Skip to main content

Surely You Are Joking, Mr Feynman – Richard Feynman *****

As far as the general public is concerned there is no doubt who was the greatest physicist of the 20th century – Albert Einstein. Ask a physicist, though, and Einstein will only justscrape in there ahead of Richard Feynman.
Feynman was both a superb scientist and a great storyteller. This lovely book, subtitled ‘adventures of a curious character’ is edited down from taped conversations with fellow scientist and friend, Ralph Leighton.
It’s a sort of informal autobiography, in that it runs through Feynman’s life, but it consists of series of anecdotes, often very funny, of things that happened to this remarkable man.
And they certainly did happen. During the Second World War, for instance, Feynman was working on the project to develop the atomic bomb. Feynman made significant contributions, but his stories are mostly about safe-breaking and lock picking. He was very suspicious of the security regime, which said that everything should be locked away, but then provided inadequate secure filing cabinets, so in his spare time, Feynman set about breaking into as many cabinets as he could.
This, and many other reminiscences make this a superb read whether or not you have an interest in science.
Paperback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support my online work, consider buying a virtual coffee or taking out a membership:
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

Community review – Stephen Goldberg **
Richard Feynman, a physicist, won a Nobel Prize for the development of quantum electrodynamics. This book is not a biography of Feynman, but is an anthology of scattered events in Feynman’s unusual life bringing truth to the book’s subtitle “Adventures of a curious character.” The vignettes of Feynman’s life addressed in the book covered in his childhood when he fixed radios, his life as a graduate student at Princeton University, his work on the Manhattan Project, and his career as a professor. There are also some stories that defy categorization but give a certain texture to Feynman’s life. The stories were very well written and generally quite amusing.
There are two basic types of stories, the ones about himself and some of his antics and the ones about the organizations he worked with or at. The personal stories show that he was something of a trouble-maker. While he frequently outsmarted his peers, he sometimes received his comeuppance from even smarter people such as Robert Oppenheimer. The more interesting vignettes were those that discussed some of the organizations he worked with and the most interesting of these were his conflicts with military at Los Alamos and his description of science study in Brazil.
Feynman portrays himself as an eccentric but he doesn’t necessarily portray himself in a favourable light, but I do not know if this is intentional or not. In this respect, I think that the book is an honest examination of his life. Not only was he a remarkable physicist, he was also an amateur painter and musician. He was also a womanizer and in certain respects he seemed to be bragging about this. On the other hand, he may have just been a product of his environment, having been born in 1918.
This book was disappointing because there must have been many more interesting stories revolving around his work and Nobel prize; stories that would be far more interesting than his ability as a safecracker or his desire to womanize. Thus I do not recommend this book as a source of information on the history of science. On the other hand, if you are interested in learning more about Feynman’s personality and learning that even Nobel-prize winning scientists are also human then this book can be a worthwhile read
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mathematics with Love – Mary Stopes-Roe *****

Admittedly it’s early days (this review is written in January), but this, for me, is the surprise hit of the year so far! I approached this book with trepidation, but found it absolutely delightful. It is described on the cover as the “courtship correspondence of Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb”, and contains a series of letters between Wallis and his cousin and eventual wife Molly Bloxham, along with some useful annotation by their daughter, Mary. The courtship itself is not without difficulties, as Wallis was 18 years older than the 17-year-old Molly at the start of the correspondence, and her father, not surprisingly, wasn’t too pleased about the interest of such an elderly suitor, but that isn’t the only reason the letters are interesting – it’s also because of maths, and Wallis’s position in the UK as the engineering hero of the Second World War. (Incidentally, it seemed very strange to see letters addressed to “Barnes” – I had always assumed Barnes Wallis was a ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more

On Time - Jim Al-Khalili *****

By a small margin Jim Al-Khalili's The World According to Physics is my favourite of his books, both because the 'three pillars' concept at its heart works so well - but also because it's short. On Time is somewhat heavier, but thankfully not a wrist-buster. It might seem at first sight odd that a book on a subset of physics is considerably longer than one covering the whole thing, but time is one of those subjects that inevitably involves considerable complexities and needs depth. As Al-Khalili establishes, it's hard to think of any other scientific concept where our perception of it - what he refers to as manifest time or psychological time - is so different from the view from physics. Some physicists go so far as to suggest that time doesn't exist at all. In the book, Al-Khalili sets out (to my mind quite successfully) both to explain why they think this is the case, but also why it's not the best interpretation of time. I'd certainly note that I...
Post a Comment
Read more