This was disappointing, because I've been wanting to read this for a while because he is so renown for being quite the hilarious character as well as a Nobel prize-winning physicist. This is a collection of essays that serves as a memoir; many are not directly related to physics, but that's definitely the theme. After reading this, my conclusion is that Feynman was mostly a world class knob. He lost me fairly early into it, when he described how you could see physics in action in the everyday world by messing with a waitress's tips. How very droll of you, Mr. Feynman. He is certainly quite the character in the same sense your annoying neighbor is quite the character, the kind who sees you unloading your groceries from the car and saunters over to give you pointless advice about his expert analysis on the best way to unload groceries without helping you, driving you to grit your teeth and nod as you flee toward your door because anything you might say in response, such as "shut UP, annoying guy!" would result in him saying "Aw shucks, I can't help it that I'm smarter than you." Many demerits for egregious overuse of the exclamation point.

Grade: C-
Recommended: Not really, although the essays set during his time at Los Alamos are somewhat interesting given the historical context. I suppose it's possible he really was charming and amusing in real life, but you wouldn't know it from his writing.

This book was a pure delight. The subtitle "Adventures of a Curious Character" is spot-on. Feynman gave an amazingly human and honest view into his philosophy and take on life, thought a series of stories.

One thing that struck me most deeply was his passion for learning new things. You would think a world-famous Physicist would just be passionate for Physics - but Feynman was curious about everything he saw. He dabbled in art and was successful enough to have a show, he joined a Brazilian Bongo group and competed with them, he hung out in Vegas until he grokked gambling, he spent time in strip bars in Arizona until he figured out how to pick up women, he cracked safes in Los Alamos for fun - the list goes on! My take: you should have your passions - but you should also have your hobbies. I think I need a new hobby :)

I really enjoyed his lessons learned from observing the Brazilian educational system. He noted that many of the students were simply memorizing words and formulas and had no understanding of the concepts they applied to. I think this is not a unique problem in education.

Another lesson learned from Feynman's studies of science is to never take any data for granted. Always always question the sources. Whenever Feynman did an experiment he would re-generate many of the numbers on his own - even if they had been published in other places. For many things we are (and not just in science) standing on the shoulders of giants. The easiest way to be led astray is if those results were never right to begin with.

I think Feynman was in his heart a true educator and scientist, with real integrity. And I think it drove him nuts how many important decisions are made using unscientific principles. This book was a light-hearted attempt to point that out - not to mention, a very entertaining read.

فکر می‌کردم بیشتر از این‌ها باشه. اما انگار نمی‌شه انتظار داشت یه شخصیت آکادمیک بخواد اسرار و داشته و نداشته‌های زندگیش رو کامل بریزه وسط. گاهی وقت‌ها البته می‌شد سرگرم شد؛ مثل قصه‌ی گاوصندوق ها. اما این لحظه‌ها نادر بود

مستر فاینمن؛ انتظارها رو برنیاوردید قارداش

this turned into a book i was racing thru just so it would be over. it's not that it's bad. it's essentially a compendium of all the stories Feynman could tell during a dinner party. and the stories are well told, and there's many amusing bits in them. but, you see, i didn't end up liking him. and in real life, i would have probably been amused by him at the first party, only spent a short time with him at the 2nd party, and then spent any further parties making sure i was in another part of the room. his ego, it's just too big. and he spends way too much time talking down his accomplishments only to build himself up even higher than when he started, often at the expense of someone else.

all that said, i suspect he would have been a good professor to have [he's good with the concrete examples of the few physics problems he mentions in this book], and if i run across some of his collected physics lectures, i would probably read them and learn a lot.

I don't really get the appeal. He's very smart and very clever and has some funny frat boy stories, but I thought he was a bit full of himself and tickled by his own smartness vis a vis everyone else. Though he is very smart.

