What kind of physicist picks locks for fun, and wins the Nobel by working out the wobble of a 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, picks up bongos and ends up playing in a samba band during his Brazil sabbatical.
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.
What pulled him out, he later said, was a plate. Bored in a Cornell cafeteria, he watched a student spin one. The seal wobbled at a different rate than it spun. He worked out the equations for fun, and out of that play came the work that won him the Nobel.
