Richard P Feynman - Surely you're joking Mr Feynman! Adventures of a curious character.

Curious is an apt word to describe both the contents of this book and the character of 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics winner Richard Feynman it describes. It is a collection of stories told to his drumming partner Ralph Leighton, the son of another Caltech physicist. Several things are obvious from the tales the book contains, some positive and some less so. Feynman was a formidable intellect with an extraordinary capacity for work. Equally he’s a formidable bore with an extraordinary capacity for smugness!


As someone who is famous for his popularisation of complex theoretical physics and other esoteric ideas, a lot of the scientific explanations were arcane and impenetrable to the layperson. Whether this was a fault of Feynman’s stories or Leighton’s account of them is hard to tell from reading the book but I would probably go for the latter. The stories chosen give a strange and lopsided view of Feynman. For example, a long series of recollections about working on developing nuclear weapons at Los Alamos as a young man focus mainly on how to pick locks and break into filing cabinets, which is about as interesting as it sounds. There’s also a lot of pervy material on how to talk to girls in bars, how to ‘befriend’ showgirls in Vegas and his appreciation for strip clubs.


Taken as a whole, the book was boring and reminded me of listening to a loquacious person with a very high opinion of themselves drone on about their various exploits. A lot of these exploits are couched in transparent false modesty, which compounds the problem of their tediousness. Of course, Feynman lived an extraordinary life in terms of his intellectual achievements but this is no guarantee of his brilliance as a raconteur. On the evidence of this book he is definitely not someone I’d like to share a few drinks with!


There were some admirable aspects of his character that shone through the monotony of the anecdotes. He was interested in anything and everything, always found things out for himself and never trusted received opinion and worked with an almost maniacal fervour. He obviously considered himself a leading authority on pretty much anything he studied, perhaps quite accurately, but this makes his claims of modesty ring all the more hollow. His opinions about the rigours of the scientific method contained in the final chapter (‘Cargo Cult Science, adapted from a Caltech commencement speech given in 1974) was by far the best chapter in the book. This gave me the idea that maybe it was the compiler of this collection that was the major problem and that Feynman would be better encountered in his own words.


Feynman’s attitude to winning the Nobel Prize was very pleasing to me. He thought it was more hassle than it was worth because it made him a celebrity when all he really wanted was to be a physicist. This rang true to me for some reason but also made me reflect that: if he hadn’t have won this famous prize then no one would have written a book like this about him, which is ironic!

This was a boring book, full of bad stories but I’m intrigued to read more of Feynman in his own words or listen to his famous lectures on physics because I have a strong suspicion that this collection does not do him justice!