Allow me to regale you with tales of one of the smartest bags of plasma to ever ambulate across the stage before succumbing to planned obsolescence and (empirically speaking), being quiescent for an indeterminate amount of time. (It occurs to me that Shakespeare's original semantic construction of this sentiment cemented itself firmly in the depths of posteriors (i.e. posterity) for reasons that this formulation evinces none of, so I will try again. I am here to fuck your occiptal lobes with words and characters which clumsily circumscribe the time which one of the keenest minds in the history of big-brain-energetics piloted a bipedal robot across Jotunheim before catching an errant hammer with a suspiciously short handle, (i.e. the work of the trickster Loki in the form of a fly who bit a surly dwarven blacksmith (Sindri) upon his asshole while he was forging Mjölnir), right directly in his germline, thus cashing all of its lethal liquidity into what Ludwig von Mises called, "A Gonadal Götterdämmerung" and ensuring this brilliant mind could no longer beseech the hearts and minds of mortal denizens upon that plane of existence for a very long, (perhaps indefinite), amount of time due to investing his entire savings into precious metals with Birch Gold. While simultaneously occluding from his high powered perception, the fact that his untimely demise was a product of Útgarða-Loki, a giant, and known master of trickery, (in case the name didn't give it away), having tricked the piss drunk battle god into attempting to lift a giant grey cat which manages to arch it's back regardless of what he does and thus only allows him to lift a single paw, incensing the Thunder Lord until he begins to spin his hammer whilst muttering curses, until finally he screams, "FUCK THE NINE WORLDS!", and releases the deadly instrument to careen across the tundra like a meade powered railgun and strike Mr. Feynman, (with improbable precision), directly in the prickly knapsack and discombobulate and oblitify (sic) his corporeal triangulation. Imagine this:
t
You've encased Tom Cruise in a cube of frozen piss for the next Mission Impossible. Wait, let me start over. You've freshly emerged from a vat of sliquid silver silicone-based lube, your body glistening like a chicken tender writhing on the corrugated teeth of a Foreman Grill. You thought this might provide you some advantage whilst grappling with Inter-universal Teichmüller theory, but it has only served to leave you sexually agitated to the point of humping furniture. Repeated bouts of Turkish Oil Wrestling with abrasive fabrics has left your morsels tender and your cognitive nutrients depleted. You're simply too goddamn stupid to understand this. You’re so dumb you couldn’t pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were written on the heel. You might as well give up. Belching forth a the line of caustic invectives which follow: "The most erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else.” You then collapse.

During the course of your angry nap, you experience a fitful dream. You’re in the midst of a grueling marathon. Your muscles are bathed in acid. Your lungs are a frozen ball of expanding gas crowding out your innards. With tremendous effort, and cussing so foul memory doesn’t permit you to recall it, you crest a hill. Off in the distance, you see the smartest people you know in your personal life, implacably approaching the finish. You realize that, with enough training, you could bridge the cognitive divide between you and them. “If I just buckle down and learn my multiplication tables, I can run shoulder to shoulder with Sara and Jimbo.” You think. They’re not so different from you, they just didn’t spend approximately 90% of their time playing Roguelike games and cursing when no systems of meta progression are present to lessen the torment between runs/watching videos on how to modify their newly acquired steam deck in order to play every smut game available on itch.io /rewatching Jersey Shore/teabagging molten subduction zones/dressing in all black and pretending to steal stuff from their own home when cars go by in the night/directing comrades to Ubuntu repositories in order for them to also experience unbridled smut on linux based operating systems of a handheld nature/eating fermented pineapple/zooming to pixel-depth on Aleister Crowley's nutsack/trying to become proficient with a Manriki-Gusari/attempting to scale a sheer cliff using only their wet underwear so they could proclaim from the summit: “She writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash!"
This thought lightens your burdens and you push on with renewed vigor.

Well, don’t get carried away, chief, because you stagger across the finish line like a spastic newborn giraffe doing The Butterfly and conduct a violent emesis of nutrients from both ends while pissing at right angles the entire time (don't try this). At this moment, a man comes trotting by your (geometrically peculiar) fetal form. His steps are springy and there’s a curious clinking noise that accompanies his gait. He’s got a mischievous grin and intelligent eyes. He doesn’t appear to be sweating and his breathing is relaxed. How curious, you think. At least you beat one person in this podiatric blasphemy. “You never push a noun against a verb without trying to blow up something.” You offer your cryptic condolences to the stranger as he sails past you with a good natured laugh.

“That’s Richard Feynman.” Someone says.

“Poor bastard.” You retch.

“That’s his tenth lap. He just does this shit for fun.”

As the man recedes into the periphery, you catch a glint of metal. Beneath his shorts you see what appear to be cybernetic ostrich legs with bio-memetic hydraulic ankles and responsive foot springs.

