Reviews for Classic Feynman: All the Adventures of a Curious Character

The average rating for Classic Feynman: All the Adventures of a Curious Character based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-10-22 00:00:00 Donna King This 500-plus-page volume contains all the material from the 1985 book, "Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character)," and its 1988 sequel, "What Do You Care What Other People Think? Further Adventures of a Curious Character." The two books are not simply juxtaposed but their essays and chapters are merged to form a new arrangement of the material. The nine parts of the book, each containing 1-18 chapters/essays, are: Prologues [pp. 1-9]: Ralph Leighton's "To the Reader" and Freeman Dyson's "Foreword" From Far Rockaway to MIT [pp. 11-55] The Princeton Years [pp. 57-88] Arlene (actually spelled "Arline"; Feynman's first wife, lost to tuberculosis at age 25) [pp. 89-119] Feynman, the Military, and the Bomb [pp. 121-179] From Cornell to Caltech, with a Touch of Brazil [pp. 181-248] The World of One Physicist [pp. 249-378] Mr. Feynman Goes to Washington: Investigating the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster [pp. 379-478] Epilogues [pp. 479-506]: Reflections on the value of science and the perils of cult science The book comes with a commemorative audio CD containing a February 1975 talk by Feynman at UC Santa Barbara, entitled "Los Alamos from Below." I listened to this talk before beginning to read the book. The talk, available on-line as a 69-minute audio file ), is enjoyable and enlightening. Hearing the Nobel Laureate's voice adds another dimension to the understanding provided by the textual description of his adventures. The phrase "from Below" signifies the fact that Feynman talks about a time period when he was a low-level researcher who observed the goings on at Los Alamos, without being privy to reasons behind various decisions made higher up. While autobiographical, this book does not list and discuss events in chronological order. Rather, it jumps back and forth among Feynman's childhood, his college days, his early career (when his wife Arline was still alive, though quite sick most of the time), and his later affiliation with Caltech. Each chapter/essay has a theme that is reflected in its title. Some of these cover not a particular time slice in Feynman's life, but rather mix memories from his childhood and youth with events later in his life. Feynman emerges as a collection of contradictions. He comes across as a bright scientist, who worked with intensity for extended periods of time on problems that fascinated him, but who also showed a lack of interest in pursuing the traditional path of scientific research. He worked in fits and starts, highly inspired at times and getting bored at others. According to physicist Freeman Dyson, who wrote the book's foreword, there were two great creative periods in Feynman's life: the 10 years between 1939 and 1949 and the 1960s decade. Feynman was curious, playful, and quite a prankster. At parties, he would emulate a bloodhound, attempting to tell through his sense of smell which guest had touched which object. He became quite good at this; he was convinced that the human sense of smell, though way inferior to that of bloodhounds, isn't as bad as most people think. Of course, party guests never believed him, given his reputation for making things up; they usually thought that he did a magic trick with help from an accomplice. Socially, he was more comfortable with street people than with top-notch scientists and academic administrators. In women, too, he preferred to befriend barflies and Las Vegas showgirls, hinting that his upbringing and early nerdiness may have played a role in shaping his social quirks. I found reading this book an educational experience and a reaffirmation of some of my unconventional beliefs about how scientific work should be pursued; that having fun doing science leads both to more rewarding research experiences and more important discoveries. I was reassured to learn that, in the end, people value and respect someone who knows what s/he is talking about, even if the said person's opinions are stated bluntly and not always in politically correct (PC) terms. Speaking of PC, there are two aspects of Feynman's life and character that bothered me a lot. Let me try to get these disturbing aspects out of the way, so that I can devote the rest of my review to his amazing and endearing qualities. Feynman loved women and went out of his way to impress and attract them. He would meet many at bars, dances, Las Vegas shows, and they would immediately take a liking to him and confide in him. It appears, however, that he did not respect women and viewed them only as amusement and objects of conquest. Examples that confirm this impression abound in the book. He comments about women's physical attributes first, on several occasions (such as on p. 338, where he writes, "She was really cute, a beautiful blonde"), when he introduces female characters he has encountered. He writes at length about how to get women interested by pretending that you don't care much about them and treating them poorly. Perhaps, Feynman shouldn't be blamed for this line of thinking, which was the norm during his days as a young man, but then, this is such a contrast with the rest of his character that one can't help but wonder. Feynman