User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
This book of anecdotes is written in a very casual, fun way that makes it easy to read. The problem is that the author, Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Dick Feynman, is annoying. All the anecdotes involve him discovering a hidden talent, using it, delighting others (or himself if that's his real goal) and then being applauded for it (sometimes only by himself). For example, he discovers that he's a great artist, musician, safecracker, and critic. Everything revolves around him showing off and being somewhat of a jerk. There were many times when I thought, yeah buddy, *you* think it's funny but no one else does. A few stories like this and it's quirky but piled on top of each other, it's annoying.
I can't really recommend this book. Maybe mischevious self-aggrandizing guys would enjoy it but otherwise, I suggest a pass.
Rating: really liked it
This book was a pure delight. The subtitle "Adventures of a Curious Character" is spot-on. Feynman gave an amazingly human and honest view into his philosophy and take on life, thought a series of stories.
One thing that struck me most deeply was his passion for learning new things. You would think a world-famous Physicist would just be passionate for Physics - but Feynman was curious about everything he saw. He dabbled in art and was successful enough to have a show, he joined a Brazilian Bongo group and competed with them, he hung out in Vegas until he grokked gambling, he spent time in strip bars in Arizona until he figured out how to pick up women, he cracked safes in Los Alamos for fun - the list goes on! My take: you should have your passions - but you should also have your hobbies. I think I need a new hobby :)
I really enjoyed his lessons learned from observing the Brazilian educational system. He noted that many of the students were simply memorizing words and formulas and had no understanding of the concepts they applied to. I think this is not a unique problem in education.
Another lesson learned from Feynman's studies of science is to never take any data for granted. Always always question the sources. Whenever Feynman did an experiment he would re-generate many of the numbers on his own - even if they had been published in other places. For many things we are (and not just in science) standing on the shoulders of giants. The easiest way to be led astray is if those results were never right to begin with.
I think Feynman was in his heart a true educator and scientist, with real integrity. And I think it drove him nuts how many important decisions are made using unscientific principles. This book was a light-hearted attempt to point that out - not to mention, a very entertaining read.
Rating: really liked it
Richard P. Feynman was a winner of the Nobel prize in physics. This book tells us about various escapades he had in his life. I have read a few books written by Nobel Prize winners in Physics. Most of them were written formally about the academy stuff related to Physics.
I knew what I had to expect from this book. I was in for a big surprise when I started reading it. This book will give you a totally different experience. You are in for a joyride with Mr. Feynman, who discusses almost everything under the sun with ease in a brilliant humorous way.
His tryst with art, Brazilian bongo, bars, gambling, dating, and many other things will keep you amazed and entertained at the same time. We will wonder how this Physicist got a handsome amount for his drawings. He was the very best in almost everything he tried in his life.
What I learned from this book 1) Why is it important for a Scientist to be genuine? Feynman tells us the importance of being genuine in Scientific circles to avoid bias and the importance of avoiding revealing only favorable data.
"The idea is to try to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists...
You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.”
2) How did Japan become a developed country? If you are someone who read the book, To Hell and Back: The Last Train from Hiroshima, you will see how terribly Japan was affected due to the world war and the atom bomb explosion in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. From that situation, Japan has become a superpower. Many factors contributed to their success, like the Kaizen technique, Toyota way, minimalism, Ikigai, and Kakeibo. Feynman tells us how Japan developed at such a fast pace.
"The people of Japan believed they had only one way of moving up: to have their children educated more than they were; that it was very important for them to move out of their peasantry to become educated. So there has been a great energy in the family to encourage the children to do well in school, and to be pushed forward. Because of this tendency to learn things all the time, new ideas from the outside would spread through the educational system very easily. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why Japan has advanced so rapidly."
3) How did Mr. Feynman become the best in whatever he tried to do in his life? We will be amazed at the different areas that Feynman could handle in his life. He was very successful in almost all the fields he tried to deal with. He himself is saying that it was due to his confidence that he was able to deal with multiple fields like Physics, Art, and Music in his life.
“You have to have absolute confidence. Keep right on going, and nothing will happen.”
My favourite three lines from this book “I always do that, get into something and see how far I can go.”
"You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It's their mistake, not my failing."
"The whole problem of discovering what was the matter, and figuring out what you have to do to fix it–that was interesting to me, like a puzzle."
What could have been better? The problem with this book is that Feynman might sound narcissistic and chauvinistic in some areas of this book. Some won't like the way he described women and other fields of science like biology. His extraordinary confidence can be interpreted as grandiosity by some people.