Well, shit, that wasn’t as uplifting as I intended it to be. My point is: There’s smart people that you can imagine emulating through linear improvements, and then there are people like Richard Feynman, who are a different kind of athlete (and arguably a damned cheater). If you read this book you’ll come to know a bit about an affable rascal, a maverick, a first principles thinker with a wicked sense of humor who was insatiably curious about the natural world. A person who wasn’t comfortable with understanding anything superficially. He had a low tolerance for horseshit, saying a lot that means very little, (forgive me, Dick), sloppy reasoning, people pretending to know things they can’t possibly know, and making things more complicated than they need to be. Here is a brief (far from exhaustive) list of things he applied his alien intellect to:

Quantum Electrodynamics.
Statistical Mechanics.
Parallel Computing
Radio construction and repair.
Playing bongo drums.
Superfluidity.
Criticizing the educational systems' emphasis on rote memorization.
Quarks.
Painting.
Participating in humanity’s potential swan song at Los Alamos.
Safe cracking.
Taking a cudgel to uppity philosophers.
Teaching.
Sussing out bureaucratic and engineering malfeasance in the wake of The Challenger Disaster.
Coercing ants to follow pheromone trails.
Cultivating an eccentric personality which makes for an interesting portfolio of anecdotes which comprise the bulk of this book.
Threatening to piss through a man in a bar bathroom.
Metabolizing oxygen.
Offering the best quote of all time on his deathbed. “I’d hate to die twice. It’s so boring.”

Feynman is a personal hero of mine, and this is one of the greatest autobiographies ever written. It is genuinely funny, and if you come away from it without wanting to know more about how things really work, well, you’re dead to me. Let’s go out with a quote, because I’ve exhausted my word-bag.

“I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here. I don't have to know the answer. I don't feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell.” - Dick Feynman.

"I'm too drunk to taste this chicken." - The Late-Great Colonel Sanders.

Despair of your position on the continuum of human intellect with this book!

5 ⭐

’Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman: Adventures of a Curious Character as Told to Ralph Leighton’, aka. ‘What a Quark of Shit, Professor Feynman!’, aka. ‘Feynman Finesses the Frigideira’, is a collection of anecdotes that takes us through some of the more extraordinary, often hilarious and, at times, unbelievable events in the life of the Nobel Prize winning Theoretical Physicist, Richard P. Feynman.

I’ll be honest, I have a habit of grabbing a vice-like grip on hobbies that I have no right picking up. Recently, I have become incredibly excited about Physics! With deep regret, I had no interest in the subject at school, leaving it behind after Year 11, passing by the barest of margins, I was too distracted by the blossoming beauty of the girls in my class and the misguided teenage desire to be popular among one’s peers. Despite this, I was always very good at Mathematics, it was something that came quite naturally and I enjoyed it. Well, I’ve belatedly discovered that where Mathematics focuses on abstract topics using pure logic and Mathematical reasoning, Physics focuses on answering tangible (for the most part) questions using Math as a necessary tool. Feynman expresses this much more aptly:

n  ”Physics is to math what sex is to masturbation”n

Physicists want answers! I want answers! “Damn it!”, I said. “I’m gonna learn some Physics!”. So, I’m browsing the net, looking for the best books on Introductory Physics and I keep coming across ’The Feynman Lectures on Physics’. They’re not cheap, but nobody seems to have a single bad word to say about the Collection and I just had to have it! So, I bought it, and in preparation I’ve been watching YouTube videos, Undergrad lectures, BBC Interviews, reading this Autobiography, anything I can get my hands on about this guy whom I’d never heard of before and, I’ll be damned if he hasn’t become an incredible source of inspiration to my inferior layman-self! Feynman’s deep curiosity and boundless intelligence, juxtaposed against his larrikinism and disrespect for authority make him feel simultaneously relatable and beyond reach. Before I say more, here are a number of quotes that I think give an incomplete, but enlightening, glimpse into the mind of Richard Feynman:

”I find myself trying to imagine all kinds of things all the time, and I get a kick out of it, just like a runner gets a kick out of sweating (laughs with childish abandon), I get a kick out of thinking about these things. I can’t stop!!” - ’Fun To Imagine’ Interview’ (On Curiosity)

”One of the things that my father taught me was a disrespect. He’d open a picture, a New York Times, maybe it was a General, and he’d say, “Now, look at these humans,” he’d say.
“Here’s one human standing here and all these others are bowing. Now, what is the difference? Why are they all bowing to him? Only because of his name and his position, because of his uniform, not because of something he especially did.”” - BBC, The Fantastic Mr.Feynman (On Authority)

”I don’t see that it makes any point that someone in the Swedish Academy decides that this work is noble enough to receive a prize. I’ve already got the prize, the prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out, the kick in the discovery, the observation other people use it, those are the real things. The honours are unreal to me, I don’t believe in honours. It bothers me. Honours bothers me! Honours is epaulettes. Honours is uniforms. My Poppa brought me up this way. I can’t stand it. It hurts me.” - BBC, The Fantastic Mr.Feynman (On winning the Nobel Prize)

”… I take it all back. If you give me the right man, in any field, I can talk to him. I know what the condition is: that he did whatever he did as far as he can go, that he studied every aspect of it, that he has stretched himself to the end. He’s not a dilettante in any way. Therefore he’s up against mysteries all the way around the edge. We can talk about mystery and awe. That’s what we have in common.” - ’The World From another Point of View’ Interview (On Conversation/What makes a “Good Man”)

And there it is. In these 4 quotes, I think you have the bare foundations, the scaffolding if you will, of what makes this man tick.

