Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman - Softcover

Feynman, Richard Phillips

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0553256491 ISBN 13: 9780553256499

Publisher: Bantam Dell Pub Group, 1999

Synopsis

The Nobel Prize-winning physicist chronicles his own outrageous exploits in a memoir that includes anecdotes about solving the problem of liquid helium, painting a nude female toreador, and cracking the safes containing the atomic bomb's most hidden secrets. Book available.

About this title

Review:

A series of anecdotes, such as are included in Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman, shouldn't by rights add up to an autobiography, but that's just one of the many pieces of received wisdom that Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman (1918-88) cheerfully ignores in this engagingly eccentric book. Fiercely independent (read the chapter entitled "Judging Books by Their Covers"), intolerant of stupidity even when it comes packaged as high intellectualism (check out "Is Electricity Fire?"), unafraid to offend (see "You Just Ask Them?"), Feynman informs by entertaining. It's possible to enjoy Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman, a bestseller ever since its initial publication in 1985, simply as a bunch of hilarious yarns with the author as know-it-all hero. At some point, however, attentive readers realise that underneath all the merriment simmers a running commentary on what constitutes authentic knowledge: learning by understanding, not by rote; refusal to give up on seemingly insoluble problems, and total disrespect for fancy ideas that have no grounding in the real world. Feynman himself had all these qualities in spades, and they come through with vigour and verve in his no-bull prose. No wonder his students--and readers around the world--adored him. --Wendy Smith

Review:

"There are two types of genius. Ordinary geniuses do great things, but they leave you room to believe that you could do the same if only you worked hard enough. Then there are magicians, and you can have no idea how they do it. Feynman was a magician" (Hans Bethe, theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate)

"A storyteller in the tradition of Mark Twain. He proves once again that it is possible to laugh out loud and scratch your head at the same time" (New York Times Book Review)

"Quintessential Feynman - funny, brilliant, bawdy...enormously entertaining" (New Yorker)

"Buzzes with energy, anecdote and life. It almost makes you want to become a physicist" (Science Digest)

About this edition

• Publisher: Bantam Dell Pub Group
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0553256491
• ISBN 13: 9780553256499
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback