★★★★★ A load of ham, but absolutely no baloney

"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character

Richard P Feynman, Ralph Leighton (ed)

Here's a bit of advice if you're thinking of reading "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character. First watch a 15 min video called "My friend Richard Feynman" by Leonard Susskind. (It's a TED talk. I apologize.) In it Susskind talks about Feynman. He doesn't skip over Feynman's faults, but it is obvious that Susskind knew and truly loved Feynman. Nothing you can do in 15 min will give you a better understanding of Feynman's character. The words "A load of ham, but absolutely no baloney" are a quote from Susskind's video.

I read Surely You're Joking shortly after it came out in 1985, as did several of my coworkers. There were differing opinions. I enjoyed it. To me it reads as if Feynman believed he could get away with expressing his unfiltered thoughts publicly. Some of those thoughts were of the inside kind that most people know better than to say out loud. If Feynman thought he could get away with this, he was right! The book was a best-seller, and some of us, at least, interpreted as an extremely intelligent and entertaining man expressing the thoughts that many of his tribe are secretly afraid to share.

Here's my advice to readers of Surely You're Joking. As you read, you will encounter bits that strike you as reprehensible. When that happens, try to think hard about them from Feynman's point of view. In many, perhaps most, such cases you will decide that the passages in question are really as reprehensible as you first thought. But in others you may realize they are not. Let me give an example. In the chapter "Los Alamos from Below" he talks about how he learned that the atomic bomb was going to be tested.

After we’d made the calculations, the next thing that happened, of course, was the test. I was actually at home on a short vacation at that time, after my wife died, and so I got a message that said, “The baby is expected on such and such a day.”

I overheard two of my coworkers expressing their outrage at this casual, apparently callous mention of his wife's death. They clearly thought he should have expressed more pain. My thought was "A man who had felt less, might." (Bonus points if you recognize the quote!) After all, he's talking about Los Alamos with a friend 40 years after the events in question. It would not be sensible to derail the conversation with a eulogy for Arlene.

In fact, the sequel "What Do You Care What Other People Think?": Further Adventures of a Curious Character contains a chapter entitled “What Do You Care What Other People Think?” about his love for and marriage with Arlene. Ralph Leighton, who compiled these recollections, describes it as follows

The story of Arlene, from which the title of this book was taken, was painful for Feynman to recount. It was assembled over the past ten years out of pieces from six different stories. When it was finally complete, Feynman was especially fond of this story, and happy to share it with others.

So, give the guy a break, OK?

An entertaining book, but perhaps too unfiltered for many readers.

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