At times, it feels like Feynman is trying to build his own legend via impressive anecdotes, and if there wasn’t so much evidence confirming his genius, or second-hand accounts of the events he discusses, one might believe that was the case. After all, how many things can one man excel in. Feynman is most well-known for being an incredible theoretical physicist, however, if we’re to believe all the events that take place here, he was also in close proximity to being the first to demonstrate the uniformity of life through his dalliance with Biology and the nature of Ribosomes, he was adept at playing both the Bongos and the Frigideira, he was accomplished enough as an Artist to eventually exhibit and sell his own work, he was a renowned safe-cracker… The list goes on. It’s the classic problem of the unreliable narrator. Is he having us on? For the record, I don’t think so.

That said, Feynman was a prankster whose larrikinism only enhanced his endearingness. He would often trick people into believing he was much better at things than he actually was or that he could perform miracles, whether it be matters of arithmetic or safecracking, a dangerous magic trick or this or that. He’d pretend he could speak Italian (to Italians) and keep on walking with absolute confidence. He failed a Military Psychology Test after taking the piss out of the Shrink, the guy’s amazing!

Feynman’s use of analogy is remarkable. He often makes excellent, humorous and pinpoint analogies regarding the topic at hand that often had me nodding my head in appreciation. I have often thought that a person’s ability to analogise effectively is a great gauge of their understanding of any given subject with respect to the rest of the world. As the Chinese Philosopher, Confucius states, “The ability to make an analogy from what is close at hand is the method and the way of realizing humaneness”.

I found the most interesting part of his story to be the integral role he played in the development of the first Atomic Bomb. The thrill that he and his young team felt at finding solutions to incredibly difficult Mathematical Problems, but ultimately, his belated apprehension, and seeming regret, with regards to his role in the creation of such a devastating weapon:

”After the thing went off (ref. Trinity Detonation Test/Manhatten Project), there was tremendous excitement at Los Alamos. Everybody had parties, we all ran around. I sat on the end of a Jeep and beat drums and so on. But one man, I remember, Bob Wilson, was just sitting there moping.
I said, “What are you moping about?”
He said, “It’s a terrible thing that we made.”
I said, “But you started it. You got us into it.”
You see, what happened to me—what happened to the rest of us—is we started for a good reason, then you’re working very hard to accomplish something and it’s a pleasure, it’s excitement. And you stop thinking, you know; you just stop. Bob Wilson was the only one who was still thinking about it, at that moment.”

Unfortunately, this particular book doesn’t include Feynman’s role in the investigation of The Challenger Disaster. It’s covered in a BBC interview, however, I’ve also heard that it’s included in the “sequel” to this autobiography, titled ‘What Do You Care What Other People Think?: Further Adventures of a Curious Character’. Needless to say, I’ll be picking that one up! If you’ve any interest in Science whatsoever, or if you find yourself in the mood for an Autobiography about a remarkably diverse and charismatic individual, I can’t recommend this one enough!

A fascinating read, and also surprisingly hilarious! I didn't expect to burst out laughing while reading the autobiography of a physicist but that's what ended up happening -- Feynman definitely was a first class prankster! Although physics are often mentioned, you don't need to really know about it to be able to enjoy the book; this is more about his life than his work. It's a joy to read about how much this man enjoys learning, not only physics but also music (bongo player!), painting and so on. Makes you just want to learn those things you've been postponing for a while. I cringed a bit at the way most women are represented in the book, but if that's how the women he met really were, there's nothing really to do about it, you can't rewrite history.

I would really advise everybody to read this book. Feynman is a Nobel Prize winner, worked on the atomic bomb and is such an interesting and funny person to read about. Really, what I'm going to remember most from this book is how thoroughly that guy enjoyed life and embraced any challenge he set his mind on.

Не можу сказати, що я у цілковитому захваті від книги. Були деякі речі, які мені не подобалися. Але в ній все-таки дуууже багато корисного. Чого вартує лише думка, що ми неправильно вчимося (і це дійсно правда). Ще дуже легко і невимушено Фейнман розповідає про науку і проблеми у світі.