Feynman himself said that he is not a perfect person. He had his own negatives. Feynman died in February 1988. Most of the incidences discussed in this book happened in the 1950s to 1980s. We should also consider the time period in which he lived and should never try to interpret this book with the political correctness of 2022.
I can't still blame a reader if they felt what I described above, as I also felt the same in some parts of this book. There are innumerable positives in this book that will cancel all the above negatives easily.
Rating 5/5 This book will be a good choice if you want to have a fun filled experience for sometime with a true genius.
“I wonder why. I wonder why.
I wonder why I wonder.
I wonder why I wonder why
I wonder why I wonder!”
Rating: really liked it
Hadn't thought a Nobel pprize-winning physicist could be so fun loving & down-to-earth. He was a man ahead of his time when it came to many things -- & of his time when it came to his ideas about 'pretty girls' (as he calls women). The audiobook reader did a great job, but what a shame Feynman didn't read it himself before he passed on...
Rating: really liked it
“Would you like cream or lemon in your tea, Mr. Feynman?” It’s Mrs. Eisenhart, pouring tea.
“I’ll have both, thank you,” I say, still looking for where I’m going to sit, when suddenly I hear “Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh. Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman.” The title of this collection comes from a tale that took place early in Feynman's career where he was invited for an afternoon tea with the dean of his university. The dean's wife is serving and asks him the above question. Richard never drinks tea and never moves in the same society that does, little own the society that has lemon OR cream with it.
A big theme of these stories and indeed a running theme in Feynman's life is that he had no time for formalisms, rituals or societal views. He does attribute a lot of this to his upbringing. His father was a uniform maker and often dealt with clients of all types of notoriety and he knew that underneath all those uniforms were just another naked ape. He passed on his views to his children and Richard went so far as to nearly not accept his Nobel Prize. To him it was another form of bullshit and that his reward had already been awarded with other scientists using his findings.
It's no argument that Feynman was a brilliant physicist, but he also had many interests. And a great proportion of these stories are about these interests or how his interests intersected with his physics work. There is only one story in this collection that is technical in any way. The collection reads as if you had somehow run into Feynman in a seedy bar in 1960s Vegas (there's a story about this time) waiting for a showgirl to finish work. He is a great orator and the origins of these stories are that they were recorded and transcribed by Ralph Leighton, a drumming pal of Richard's. Yes, Feynman played the bongos.
So while you have this brilliant man, in some ways ahead of his time in the ways that he thought and how he acted, there ares some hints that he is a man of his time. Reading these stories you come to realise that Feynman was quite the womaniser. He appreciated the female form in a socially acceptable way for the time that he lived in. And so when someone from the twenty-first century reads this book he can come across as a bit sleazy. I am not going to defend his attitudes nor am I going to condone them. Personally I found nothing overtly offensive about his actions or his attitudes. But I can imagine my partner reading this and sighing at several statements made by him.
The book covers times in his childhood right up until late in life. There is a nice large chapter on his time at Los Alamos working on the Manhattan Project. There are also stories about his time in Brazil and Japan and his love for immersing himself in a different way of life. There are also a couple of great chapters on education; one about the standard of students he sees while in Brazil and the other concerning a time when he was asked to be on a panel to decide high school texts for his school region.
I'd recommend this read to most people. It is extremely accessible, with little jargon or technical physics. It talks more on his philosophy of living, learning and how to deal with the world around you. He is definitely a great orator and that is why his legacy lives on. This book remains a popular seller in the general sciences and recordings of his lectures and interviews are popular on youtube. It's great to know that we still have so much of him around.
And for those who want more there are plenty more collections of his wisdom. There is also Feynman a biographic graphic novel.
Rating: really liked it
“You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It's their mistake, not my failing.” ― Richard Feynman, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
I've been circling this book, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, and Gleck's Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman for awhile. This one seemed the most fun and easiest place to start. I was driving from Taos/Santa Fe back to Phoenix last week and as I drove past Los Alamos, it was just the particle collision in my brain I needed to start on Feynman.
Often, memoirs are hard to read because you know a bunch of it is façade. A person is showing you a part of them for a purpose. They want to be viewed as smart, important, funny, etc. They carefully guide you through a Potemkin village of their life. Richard Feynman's memoir is different. Not that I don't think Feynman had an ego. He might have even had an agenda with the book. But, for the most part, he seemed much more interested in the stories he wanted to tell, rather than on how they would make him look. He wasn't all that worried about how he looked so much. His entire life was built around doing what he wanted, exploring what he found interesting, violating taboos, beating his own drums and cutting his own path.
