Surely You're Joking

When I was a teenager, my dad had various books lying around. One was a bestseller, of sorts. It was titled Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman. The book was actually written, or more precisely, transcribed by Ralph Leighton, who was the son of a colleague of Richard Feynman.

Who is Richard Feynman, you might ask? He was a Nobel winning physicist, though he himself hated the fact he got the award, not so much because he didn't deserve it, but he felt awards were meaningless. He did work in quantum electrodynamics and invented the so-called Feynman diagrams.

He probably would have languored in obscurity, except to hard-core physicists, were it not for this book.

Part of the appeal was his common man upbringing, and his knack for looking for adventure. Whether it was his desire to visit Tana Tuva, a country his father said was no longer around, where Mongolians do throat-singing, a style of singing where it sounds like two voices are being sung, when it's only one person.

He hung around biologists back when they were figuring out DNA. He helped on the Connection Machine, which contained some 64,000 simple processors. He wrote books on physics, and helped us look at physics in a different way. He played the bongo drums, painted art, learned to read Mayan writing.

Throughout his life, you see his child-like curiosity. It's likely he inspired many people to a career of physics. Even for those who didn't choose physics, he may have helped redefine what a scientist does. He simply wanted to have adventures and wanted to learn.

What's not so clear was how brilliant he was. Reading Surely, You're Joking, you find that he is curious, but not how he thought. I'm sure he didn't have any idea what he did. Is it one's ability to sit and think and think and think? Certainly, even as his father lacked scientific training, he tried to get his son to visualize things, and that may have been crucial in his development.

I can't say that Feynman has inspired me to new heights even approaching what he did, but I can say that reading about Feynman was formative in growing up, in some way. I wonder if I hadn't read this book whether I'd see the world differently or not? Of course, if the answer is yes, it makes one wonder what other books would have to say, even though it's been more than twenty years since I read this book.