One of LonelyGirl15's Favorite Books / Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

Categories: Staff Picks , Nonfiction

Okay, LonelyGirl15 turned out to be a scam.  Apparently this has proven a near tragedy to young male "geeks" who were attracted to a beautiful actress who also seemed to share their interest in science.

If you just get a plot summary of Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! you'll want to slap him around.  As a child Feynmann fixed adults' radios.  He distinguished himself at MIT, was one of the first arivees at Los Alamos.  He caught the notice of the higher-level scientists and solved important nuclear-related problems.  He learned to pick locks.  He distinguished himself at Princeton and got teaching jobs at Cornell and CalTech.

He went to Brazil and was the best drummer in a samba school (that's "school" as in fish, not as in education) for Carnaval.  He took up drawing and had a one-man show.  Everyone loved his bongo playing.  He was one of the winners of the Nobel Prize for physics.  In his free time, he enjoyed deciphering Mayan heiroglyphs.  Other than the death of his first wife, his setbacks were minor.  He offended a Swedish princess during the Nobel Prize ceremonies.  He had to sleep on a sofa in the student lounge on his first night in Ithaca.  Perfect life with a lot of bragging, huh?

So why is this such an engaging book?  It's his humor, his apparent honesty, and his writing style.  Plus his brilliance.  He was the one, during hearings after the Challenger Shuttle disaster, who demonstrated the O-Rings' deterioration by calling for a glass of ice water, sticking an O-Ring in the water, and showing its disintigration.  (Actually the whole thing was more complicated than that, as you can imagine.)

To learn physics from this book, you'd probably have to know some already.  What I learned was that it's better to try to speak an unfamiliar language to a non-English speaker, than to speak English, even if your grasp on the other language is poor.  He explained the concept so convincingly that I became a convert, although my attempts are often incomprehensible.  Last week, for example, I said, "La biblioteca esta fermato nunco," which did not actually help the customer.  Still, the experience led me to the dictionario to find a better word for "now" than "nunco."  Any word would have been better, actually.  ("Ahora"?)  Soon, I will tackle "fermato."

After Surely You're Joking, Feynman wrote more memoirs, and his daughter published a collection of his letters after Feynman's death in 1988.