He was a Nobel-prize winning polymath physicist whose other talents included playing drums, teaching, drawing naked girls, picking locks, making atomic bombs, practical jokes, and telling stories. He wasn't interested in the usual trappings of success. Many of those things annoyed him. He was curious. He was a risk-taker. He was a genius.
Rating: really liked it
One of the problems with reading a book written by a genius is that you have to ask yourself whether any perceived deficiencies in the text are due to the author, or due to your own failure to comprehend his brilliance. That said, I wasn't thrilled by this book. On a purely technical level, it would have benefited from a stronger editor. While there's a rough chronological order to the material, there tends to be a lot of jumping around both within and between the chapters. A few times, Feynman would relate some post-WWII anecdote, only to jump back to something that happened during his time at Los Alamos in the early 1940s. He'll mention that he divorced his second wife, and then shortly thereafter tell a story set during the marriage. It gives the book a very disjointed quality.
On a more personal level, Feynman just doesn't strike me as someone you'd want to spend time with. About 30% of his stories talk about a time he pulled a fast one on somebody, or how he did something arrogant and obnoxious and it developed into an incident. Reading this book feels like babysitting a very rambunctious toddler--as amusing as his antics may be, you're can't help but looking forward to it being over. And while it's perhaps unfair to judge his behavior by modern standards, some of the womanizing and borderline misogyny (as when he decides that the best way to pick up women in bars is to treat them badly and call them whores) is a bit disappointing. Feynman's scientific accomplishments may be beyond reproach, but I doubt I'll spend any more time with his memoirs.
Rating: really liked it
Everyone has a collection of favorite stories that they enjoy telling; but it's unusual for the stories to be so good that a friend insists on writing them down, so that other people can appreciate them too. When I read this book, I almost feel that Feynman's telling the stories himself. Well, when that happens in real life, you always want to join in; here's my personal best effort at a Feynman-type anecdote. I hope it's now far enough in the past that the people concerned will see the funny side, if they happen to stumble across this page by accident!
STAR TREK AND THE PERSONAL SATELLITE ASSISTANTIt was early 2000, and I had just started working at NASA Ames Research Center in California. I was part of this little group that was supposed to be developing spoken language dialogue systems for space applications. The guy whose idea it was had started up the group, recruited me and two other people, and then left to join Microsoft Research before I'd even arrived. So everyone was looking at us suspiciously. Why did NASA need software that you could talk to?
The rest of this review is available elsewhere (the location cannot be given for Goodreads policy reasons)
Rating: really liked it
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. Of course, you only live one life, and you make all your mistakes, and learn what not to do, and that's the end of you.
I can usually tell when I’m going to give a book 5 stars by one sign: I can’t shut up about it. Well, I couldn’t and can’t shut up about this book; it was simply great. This greatness sort of snuck up on me. I’d recently read a collection of anecdotes by a scientist (
A Primate’s Memoir) and found it rather disappointing. Plus, the whole idea of reading a book of stories about a great physicist, without learning any actual physics, seemed silly. But my skepticism had withered away by the end of the first chapter; I was entranced by the man, absolutely fascinated, and remained so the whole time.
The subtitle of this book is perfect, because the two meanings of the word “curious” converge to encapsulate Feynman: he was curious in the sense of being odd, as well as curious in his love of learning. I was trying to figure out a way to describe Feynman’s personality, and this is the best I’ve come up with: Feynman is Huck Finn grown up to become a physicist. The qualities that make Mark Twain’s most famous character so endearing are also the qualities that endear Feynman to me: mischievousness, curiosity, cleverness, honesty, naiveté, friendliness, frankness, and an uncompromising moral principle. Like Huck, Feynman is always getting himself into absurd situations, and getting out of them with pure quickness of mind; like Huck, Feynman likes to fool other people and play tricks, but all without a hint of malice; and like Huck, Feynman will stick his neck out for what he feels is right.
There are some hilarious stories in here, which I won’t spoil. But what was more impressive to me was the amount of serious thought that could be found. Feynman’s criticism of the Brazilian school system—which relied overmuch on memorization by rote, and concentrated overmuch on passing tests, instead of teaching students how to make sense of the world around them—applies equally well to many aspects of the current U.S. school system. Equally relevant was Feynman’s chapter on the time he served on the board that oversaw the evaluation of math textbooks for the California school system; it was a Kafkaesque farce. But by far the most consistent intellectual theme that went through these reflections was an absolute distrust of pretension, reputation, convention, snobbery, prestige, and authority.
