I originally read a borrowed copy of “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” back in college.  Feynman was a Nobel prize winning physicist who had a surprisingly adventuresome life.  With lots of interests outside of physics, he was the geek that engineers like me wanted to become.  The book is filled with funny stories from the first half of this life, cowritten with Ralph Leighton.

Richard Feynman was a Physicist who attended college at MIT, graduate school at Cornell, worked briefly in the private sector before being recruited to do numerical calculations at Los Alamos for the Manhattan Project.  He later settled in at CalTech and eventually won the Nobel Prize in physics.

He had a unique curiosity about the world and a rare ability to explain more technical terms.  I remember reading an ancient paper of his about how small we could make electronics that is relevant.  And his 1964 “The Feynman Lectures on Physics” are still sold today.  But the stories in this book are about enjoying life.

As a young man he would see mindreader performances and try to figure out how the reader was being signaled.  Not to discredit them, just for the challenge of figuring out the trick.  He once said he didn’t know a thing about art.  Then he decided to exchange lessons with an artist.  The physics didn’t stick with the artist, but Feynman did learn how to paint.  Even held a one-man show, admittedly capitalizing on the novelty of being a physicist.  But in the end he learned to appreciate things like brush work and lighting.

While teaching on sabbatical in Brazil, he took up playing the Bongos.  Even joined a kind of marching band.  At the same time he realized his Brazilian students were memorizing the contents of the books, but not really comprehending the implications.  They could recite formulas, but not apply them to real world problems.  So he did the right thing and gave a talk in front of college administrators describing how they could change their emphasis.

Later on he was cajoled into reviewing High School math books for the state of California.  He spent hours reading through the books and finding lots of problems.  The one I remember went something like “Pedro and his father see one star at 10,000 degrees Celsius, another at 20,000 C, and a third at 15,000 C.  What is the total temperature observed by Pedro and his father?”.  This is of course ridiculous.  You could ask the average temperature, but total has no meaning.  When it came time to discuss the results, Feynman discovered he was the ONLY one on the committee who actually read the books.  Everyone else just listened to the salesmen discuss the approach of the books.  Studying the advertising instead of the content.

One part that did bother me was in a discussion of whether buying drinks for women at bars was a “good strategy”.  A bar owner had told Richard not to buy women drinks.  He tried that approach and reported it was superior. While performing that experiment, the text had at least two comments bordering on saying, “hey I’ve bought you drinks all evening, you owe me something”.  In fact the only thing the woman might owe you is the courtesy to consume the drink with you.  And if you sent the drink to her table, not even that.  [I should point out that his first wife had passed away at this point.]

He includes a story about people doing experiments with rats in mazes, which was very popular in the 60’s.  One guy did a bunch of work figuring out how a mouse could find food behind a door in a maze, then the next time head straight for that same door.  The guy started removing variables.  He made all the doors look the same.  He made the lighting uniform.  He changed the smell of the food.  Eventually the guy figures out the rats could navigate by listening to the sound their feet made on the floor.  Good solid work.  But what Feynman noticed was that no one else in that community ever cited or took advantage of that work. This story and one about Richards own experiments with ants crawling in his residence, addressed what it takes to do good science.

I recommend learning everything you can about Richard Feynman.

Note: I previously reviewed his 1999 book, “The Pleasure of Finding Things Out”.