was also judgmental at times, yet dismissive of those who would judge him or others. He blamed people or called them names, without knowing much about them. A striking example appears on p. 407, where he, justifiably, makes fun of the NASA bureaucracy after receiving a reply to a simple question (asked as part of his research for the commission to investigate the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster), with the reply sheet sandwiched between memos in the management hierarchy sending the question down the chain and the reply back up, he refers to the person at the end of the chain (the one person who actually did some work), as "the poor bastard at the bottom." Feynman was an excellent amateur scientist in areas outside his physics expertise, a talent he picked up from his not-very-educated father, who would explain to him some basic principles of science; not what something was called, but how it behaved, why it was the way it was, and so on. These interactions with his father led Feynman to seek deeper understanding and not stop when a reasonable explanation had been found. He would observe ants for hours, conducting various experiments about their sense of direction or geometry. Whereas most students mingled with their own kinds (physicists sitting at the "physics" table at the dining hall, for example), Feynman, the college student, tried to learn about others, so he would venture to the "philosophy" or "biology" table and listen to them, was easily persuaded to attend classes or seminars in those areas, and often ended up teaching a thing or two about their discipline by simply raising important questions that occur only to outsiders. He discovered that in biology, "it was very easy to find a question that was very interesting, and that nobody knew the answer to." This curiosity and desire to work and learn in other disciplines persisted even after he became an established physicist. In the chapter entitled "But Is It Art?" [pp. 298-316], he describes his interactions, and mutual learning experiences, with an artist friend. Feynman learned quickly and produced some impressive paintings (even managing to sell some of them and to have his works exhibited in a fancy department store), but the artist friend never learned any physics! Feynman questioned the conventional wisdom that a scientist sees less beauty in a flower than an artist does. He believed that there is beauty not just in colors and shapes but also at the underlying cellular level. So, a scientist sees more beauty, not less. In a short chapter entitled "The Chief Research Chemist of the Metaplast Corporation" [pp. 50-55], Feynman describes his trials and tribulations as the "chief chemist" for a company that had only 4 other employees: the President, a VP, a salesperson, and a bottle washer. The title of another short chapter, "Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman!" [pp. 59-64], refers to a social blunder he made at the Dean's tea at Princeton, when he answered the question "Would you like cream or lemon in your tea?" by saying "I'll have both, thank you." Then there's the story of Feynman's first technical talk that was attended by Einstein and other "monster minds" [pp. 65-68]. He was understandably nervous, but the talk went well. The fairly long, and touchingly personal, chapter entitled "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" [pp. 91-119] is about his relationship with his first wife, Arline, who died at a young age. He struggled with the doctors' ideas of not telling his wife about her being afflicted with Hodgkin's disease. His wife's parents were for the idea, and he went along with it for a while. But Feynman suffered greatly from keeping something so important from the woman he loved. At some point in his career, Feynman began feeling disgust for physics; it wasn't fun any more. He realized that physics was fun when he played with it, regardless of whether the problem he examined was fashionable or important for the future of science; when he did it simply because he was curious and didn't care about someone else already having studied or invented the concept. Feynman does not hide his contempt for scientists who report their results in complicated ways. When he couldn't make sense of a sociologist's research paper, he decided to take it one sentence at a time and try to understand it fully before moving on to the next sentence. He then read this sentence: "The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels." After struggling with the meaning of this sentence, understanding finally came when he translated it to "People read." Later in the book (p. 276), Feynman explains further that things appear complicated to us, because we don't read carefully enough. Feynman lambasts a number of misguided efforts to develop high-school science textbooks and the way in which school boards choose them. He relates an experience when he was helping a school board evaluate candidate physics textbooks. One book described stars of various colors and the relationship of those colors with the star's temperature. So far, so good! The book's authors then proceeded to describe a boy and his father observing a number of such stars of various given colors, asking the reader to figure out the total temperature of the stars they saw. The total temperature has no physical significance; had they asked about the average temperature