In my own life, one of the most interesting, and also most difficult, lessons that I’ve had to learn is that people are not nearly as competent as they’d like you to believe. When I was a kid, I had a lot of faith in all sorts of things. I thought that if an ‘expert’ said something, it must be true; I assumed that there was a particular ‘expert’ in every type of activity, be it business or science, to ensure that things ran the way they were supposed to. In short, I had the comforting illusion that very smart people in very white lab coats were behind the scenes, ensuring that things ran smoothly. The world certainly cooperated with this illusion for a while (after all, that’s the whole basis of advertising); but it wasn’t long after meeting people in the ‘real world’ that this illusion imploded: the world is run by people underqualified and overconfident.
I include this bit about myself because I don’t think I would have reacted so emotionally to this rather lighthearted book were it not that I had that experience. In a way, a distrust of all authority is Feynman’s central social message. He is constantly running into ‘experts’ who haven’t the slightest idea what they’re talking about. He goes to academic conferences full of pretentious windbags; he trusts the results of other people’s experiments, and later finds that they were seriously flawed.
So any time somebody makes a claim, he decides to test it out for himself; and the few times he doesn’t do this, he gets into trouble. This realization, that most people are inclined to trust claims from authority, is integral to his almost supernatural ability to navigate unfamiliar situations; Feynman is so easily able to bluff his way through because people take his word for things. So this central insight—to always check for youself—is both the heart of his scientific attitude, as well as his way of effortlessly gliding through the world. His ability to crack safes, for example, wasn’t due to his knowing a lot about safes, but simply realizing that most people used their safes foolishly, not resetting the factory combination or setting it to something obvious. Most of us assume that we couldn’t figure out how to crack a safe; but Feynman did what he always did, and saw for himself whether he could: and he could!
I honestly wish that this book was three times its length. Now, I must know more about Feynman. My favorite saints are the ones who would hate to be worshiped, and Feynman certainly would think this glowing review was nonsense. Well, perhaps it is; but the only way you’ll know for sure is by reading this book, and checking for yourself.
Rating: really liked it
"Nobody ever figures out what life is all about,and it doesn't matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough."(Video Review)
The story of Feynman changed fundamentally, what I think about the world around me.
The story of Richard and his father helped me to understand, that
many parents could help their children to a more fulfilling life. Parents could pique the interest of the child very early and could give him real answers if he asks why again and again.
He changed my view about scientists. He proved that the
life of a scientist can be also “sexy” and interesting and the same time useful and deep activity. You rarely have a chance to meet pedagogues who can help you fall in love with learning and set the fire of science in you, as Feynman did.
This book is not only interesting for physicists and scientists, but also for parents and pedagogues who want to inspire their children, students to have a better life. Elon Musk (founder of Tesla) founded a school build on the same principles what Feynman confessed. Where children have a chance to understand the thing work around us, understand the “whys”, and continuously maintain the interest of the students.
Of course many people cannot afford this luxury. But also they can
profit from these pedagogical principles, even if these seems to be terrifying at the first time as a parent. If you encourage your child to question anybody, you will be also questioned. If you encourage your child, not to defer to different orders, it questions basic societal values of many people and they can be stigmatized being unrespectful.
But I think, you will only show a path for your child, which even can lead to the Nobel-prize, but to a happier, more interesting life. And now I am surely not joking.
Rating: really liked it
Allow me to regale you with tales of one of the smartest bags of plasma to ever ambulate across the stage before succumbing to planned obsolescence and (empirically speaking), being quiescent for an indeterminate amount of time. (It occurs to me that Shakespeare's original semantic construction of this sentiment cemented itself firmly in the depths of posteriors (i.e. posterity) for reasons that this formulation evinces none of, so I will try again. I am here to fuck your occiptal lobes with words and characters which clumsily circumscribe the time which one of the keenest mind's in the history of big-brain-energetics piloted a bipedal robot across Jotunheim before catching an errant hammer with a suspiciously short handle, (i.e. the work of the trickster Loki in the form of a fly who bit a surly dwarven blacksmith (Sindri) upon his asshole while he was forging Mjölnir), right directly in his germline, thus cashing all of its lethal liquidity into what Ludwig von Mises called, "A Gonadal Götterdämmerung" and ensuring this brilliant mind could no longer beseech the hearts of minds of mortal denizens upon that plane of existence for a very long, (perhaps indefinite), amount of time due to investing his entire savings into precious metals with Birch Gold. While simultaneously occluding from his high powered perception, the fact that his untimely demise was a product of Útgarða-Loki, a giant, and known master of trickery, (in case the name didn't give it away), having tricked the piss drunk battle god into attempting to lift a giant grey cat which manages to arch it's back regardless of what he does and thus only allows him to lift a single paw, incensing the Thunder Lord until he begins to spin his hammer whilst muttering curses, until finally he screams, "FUCK THE NINE WORLDS!", and releases the deadly instrument to careen across the tundra like a meade powered railgun and strike Mr. Feynman, (with improbable precision), directly in the prickly knapsack and discombobulate and oblitify (sic) his corporeal triangulation. Imagine this:
You've encased Tom Cruise in a cube of frozen piss for the next Mission Impossible. Wait, let me start over. You've freshly emerged from a vat of sliquid silver silicone-based lube, your body glistening like a chicken tender writhing on the corrugated teeth of a Foreman Grill. You thought this might provide you some advantage whilst grappling with Inter-universal Teichmüller theory, but it has only served to leave you sexually agitated to the point of humping furniture. Repeated bouts of Turkish Oil Wrestling with abrasive fabrics has left your morsels tender and your cognitive nutrients depleted. You're simply too goddamn stupid to understand this. You’re so dumb you couldn’t pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were written on the heel. You might as well give up. Belching forth a the line of caustic invectives which follow: "The most erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else.” You then collapse.
