is a cathode plus or minus? Is an
an ion this way, or that way?"
But later, when the guy's in the middle of a bunch of equations, he'll say
something and I'll say, "Wait a minute! There's an error! That can't be right!"
The guy looks at his equations, and sure enough, after a while, he finds the
mistake and wonders, "How the hell did this guy, who hardly understood at the
beginning, find that mistake in the mess of all these equations?"
He thinks I'm following the steps mathematically, but that's not what I'm doing. I
have the specific, physical example of what he's trying to analyze, and I know from
instinct and experience the properties of the thing. So when the equation says it should
behave so­and­so, and I know that's the wrong way around, I jump up and say, "Wait!
There's a mistake!"
So in Japan I couldn't understand or discuss anybody's work unless they could
give me a physical example, and most of them couldn't find one. Of those who could, it
was often a weak example, one which could be solved by a much simpler method of
analysis.
Since I was perpetually asking not for mathematical equations, but for physical
circumstances of what they were trying to work out, my visit was summarized in a
mimeographed paper circulated among the scientists (it was a modest but effective
system of communication they had cooked up after the war) with the title, "Feynman's
Bombardments, and Our Reactions."
After visiting a number of universities I spent some months at the Yukawa
Institute in Kyoto. I really enjoyed working there. Everything was so nice: You'd come to
work, take your shoes off, and someone would come and serve you tea in the morning
when you felt like it. It was very pleasant.
While in Kyoto I tried to learn Japanese with a vengeance. I worked much harder
at it, and got to a point where I could go around in taxis and do things. I took lessons
from a Japanese man every day for an hour.
One day he was teaching me the word for "see."
"All right," he said. "You want to say, 'May I see your garden?' What do you
say?"
I made up a sentence with the word that I had just learned.
"No, no!" he said. "When you say to someone, 'Would you like to see my garden?
you use the first 'see.' But when you want to see someone else's garden, you must use
another 'see,' which is more polite."
"Would you like to glance at my lousy garden?" is essentially what you're saying
in the first case, but when you want to look at the other fella's garden, you have to say