“Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”: Adventures of a Curious Character

Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! is a book I could not put down. I read it in two evenings which left me wanting more. From his humble beginnings in Far Rockaway Queens as a high school prodigy to MIT (SB) at the age of 17 and then on to Princeton (Ph.D.), to Cornell and eventually Caltech and the Nobel Prize for pioneering QED this is an autobiography of one of the greatest minds ever in theoretical physics. Baudy, brash with a dynamic flare all his own, a born storyteller with gift of gab and an extremely inquisitive nature who also immersed himself in music and art. Everything he tried his hand at he excelled in. The loves of life and his family were also shared so it was not all technical. His descriptions of his work on the Manhattan Project with Oppenheimer and at Oak Ridge are riveting as is his work on the Rogers Commission to solve the root cause of the Challenger disaster. Those memories give a rare look inside the bureaucracy of NASA and how the upper management tried to hide a known defect in the design of the SRBs. That accident was preventable and Professor Feynman exposed numerous shortcomings in their processes which befuddled Secretary Rogers who had been tasked by President Reagan not to embarrass NASA! In Feynman’s second book “What Do You Care What Other People Think? He devoted half the book to the inner workings of the Rogers Commission and the controversy that arose once the final report was being prepared. I give five stars to his second book as well. My heroes in science have always been Sir Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein. Richard Phillips Feynman now joins that elite duo in my picks for perhaps the greatest scientist ever.

It’s sad that so many “”“provisional””” people who are still alive have had movies made about them. This man actually deserves one. Go watch some of his interviews and lectures for more, this book is just the tip of the iceberg for the greatness in this guy. After I have learned how to properly use the Feynman technique to self educate, it is remarkable how much more I’ve been able to teach myself than any of my teachers. I wish I knew the Feynman technique when I was a kid… : ( it really shows how fractured the educational system is; so few people are capable of educating themselves it’s sickening. You’d think a student’s ability to educate themselves would be the focal point of public education. There is nothing more valuable than an understanding of how to actually learn. “It’s not because I’m smarter, the principles I know are just different.” - Richard Feynman