During the course of your angry nap, you experience a fitful dream. You’re in the midst of a grueling marathon. Your muscles are bathed in acid. Your lungs are a frozen ball of expanding gas crowding out your innards. With tremendous effort, and cussing so foul memory doesn’t permit you to recall it, you crest a hill. Off in the distance, you see the smartest people you know in your personal life, implacably approaching the finish. You realize that, with enough training, you could bridge the cognitive divide between you and them. “If I just buckle down and learn my multiplication tables, I can run shoulder to shoulder with Sara and Jimbo.” You think. They’re not so different from you, they just didn’t spend approximately 90% of their time playing Roguelike games and cursing when no systems of meta progression are present to lessen the torment between runs/watching videos on how to modify their newly acquired steam deck in order to play every smut game available on itch.io /rewatching Jersey Shore/teabagging molten subduction zones/dressing in all black and pretending to steal stuff from their own home when cars go by in the night/directing comrades to Ubuntu repositories in order for them to also experience unbridled smut on linux based operating systems of a handheld nature/eating fermented pineapple/zooming to pixel-depth on Aleister Crowley's nutsack/trying to become proficient with a Manriki-Gusari/attempting to scale a sheer cliff using only their wet underwear so they could proclaim from the summit: “She writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash!"
This thought lightens your burdens and you push on with renewed vigor.
Well, don’t get carried away, chief, because you stagger across the finish line like a spastic newborn giraffe doing The Butterfly and conduct a violent emesis of nutrients from both ends while pissing at right angles the entire time (don't try this). At this moment, a man comes trotting by your (geometrically peculiar) fetal form. His steps are springy and there’s a curious clinking noise that accompanies his gait. He’s got a mischievous grin and intelligent eyes. He doesn’t appear to be sweating and his breathing is relaxed. How curious, you think. At least you beat one person in this podiatric blasphemy. “You never push a noun against a verb without trying to blow up something.” You offer your cryptic condolences to the stranger as he sails past you with a good natured laugh.
“That’s Richard Feynman.” Someone says.
“Poor bastard.” You retch.
“That’s his tenth lap. He just does this shit for fun.”
As the man recedes into the periphery, you catch a glint of metal. Beneath his shorts you see what appear to be cybernetic ostrich legs with bio-memetic hydraulic ankles and responsive foot springs.
Well, shit, that wasn’t as uplifting as I intended it to be. My point is: There’s smart people that you can imagine emulating through linear improvements, and then there are people like Richard Feynman, who are a different kind of athlete (and arguably a damned cheater). If you read this book you’ll come to know a bit about an affable rascal, a maverick, a first principles thinker with a wicked sense of humor who was insatiably curious about the natural world. A person who wasn’t comfortable with understanding anything superficially. He had a low tolerance for horseshit, saying a lot that means very little, (forgive me, Dick), sloppy reasoning, people pretending to know things they can’t possibly know, and making things more complicated than they need to be. Here is a brief (far from exhaustive) list of things he applied his alien intellect to:
Quantum Electrodynamics.
Statistical Mechanics.
Parallel Computing
Radio construction and repair.
Playing bongo drums.
Superfluidity.
Criticizing the educational systems' emphasis on rote memorization.
Quarks.
Painting.
Participating in humanity’s potential swan song at Los Alamos.
Safe cracking.
Taking a cudgel to uppity philosophers.
Teaching.
Sussing out bureaucratic and engineering malfeasance in the wake of The Challenger Disaster.
