What kind of physicist picks locks for fun, and traces his Nobel-winning work back to a wobbling cafeteria plate?
Richard Feynman. Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! collects the stories that made him famous to a generation of readers. It isn’t a biography. There’s almost no physics in it, just a string of anecdotes told in his own voice.
Some are pure mischief. He cracks the safes at Los Alamos because the locks look interesting, decodes a Mayan calendar because a manuscript catches his eye, and ends up playing a toy frying pan in a samba band during his stay in Brazil.
One stretch isn’t funny at all. After Hiroshima, sitting in a New York restaurant, Feynman maps the bomb’s blast radius onto the streets around him and watches the city disappear in his head. For a while after, every bridge and building looked to him like future wreckage.
At Cornell after the war, he felt burned out and unable to do research. He decided to stop worrying about important results and play with physics again.
Then, in a Cornell cafeteria, he saw someone toss a plate into the air. The plate wobbled at one rate; the Cornell seal on it went around at another. He worked out the motion for fun. In “The Dignified Professor”, he traces the work that won him the Nobel back to that bit of play.
