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I read (listened to, technically) this book a few weeks ago because I've always been inspired by the idea of Feynman and didn't know much about him. Honestly, I

• P0l83q4p1Hw3Ul 5y ago
  I like him more after reading it. All the stories had neat ideas, demonstrated his personality and showed what drove him. Of course it wasn't laid out directly in a boring technical book that no one is going to read. Also, what's up with people ignoring the fine line between crazy and genius, and thinking all these genius are supposed to be completely normal people?
  • ip26 5y ago
    I don’t think people expect them to be normal. But we hold these people up as our heroes. People aspire to be more like their heroes. So it comes as a shock when they learn their hero was a notorious philanderer, or terrible father, or chronically depressed, or self-aggrandizing. Personally, I’m unsettled by how often the kids of our heroes seem to wind up unsuccessful, unhappy and poorly adjusted. I’ve kind of lost interest in the unstable genius. I want to learn about the also-rans who made quiet but notable contributions while remaining happy & raising equally happy kids.
• hungryforcodes 5y ago
  You definitely inspired me to read it now. The clockwork of Feynman's human and non geeky character is one of the most interesting things about him.
  • 74d-fe6-2c6 5y ago
    His relationship with women seems pretty immature and very geeky to me.
    • daukadolt 5y ago
      Can you elaborate?
      • 74d-fe6-2c6 5y ago
        Can you google "feynman quotes women"?
        • klohto 5y ago
          Why even state it then if you’re not interested in continuing the discussion?
          • 74d-fe6-2c6 5y ago
            It's a bit too obvious to have potential for a discussion ...
• chris_j 5y ago
  What is it about those anecdotes that makes you like him less?
  • pfortuny 5y ago
    I guess you do not go to a topless bar to pay respect to and trean women with equality and respect.
  • jacobmischka 5y ago
    I don't know, I don't disapprove of any of those things morally or anything, but it just got old eventually. As an example, somewhere in the later parts of the book he talks about a period where he starts painting, and very shortly afterward he starts trying to convince women to let him paint them nude, including a student at the institution where he was a professor. Again, I don't think there's anything wrong with nudity, or anything inherently sexual about nudity in art, or even anything morally wrong with the desire to see naked women. But by that point after some of his other stories I started to see him as a somewhat creepy dude and it just came off to me like, oh of course, shortly after taking up this interesting art form you'd go straight to using it as a reason to see naked women, typical Feynman. I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with anything he did in any of his stories, all of the parties were consenting in them all, it just left an unpleasant taste in my mouth.
    • chris_j 5y ago
      Thanks for expanding. I had forgotten about the painting anecdote. As others have pointed out, a lot men in that era seemed similar in a way. I'd been assuming that going through all the changes that happened in the 60s as a middle aged man must have had a certain effect on them. Seeing expressions of sexuality go from being something very private, something to be ashamed of, to being something that the younger generation is much more open about. For example, I remember reading Asimov when I was a kid. His earlier books were all very buttoned up, with highly intellectual and in depth discussions of galactic politics or robots. Then his later books are full of sex. I gather that Asimov in his later years gained a reputation for being somewhat creepy too.
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• nicbou 5y ago
  Although I didn't approve of some of the things he did, his book (Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!) made me want to branch out more, to approach the world with renewed curiosity. His book is a good reminder that there is more to life than your resume. I often find myself taking random detours like he did with the ants or the bongos.
  • fctorial 5y ago
    His ant experiments blew my mind. The only experiment I did with ants was rubbing my finger on their trail and then watching them wander around blindly for a minute or so.
• Yajirobe 5y ago
  lmao. nerd
• StavrosK 5y ago
  There is some pretty bad sexism in the book (because that era was sexist, I guess), but I think your comment goes too far the other way and treats sex as taboo. What's wrong with naked women, prostitutes, gambling and topless bars?
  • jacobmischka 5y ago
    Please see my other comment; I don't think there's anything wrong with them necessarily, I just didn't particularly enjoy reading about them and his behavior just seemed sleezy a lot of the time.
    • StavrosK 5y ago
      That's fair.
• kstenerud 5y ago
  Or, just approach it with an open mind, as a window into small parts of a man's journey. The more you judge people, the less you'll enjoy the twists and turns of a human life.
