Richard Feynman’s (1918-88) semi-autobiographical books, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! Is something I read many years ago and again today - on a wintery Sydney day.
In 1965, Feynman, jointly with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, received the Nobel Prize in Physics. In a lifetime of significant achievements in physics, and perhaps his most important; work on Quantum electrodynamics giving a complete account of matter and light interaction and hence almost everything that happens in the world.
Some will know of Feynman’s famous diagrams representing the quantum field theory processes in terms of particle paths (Electron-positron annihilation examples)
In Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! We find Feynman as the quintessential inquirer whose investigations led him to develop one of the most sophisticated and complex formulation describing nothing short if the very reality we percieve, and at other times to a kind of social mischief that is delightful in its purity and inspiring in its intellectual courage.
Feynman covers a range of topics throughout the course of his life, from the simple to the brilliantly exotic, showing us the inner workings of his mind as he goes from one unusual adventure to another.
This paperback is brimming with anecdotes. Consider for example – when he was working at Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project (read developing the atomic bomb) Feynman cracked safes containing the secrets of the bomb.
Feynman gave his first physics lecture in front of Einstein and this book and in contrast, played frigideira in a Brazilian samba band and in Las Vegas, he learned the ways of gamblers and show girls. Or the time when he decided to speak too candidly to the psychologist and got rejected from the World War II draft for mental reasons, only to later go on and be assigned to one of the biggest and most important projects in the war; the Manhattan Project.
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