of the stars, it would have made sense, but would still fall short of being an interesting or enlightening exercise. Actor/director Alan Alda provides a touching essay in the "Epilogues" part, bearing the title "Finding Feynman" [pp. 499-506]: Alda worked for many years to stage the play "QED" (which portrayed a day in the life of Richard Feynman), despite finding it difficult to muster support for the project. Later, in 1996, the movie "Infinity" based on material in this book was released that chronicles the early life of Feynman, portrayed by Matthew Broderick, with Patricia Arquette playing his wife Arline. I read the part of the book dealing with Feynman's role in investigating the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster [pp. 379-478] with even greater interest, as I teach in one of my graduate-level courses about the use of redundant computers on the Shuttle as a way of dealing with hardware and software imprefections. Reading Feynman's account of the Challenger disaster and the political posturing and power struggles in preparing and releasing the Commission's final report, was particularly eye-opening. When Feynman noticed that the official Space Shuttle report was moving in the wrong direction, not being specific enough about what went wrong and who was to blame, he tried to have his name removed from the list of authors/signatories. Eventual compromises in wording of the report's final recommendations, and an opportunity to voice his concerns in an appendix under his own name, persuaded Feynman to leave his signature on the report. Feynman complains that many people talk about failure probabilities that do not make sense. When he asked a number of "specialists" about the failure probability for the Space Shuttle, he often got the response "1 in 100,000." Such a failure probability would mean that you can fly the Shuttle every day an average of 300 years between accidents. There is no way the Shuttle was this reliable. A failure rate of about 4% had been observed for rockets and even a couple of orders of magnitude improvement on this figure, to account for the greater care exercised for manned missions, would only get us to 1 in 1000 at best. This book reproduces Appendix F of the investigation's report [pp. 465-478], containing Feynman's analysis of Space Shuttle's reliability, including his disagreement with NASA management's exaggerated figures. He also comments on the 4-way and 5-way redundant computers for the Shuttle and on the difficulties arising from the use of obsolete hardware and software, given that operational experience with existing systems would be difficult to reproduce in replacement systems. In line with the observations I made earlier about Feynman's weakness for pretty women, he confesses to giving his as yet unreleased observations on the Challenger disaster to two blonde reporters and then regretting his action. To summarize, I truly enjoyed this book and emerged from reading it with even greater respect for Feynman and his abilities. The negative character traits notwithstanding, Feynman is one of the very few human beings who have contributed both to expanding the frontiers of science and to explaining science and its importance to the masses. He showed us that a scientist at the pinnacle of his field can/must still find time to explain his work to ordinary mortals, to explore other disciplines, and to pay attention to ethical implications of his own work and of science/technology in general.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-11-28 00:00:00 P J ASTA Read as part of my ongoing shelf audit. Verdict: Oh yeah, this is a keeper. My first encounter with Richard Feynman's work was in the mid 2000s, when my family was moving about halfway across the U.S. and my dad checked out the audiobook of "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character for the drive. I don't remember a lot of particulars, except for 'A Map of the Cat' and Feynman's story about lighting the back of his hand on fire in college, but I remember enjoying the mixture of science and humor, and feeling like it was a cool thing to share with my engineer father. I was, at the time, going into middle school. Years later, someone gave me a Barnes and Noble gift card as a high school graduation gift, and I bought this compilation thinking a) it would be an appropriate thing to read in college and b) it would make me look very Sophisticated and Smart to have this on the shelf in my freshman dorm room. I then... did not read it. For nine more years. (I really should have, or at least the Los Alamos parts; my freshman colloquium course was all about the making of the atomic bomb.) I'm glad that my current attempt to actually read everything on my shelf has brought me back to this, though, because Feynman's perspective is fascinating. Stylistically, these essays feel like stories you're being told by your grandfather or great uncle; there's a friendliness and openness which invites the reader in and makes you feel welcome, even when the details go right over your head. The content is... fascinating, even the parts I didn't understand, because you can feel Feynman's incredible intelligence on every page. Physics isn't my jam, but I don't need to understand exactly what he's saying to get something of value from the enthusiasm and wonder with which he approached his work. The way in which he approached science is... 