  • jacobmischka 5y ago
    That's a better way of phrasing what I intended in my last sentence, go into it with an open mind. I was expecting differently, so I didn't enjoy it as much as I would have had I known ahead of time that it would be largely tangential to his scientific life.
• practicalpants 5y ago
  I don't think Feynman was that different in this masculine or promiscuous respect from many of that era's greats... Schrödinger, von Neumann, Einstein, to name a few. Feynman at least writes extensively about his deceased wife. I imagine you would not enjoy reading history too much as the 21st C Western first world attitudes on these topics are pretty unique compared to any other time.
  • jacobmischka 5y ago
    I do enjoy reading history, and I'm not even turned off by knowing that he did and enjoyed those things. I just got tired of listening about it for what seemed like about half of the book when I was expecting a memoir of a Nobel prize winning scientist.
    • baremetal 5y ago
      surely youre joking...
  • seoaeu 5y ago
    Those other scientists didn't coerce any of their female graduate students to pose naked so they could practice for their painting hobby.
  • paulpauper 5y ago
    Dirac was purpotedly very on-point
• Borrible 5y ago
  Just read his lectures decades ago. So, he was an overall great guy, you say? And there is an audio book version of his illustrious escapades? Great, have to give it a try. Thank you!
  • jacobmischka 5y ago
    I might recommend actually reading it, the narration of the Audible recording at least wasn't spectacular.
    • Borrible 5y ago
      Ah, a pity. I love listen to audio books, but you're absolutely right, the narrator is sometimes more important than the narrative. Some gifted narrators probably could read out operating instructions of kichen machines and it would be entertaining. Thanks for the advice.
• otras 5y ago
  If you’re looking for a deeper look beyond the anecdotes, I’d recommend James Gleick’s Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman. It covers much more of the ideas he had and what drove him.
• svat 5y ago
  One thing to remember about this book that is easy to miss is that it's not a memoir or autobiography in the usual sense. You may have seen this book, and its sequel, What Do You Care What Other People Think?, described as being "by Richard Feynman and Ralph Leighton" or "edited by Ralph Leighton" or "as told to Ralph Leighton". It turns out that it was not written as a book, but his friend Ralph Leighton (son of the physicist Robert B. Leighton) took several hours of (recorded) conversations with Feynman talking to him, and selected parts of them to go into the book. So although the book is sold as "by Richard Feynman" (which is true in some sense: it's in the first person, published when he was still alive, and he really did say everything that's in the book), it would be more accurate to call it a book by Ralph Leighton, and an appropriate title may be "Things my friend Richard Feynman told me about himself that I thought were fun". (This also explains the subtitle "Adventures of a Curious Character"—this is not Feynman calling himself that, but Leighton describing his friend that way.) Now consider that (1) Ralph Leighton was not a physicist but Feynman's "close friend and drumming partner", and (2) Feynman was a natural conversationalist, automatically adapting his style depending on whom he was speaking to, whether it was a friend, or undergraduate physics students, or he was talking about computers to a New Age crowd at Esalen (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA), and you have this result. The friendly conversational style increases the appeal of the book and gives some insight into the speaker, but the technical detail of Feynman's core work, which was very important to him, gets diluted. (One of my professors disliked the book for giving the impression that you get a Nobel Prize just living a life of having fun and playing around, while in fact Feynman was known to work very hard, at all hours of day and night. He liked to re-derive by himself anything he learned till he was satisfied he understood it, and that took prodigious amounts of pen-and-paper calculation. This may partly be Feynman projecting an aura of effortless brilliance, but I think it's more likely a combination of the fact that hard work doesn't seem hard if you enjoy it enough, and that going in detail about how hard you worked does not make for very good conversation.) It is true that many memoirs are written this same way (dictating to someone else), but I think this book shows the effects more than most: including the selection of topics, as you observed. (BTW the audio material that went into the books is available too, as "The Feynman Tapes", and listening to it may give a different impression than listening to an audiobook of someone else reading the text of a book itself transcribed from audio: https://kongar-olondar.bandcamp.com/ https://kongar-olondar.bandcamp.com/ )
• mncharity 5y ago
  IIRC Feynman both had a reputation for putting a lot of effort into crafting a persona, and later said he had been less than honest in the sexist stories. So perhaps they reflect a somewhat different mix of sins.