Coercing ants to follow pheromone trails.
Cultivating an eccentric personality which makes for an interesting portfolio of anecdotes which comprise the bulk of this book.
Threatening to piss through a man in a bar bathroom.
Metabolizing oxygen.
Offering the best quote of all time on his deathbed. “I’d hate to die twice. It’s so boring.”
Feynman is a personal hero of mine, and this is one of the greatest autobiographies ever written. It is genuinely funny, and if you come away from it without wanting to know more about how things really work, well, you’re dead to me. Let’s go out with a quote, because I’ve exhausted my word-bag.
“I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here. I don't have to know the answer. I don't feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell.” - Dick Feynman.
"I'm too drunk to taste this chicken." - The Late-Great Colonel Sanders.
Despair of your position on the continuum of human intellect with this book!
Rating: really liked it
There’s presumably a rule where only smart people are awarded Nobel Prizes in Physics. Richard Feynman was no exception. This memoir is filled with anecdotes from his childhood spent fixing radios, his experiences as a young man doing bomb research at Los Alamos up through his days as a renowned professor at Cal Tech. The central theme was always that this is one smart cookie. It was interesting to pick up on his thought processes. It probably didn’t feature as much pure science as most of his other books, but at least you could appreciate his intuition into the physical world’s biggest puzzles. Rather than emphasizing the technical details of physics, most of his stories were focused on his other interests and his geeky humor.
While some of the stories were entertaining, and the lumens of candle power abounded, it didn’t always work for me. I kept getting the feeling that had the same stories been told in the third person, they would have been better – less egotistical sounding. In every one of his sidelines, he was masterful. It was like he was still driving home the point of how brilliant he was even when he was slumming it. After a while, I got tired of hearing how he became fluent in Portuguese when he taught in Brazil, or impressed the locals to no end with his distinctive style of bongo playing, or could dance like a professional, or got just about any woman he wanted to sleep with him. It was this last one that left the worst taste in my mouth. Some of his tales of attraction and conquest occurred when one of his wives was on her death bed.
He was probably not as bad as I’ve made him sound. Like I said, we can certainly appreciate his intellect. He had a rare ability to explain difficult concepts in laymen’s terms, too. I got a confirmation of this a week after I finished the book when we were interviewing a former student of his from Cal Tech. He mentioned the “Feynman Effect”: a phenomenon whereby someone asking him a question got answered in such a clear and intuitive way that it was only later that they realized they still didn’t know exactly how it all tied to their existing understanding.
So, count me as a fan of his scientific contributions and his ability to communicate, but not of his swagger. If it had all been a bit of a joke (you know, physicist … funny hair … limited social skills … but a would-be Lothario in spite of it), I would have laughed along with him, but I don’t think that was his intention.
Rating: really liked it
5 ⭐’Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman: Adventures of a Curious Character as Told to Ralph Leighton’, aka. ‘What a Quark of Shit, Professor Feynman!’, aka. ‘Feynman Finesses the Frigideira’, is a collection of anecdotes that takes us through some of the more extraordinary, often hilarious and, at times, unbelievable events in the life of the Nobel Prize winning Theoretical Physicist,
Richard P. Feynman.
I’ll be honest, I have a habit of grabbing a vice-like grip on hobbies that I have no right picking up. Recently, I have become incredibly excited about Physics! With deep regret, I had no interest in the subject at school, leaving it behind after Year 11, passing by the barest of margins, I was too distracted by the blossoming beauty of the girls in my class and the misguided teenage desire to be popular among one’s peers. Despite this, I was always very good at Mathematics, it was something that came quite naturally and I enjoyed it. Well, I’ve belatedly discovered that where Mathematics focuses on abstract topics using pure logic and Mathematical reasoning, Physics focuses on answering tangible (for the most part) questions using Math as a necessary tool. Feynman expresses this much more aptly:
”Physics is to math what sex is to masturbation” Physicists want answers! I want answers! “Damn it!”, I said. “I’m gonna learn some Physics!”. So, I’m browsing the net, looking for the best books on Introductory Physics and I keep coming across
’The Feynman Lectures on Physics’. They’re not cheap, but nobody seems to have a single bad word to say about the Collection and I just had to have it! So, I bought it, and in preparation I’ve been watching YouTube videos, Undergrad lectures, BBC Interviews, reading this Autobiography, anything I can get my hands on about this guy whom I’d never heard of before and, I’ll be damned if he hasn’t become an incredible source of inspiration to my inferior layman-self!
