A Brief Book Review of Surely, You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman by Richard Feynman
It’s unexpectedly quite enjoyable to read a memoir of Richard Feynman so soon after reading a biography of Isaac Newton. It’s a study in contrasts. In James Gleick’s “Isaac Newton”, which I read a couple weeks ago, we meet an orphaned, hermetic, terminally intense, celibate, ultra-competitive mathematician, theologian, alchemist, and government minister. In Feynman—who won a Nobel Prize for physics more than 250 years after Sir Isaac invented calculus and modern physics—we meet a playful, bongo drumming, areligious, prank pulling, safe cracking modern man who hated most philosophy and had no patience for government bureaucracy. I could go on. The surface differences are legion. What’s similar about these two men, though, is their intense curiosity and independence, love of scientific experimentation, and exceptional ability to discover and explain natural phenomena. I read another Feynman memoir a couple of years ago titled “What Do You Care What Other People Think?” That was good. I remember being touched by Feynman’s relationship with his father, his reflections on the illness and death of his first wife, and his work in helping solve the mystery of the Challenger Space Shuttle explosion. But this memoir I enjoyed a lot more. You gain a more full (and entertaining) view of the man, from his days at MIT, Harvard, Princeton, Cornell, and CalTech, to life at Los Alamos helping create the nuclear bomb, to his time in Brazil, to shenanigans in Las Vegas, and so much more, especially about how to learn, practice, and teach science. The essays I liked the most were “He Fixes Radios by Thinking!”, “The Chief Research Chemist of the Metaplast Corporation”, “Monster Minds”, “A Different Box of Tools”, “Los Alamos from Below”, “Safecracker Meets Safecracker”, “Lucky Numbers”, “Judging Books by Their Covers”, “Found Out in Paris”, and “Cargo Cult Science”. Highly recommended.