'idyllic' is really the best word I have for it; he had both incredible ability and childlike curiosity, and he was always pursuing his passions and excited about wherever he was. I find myself wondering, in this time of crushing student debt and diminished research funding, if it's possible to live that way now. I hope it is, at least for some people. There's also something fascinating about seeing ordinary facets of the world through the lens of an extraordinary person. The same curiosity that Feynman applied to physics problems was extended to many other things in his life - attending a dance organized by a club for deaf and mute people, for instance, or learning how to play the drums, or life drawing. He seems to have gone through life with this... incorrigible energy, with very little fear of failure, and I find myself wondering if maybe that's the real secret of genius - not some baked-in capability of the brain, but the desire to just keep trying new things and fiddling with problems, regardless of the potential outcomes. So many of Feynman's decisions, at least as he describes them himself, seem so simple and free of anxiety or second-guessing. Even with that, he did experience impostor syndrome at least once - at his first teaching job, at Cornell, after WWII. Feynman's response to that, too, is startlingly simple: Then I thought to myself, "You know, what they think of you is so fantastic, it's impossible to live up to it. You have no responsibility to live up to it!" It was a brilliant idea: 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. As someone who struggles with anxiety and self-esteem frequently, it's comforting to know that even a guy who argued physics with Niels Bohr and won a Nobel Prize felt inadequate and like a fraud at one point; that's as clear a demonstration as possible that impostor syndrome thought processes have no bearing on reality. It's... something I'll try to keep in mind. I was also deeply touched by the way Feynman talks about his first wife, Arlene, who died of tuberculosis while he was working on the Manhattan Project. While he doesn't really dig deeply into his emotions, it's still clear by the way he describes their relationship that they really loved each other. His phrasing is so simple, and yet in that simplicity is something complex: when they got married, Arlene was already sick and they knew she would be in and out of the hospital for the rest of her fairly short life expectancy. That's far from a simple situation, and yet Feynman always treats it as a foregone conclusion: "We were in love, and were already married, emotionally." Discussing her death, just five years later, he is matter-of-fact: The only difference for me and Arlene was, instead of fifty years, it was five years. It was only a quantitative difference - the psychological problem was just the same. The only way it would have become any different is if we had said to ourselves, "But those other people have it better, because they might live fifty years." But that's crazy. Why make yourself miserable by saying things like, "Why do we have such bad luck? What has God done to us? What have we done to deserve this? - all of which, if you understand reality and take it completely into your heart. There are just things that nobody can know. Your situation is just an accident of life. We had a hell of a good time together. It's that last line - "We had a hell of a good time together" - which strikes me as somehow infinitely tender. There's a lot of humor here, too, of course. Feynman followed his curiosity into odd situations and incongruous escapades, and he relates them with complete honesty, never afraid to acknowledge his own misconceptions or moments of utter absurdity. I think the most absurd is the chapter titled 'Safecracker Meets Safecracker', in which he describes learning to pick locks and open safes while working at Los Alamos which is just... I can't even imagine deciding 'hey, why don't I develop a reputation for bypassing security while working on the most high-security military project the world has known to date?' It worked out for him, but damn. Couple that decision with the revelation at the end of the chapter that 20% of the safe combinations at the installation were still set to their factory defaults... the Manhattan Project is a serious topic, but that's just ridiculous. One aspect of the book did make me consistently uncomfortable, and that's the way Feynman talks about women in aggregate. Specific women he knew well are discussed like anyone else, but there's a strong through-line of women, in general, existing primarily as eye candy and/or potential sexual partners. It's not creepy, per se, but there is a through-line of casual objectification which is, at best, an artifact of the times. (Though from some of the quotes I've seen from the new Obama autobiography, maybe not as much of the times as I would like to think.) Ultimately, I think this book is a reminder to me of an ethos worth striving for in science. My Bachelor's is in biology, though I'm not currently working in the field, and I think Feynman's example - of approaching science with wonder, of questioning everything, and of extending that same curiosity to the rest of life - is one worth emulating. I don't know if I'll be very good at it, but I want to give it a try, and I'll probably come back to this book in the future for a reminder.