Feynman’s deep curiosity and boundless intelligence, juxtaposed against his larrikinism and disrespect for authority make him feel simultaneously relatable and beyond reach. Before I say more, here are a number of quotes that I think give an incomplete, but enlightening, glimpse into the mind of Richard Feynman:
”I find myself trying to imagine all kinds of things all the time, and I get a kick out of it, just like a runner gets a kick out of sweating (laughs with childish abandon), I get a kick out of thinking about these things. I can’t stop!!” -
’Fun To Imagine’ Interview’ (On Curiosity)
”One of the things that my father taught me was a disrespect. He’d open a picture, a New York Times, maybe it was a General, and he’d say, “Now, look at these humans,” he’d say.
“Here’s one human standing here and all these others are bowing. Now, what is the difference? Why are they all bowing to him? Only because of his name and his position, because of his uniform, not because of something he especially did.”” -
BBC, The Fantastic Mr.Feynman (On Authority)
”I don’t see that it makes any point that someone in the Swedish Academy decides that this work is noble enough to receive a prize. I’ve already got the prize, the prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out, the kick in the discovery, the observation other people use it, those are the real things. The honours are unreal to me, I don’t believe in honours. It bothers me. Honours bothers me! Honours is epaulettes. Honours is uniforms. My Poppa brought me up this way. I can’t stand it. It hurts me.” -
BBC, The Fantastic Mr.Feynman (On winning the Nobel Prize)
”… I take it all back. If you give me the right man, in any field, I can talk to him. I know what the condition is: that he did whatever he did as far as he can go, that he studied every aspect of it, that he has stretched himself to the end. He’s not a dilettante in any way. Therefore he’s up against mysteries all the way around the edge. We can talk about mystery and awe. That’s what we have in common.” -
’The World From another Point of View’ Interview (On Conversation/What makes a “Good Man”)
And there it is. In these 4 quotes, I think you have the bare foundations, the scaffolding if you will, of what makes this man tick.
At times, it feels like Feynman is trying to build his own legend via impressive anecdotes, and if there wasn’t so much evidence confirming his genius, or second-hand accounts of the events he discusses, one might believe that was the case. After all, how many things can one man excel in. Feynman is most well-known for being an incredible theoretical physicist, however, if we’re to believe all the events that take place here, he was also in close proximity to being the first to demonstrate the uniformity of life through his dalliance with Biology and the nature of Ribosomes, he was adept at playing both the Bongos and the Frigideira, he was accomplished enough as an Artist to eventually exhibit and sell his own work, he was a renowned safe-cracker… The list goes on. It’s the classic problem of the unreliable narrator. Is he having us on? For the record, I don’t think so.
That said,
Feynman was a prankster whose larrikinism only enhanced his endearingness. He would often trick people into believing he was much better at things than he actually was or that he could perform miracles, whether it be matters of arithmetic or safecracking, a dangerous magic trick or this or that. He’d pretend he could speak Italian (to Italians) and keep on walking with absolute confidence. He failed a Military Psychology Test after taking the piss out of the Shrink, the guy’s amazing!
Feynman’s use of analogy is remarkable. He often makes excellent, humorous and pinpoint analogies regarding the topic at hand that often had me nodding my head in appreciation. I have often thought that a person’s ability to analogise effectively is a great gauge of their understanding of any given subject with respect to the rest of the world. As the Chinese Philosopher, Confucius states,
“The ability to make an analogy from what is close at hand is the method and the way of realizing humaneness”.
I found the most interesting part of his story to be
the integral role he played in the development of the first Atomic Bomb. The thrill that he and his young team felt at finding solutions to incredibly difficult Mathematical Problems, but ultimately, his belated apprehension, and seeming regret, with regards to his role in the creation of such a devastating weapon:
”After the thing went off (ref. Trinity Detonation Test/Manhatten Project), there was tremendous excitement at Los Alamos. Everybody had parties, we all ran around. I sat on the end of a Jeep and beat drums and so on. But one man, I remember, Bob Wilson, was just sitting there moping.
I said, “What are you moping about?”
He said, “It’s a terrible thing that we made.”
I said, “But you started it. You got us into it.”
You see, what happened to me—what happened to the rest of us—is we started for a good reason, then you’re working very hard to accomplish something and it’s a pleasure, it’s excitement. And you stop thinking, you know; you just stop. Bob Wilson was the only one who was still thinking about it, at that moment.”Unfortunately, this particular book doesn’t include Feynman’s role in the investigation of
The Challenger Disaster. It’s covered in a BBC interview, however, I’ve also heard that it’s included in the “sequel” to this autobiography, titled
‘What Do You Care What Other People Think?: Further Adventures of a Curious Character’. Needless to say, I’ll be picking that one up! If you’ve any interest in Science whatsoever, or if you find yourself in the mood for an Autobiography about a remarkably diverse and charismatic individual, I can’t recommend this one enough!