Щодо перекладу - він досить хороший, але були і проколи. Що це за «дупля не відбиваю», «всьо чотко» чи «образовані люде»?!

O tom, ako:

1) vykrádať sejfy
2) baliť baby v bare
3) konštruovať atómové bomby
4) pozerať na svet otvorenými očami
5) počítať z hlavy tretie odmocniny
6) mať v p**i
7) opravovať rádiá
8) a tiež o tom, že nikdy nie je naškodu naučiť sa hrať na bongo.

Body 6, 4 a 2 sa mi zatiaľ osvedčili a koketujem s 8
Bod 5 odporúčam neskúšať, ak vaše IQ nie je dosť vysoké na to, aby mohlo v aute sedieť na prednom sedadle

Edit: po zrelom uvážení som sa rozhodla, že do trojky nejdem, lebo pri mojich technických schopnostiach by z toho mohlo vzísť niečo, čo by sa konzistenciou, vzhľadom i letalitou nebezpečne blížilo prihorenému sójovému pudingu.

The bits on doing physics are interesting; the bits on picking up aging tigers in shady New York bars, not so much.

This book will likely appeal far more to science fanboys and groupies rather than scientists themselves. The goal of the book seems mostly to convince lay people that scientists are indeed human beings who have hobbies, eat at restaurants, and have sexual intercourse (gasp!). Given that most scientists likely see themselves as human beings, I think the majority of the book would be quite boring for them. I personally far prefer Feynman's nonfiction books and video lectures, which are served crystal-clear with a side of motivation.

However, now that I've thoroughly demotivated your wanting to read this book, there are two upsides.

First, to a baby scientist (a middle-schooler, high-schooler, or college freshman aspiring to become a scientist), especially one who doesn't come from a family of scientists or hasn't met many in their life, this book is a much more inspirational look at the life of an (atypical) scientist than the Wikipedia entry on scientist. That said, if you know a youngling leaning towards a life scientific, this is a great (dangerous?) book to pass along to them.

Second, hidden amongst the fluff are stellar pieces of advice for doing science, what I will refer to as "Feynmanisms." Most aren't explicit but are simply what I interpreted from Feynman's stories on doing science. Here's a list of my favorites:

Seek people and ideas outside your own field. There's a great pressure in science to confine yourself to one field. This pressure comes from funding agencies and administrators who must be able to easily define which discipline your work is in, as well as from interactions with other scientists in your field, who will of course mostly suggest ideas and insights from within that field. Resist this pressure. Speak with scientists in either fields about their ideas and your own. Seek connections. It will often be hard to communicate but its always worth the effort.

Don't be afraid to ask questions. Many a student or scientist finds himself at the end of a long lecture, completely lost because he didn't have the courage to ask what a word on the second slide meant. Get over it. You are and will always be a student and there will always be things you don't know.

Think in examples. It's easy to get lost if you think about every new concept you learn in terms of another new concept you only learned ten minutes ago. Yet this is often the way books try to teach. Instead, when trying to follow an explanation, think in a concrete example and add features slowly. It might be "faster" to use jargon and buzzwords to explain a concept, but there's no use in this compression if you don't understand what's going on.

Don't fool yourself into thinking you know something you don't. It is surprisingly easy to convince the human brain that it understands something that it most certainly does not. Knowing the name of something is not the same as understanding what it is. Throwing around buzzwords is an easy way to fake understanding to others, but it's impossible to be creative or have any fun if all you can do is mix and match buzzwords.

Never stop playing. Remember why you enjoyed physics (or whichever field) in the first place; it's fun to play with ideas! No administrator or scientific colleague is ever going to ask you to spend more time playing, but that is often crucial to coming up with new ideas as well as having fun.

This books has surely inspired me to be more curious and active in life! While reading this book, I noticed a psychological change in me, an Example - I usually boil corn for my evening snack. Once the corn is ready, lifting it out of the cooker immediately is damn hard (it will be boiling hot), so I'll either wait irritatingly or try to lift it in a stupid manner and hurt myself. But, this book encouraged me to solve this problem creatively. I dipped my hands in cold water and lifted the damn corn out with simply my hands!! That just made me so happy :D

That said, Mr. Feynman doesn't come across to me as being an extremely honest man! While I'm still trying to overcome my impostor syndrome, this man seems to suffer something towards the opposite (Ofcourse, this is just my personal opinion). And because of this, I could not really have a personal connection with this reading. But I do recommend this book to everyone, for there is surely something that you will learn out of reading it!