Book Review, Summary, Highlights, and Quotes from “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” by Richard P. Feynman
I read the first hundred pages of this book a few years ago, but Sure You’re Joking Mr. Feynman jumps all around from shenanigan to shenanigan with very little background or life story. After a while, I lost interest and put it down.
I recently picked it back up — and I’m glad I did.
The most enjoyable and intriguing part of this book is about Feynman’s time at Los Alamos, helping to build the atomic bomb. While it does touch on some of the theoretical work he did, it showcases his straightforwardness and willingness to be an independent thinker, which helped save a uranium plant from its ultimate demise, along with some other notable accomplishments that helped push bomb development along.
I mostly loved the stories that showed how curious Feynman was and how he followed his interests that led him to becoming a frigideira (frying pan) drummer in Brazil, wild stopovers in Las Vegas, wooing showgirls, and from his time in Los Alamos picking safes to his escapades as an artist drawing nudes.
This book covers a lot of his single life and, therefore, his attempts to meet women, but I found that I resonated most with the stories about his curiosity and how that curiosity itself led him down many interesting paths.
And of course, there are some layered in scientific, independent thinking, and life lessons as well!
Definitely recommend if you want a few laughs and don’t want a book that takes itself too seriously.
AR Score: 7/10
Best Quotes from “Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman!”
All the time you’re saying to yourself, “I could do that, but I won’t” — which is just another way of saying you can’t”
– Sure You’re Joking Mr. Feynman — Richard P. Feynman
You see when I hear about physics, I just think about physics, and I don’t know who I’m talking to, so I say dopey things like “no, no, you’re wrong,” or “you’re crazy.” But it turned out that is exactly what he needed. I got a notch up on account of that, and I ended up as a group leader.
– Sure You’re Joking Mr. Feynman — Richard P. Feynman
I was always dumb in that way. I never knew who I was talking to. I was always worried about the physics. If the idea looked lousy, I said it looked lousy. If it looked good, I said it looked good. Simple proposition.
– Sure You’re Joking Mr. Feynman — Richard P. Feynman
You must have been in a situation like this when you didn’t ask them right away. Right away it would have been OK. But now they’ve been talking a little bit too long. You hesitated too long. If you ask them now they’ll say, “What are you wasting my time all this time for?”
– Sure You’re Joking Mr. Feynman — Richard P. Feynman
I don’t believe I can really do without teaching. The reason is, I have to have something so that when I don’t have any ideas and I’m not getting anywhere I can say to myself “At least I’m living; at least I’m doing something; I’m making some contribution” – it’s just psychological.
– Sure You’re Joking Mr. Feynman — Richard P. Feynman
You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It’s their mistake not my failing.
– Sure You’re Joking Mr. Feynman — Richard P. Feynman
The students are often the source of new research. They often ask profound questions that I’ve thought about at times and then given up on […] The students may not be able to see the thing I want to answer, or the subtleties I want to think about, but they remind me of a problem by asking questions in the neighborhood of that problem. It’s not easy to remind yourself of these things.
– Sure You’re Joking Mr. Feynman — Richard P. Feynman
I was “playing” — working, really — with the same old problem that I loved so much, that I had stopped working on when I went to Los Alamos […] It was effortless. It was easy to play with these things. It was like uncorking a bottle: Everything flowed out effortlessly. […] There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.
– Sure You’re Joking Mr. Feynman — Richard P. Feynman
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to foool.
– Sure You’re Joking Mr. Feynman — Richard P. Feynman
Since then I never pay any attention to anything by “experts.” I calculate everything myself.
– Sure You’re Joking Mr. Feynman — Richard P. Feynman
The idea of distributing everything evently is based on a theory that there’s only X amount of stuff in the world, that somehow we took it away from the poorer countries in the first place, and therefore we should give it back to them. But this theory doesn’t take into account the real reason for the differences between countries — that is, the development of new techniques for growing food, the development of machinery to grow food, and to do other things. […] It isn’t the stuff, but the power to make the stuff, that is important.
– Sure You’re Joking Mr. Feynman — Richard P. Feynman
It’s nice that I got some money — I was able to buy a beach house — but altogether, I think it would have been much nicer not to have had the Prize — because you never, any longer, can be taken straightforwardly in any public situation.
– Sure You’re Joking Mr. Feynman — Richard P. Feynman
If you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid — not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment and how they worked.
– Sure You’re Joking Mr. Feynman — Richard P. Feynman
More Richard P. Feynman
- Overview: Who is Richard Feynman?
- Books: Amazon Profile
- 3 Life Lessons on Richard Feynman:
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