Rating: really liked it
Want to read a book that is full of bragging and humblebragging? Here’s the book for you. Reading this was like sitting across a table with an interesting person, only to realise that he finds just one topic interesting: himself. Pompous prig alert! 😬
What Richard Feynman wanted me to learn from this book:1. Richard Feynman is fabulous at physics.
2. Richard Feynman is fabulous at mathematics.
3. Richard Feynman is fabulous at biology.
4. Richard Feynman is fabulous at picking up girls. (He “loves beautiful girls.”)
5. Richard Feynman is fabulous at unlocking safes.
6. Richard Feynman is fabulous at playing musical instruments, even live on stage.
7. Richard Feynman is fabulous at learning new languages (or at least pretending to.)
8. Richard Feynman is fabulous at coding and decoding ciphers.
9. Richard Feynman is fabulous at dancing.
10. Richard Feynman is fabulous at teaching.
11. Richard Feynman is fabulous at sketching and painting. (Not surprisingly, he loved to draw nudes best.)
12. Richard Feynman is fabulous at Mayan anthropology.
There are many more things Richard Feynman is fabulous at but these are all I remember now.
What I didn’t find in this book:1. Details about Feynman’s family except for a barebones mention of his parents and sister and a few paras on his three wives whenever they are a part of his anecdotes about how fabulous he is.
2. Details on anything Richard Feynman wasn’t fabulous at, beyond a few paragraphs.
Bonus points I learnt about Richard Feynman1. Richard Feynman was cocky.
2. Richard Feynman loved to hear himself talk about himself.
3. Richard Feynman treated women as objects and judged them entirely on their physical merits.
4. Richard Feynman considered anyone who didn't understand physics, an idiot.
5. Richard Feynman loved playing pranks on others, whether it was funny to others or dismaying didn’t matter.
6. Richard Feynman was full of attitude and with zilch gratitude.
The only part of the book I enjoyed without getting judgemental was when he spoke of being in a textbook evaluation committee. If you want advice on how to be better at your chosen scientific discipline, jump straight to the last chapter. That’s the only one having content bordering on advice.
I still respect Richard Feynman the physicist, but as a human being, he dropped vastly in my esteem. He must have been an outstanding scientist and teacher but hardly any glimpse of that comes out in this book, which is more of an ode to himself by himself.
Do you remember the Gaston song from ‘Beauty and the Beast’? This is how Feynman would have probably sung it:
No one's slick as Feynman, No one's quick as Feynman,
No one's head is as incredibly thick as Feynman,
For there's no man in town half as manly
(Perfect, a pure paragon!)
You can ask any Tom, Dick, or Stanley
And they'll tell you whose team they prefer to be on.
Who plays darts like Feynman? Who breaks hearts like Feynman?
Who's much more than the sum of his parts like Feynman?
As a specimen, yes, I'm intimidating
Who has brains like Feynman, Entertains like Feynman,
Who can make up these endless refrains like Feynman,
I use antlers in all of my decorating.
Say it again…
Who's a man among men? Who's the super success?
Don't you know? Can't you guess?
Ask his fans and his five hangers-on
There's just one guy in town who's got all of it down
And here’s where I’ll jump in with: “Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynmaaaaaan!!!!”
**insert musical crescendo here!**
***********************
Join me on the Facebook group,
Readers Forever! , for more reviews, book-related discussions and fun.
Rating: really liked it
The Nobel prize winning physicist, acclaimed drummer, artist, expert on Mayan astronomy, safecracker, prankster, etc, etc, tells “crazy adventures” of his life. They’re really not “crazy adventures,” these anecdotes; my own father's are easily just as rich and bizarre. Feynman came off to me as a somewhat unpleasant character: he was full to the brim of himself; his false modesty (“I’m too dim to realize when to keep my mouth shut, I just say what I think”) was cloying and annoying, as were his amazement at anyone else’s talent (a professional drummer is far better than him at the drums; this “shocks” him), his claims to understand nature better than artists, and his thinly-veiled put-downs of anyone even remotely concerned with the abstract. He was just the kind of jerk who, caught up in his criticism of others’ inability to grasp his broad points, never begins to wonder whether he is the one missing the gist. Also, his anecdotes are not fleshed out with context: who exactly are the people he’s talking to? When was this? I don’t care. In all, funny and interesting at times (at Los Alamos, on a committee to select school text books), but mainly kind of mundane.
