Reflection on Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! Adventures of a Curious Character by Richard P. Feynman

               This is a funny book. It’s the memoir plus some collected lectures of Dr. Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize-winning physicist who worked at Los Alamos on “The Bomb” in World War Two. Yet despite having some very serious credentials, he is a very wacky guy. In the book he details, for example, how he learned to crack safes while working at Los Alamos and would regularly steal military secrets to show his superiors that if an amateur like him could learn how to crack their locks, they weren’t very secure. The book is the story of his life told in these little short stories that are usually just a few pages long, the main theme being that he’s a trickster. He likes to find tricks that help him learn something (often trivial) or that help him fool someone.

               This isn’t going to be like a real, in-depth reflection because the book is very loose and has very little holding it together. I’m just going to share some parts I liked. For example, he writes, “Many years later, when I was at Caltech and lived in a little house on Alameda Street, some ants came around the bathtub. I thought, ‘This is a great opportunity.” I put some sugar on the other end of the bathtub, and sat there the whole afternoon until an ant finally found the sugar.” He had decided to do some experiments on how ants find their way around and goes into detail describing his informal testing and findings in the bathtub.

               He also had some kind of trick where he would declare himself to be a bloodhound, ask someone to handle one book or one empty coke bottle of many and return it. Feynman would sniff around and figure out which one it was using only his smell, while everyone else thought there would be some kind of trick, he was just demonstrating the power of the human nose. I have tried this with chairs and it did not work and I embarrassed myself. People’s hands smell very different, and it’s apparently very helpful if the person who handles the object is a smoker or has perfume.

               There is a very dark spot in this book and it’s Feynman’s treatment of women, which is honestly garbage. There are maybe two chapters of the many in the book that describe him being interested in prostitutes and saying of women that you have to “treat them like crap.” It was incredibly disappointing because the book had been so good! His advice was nasty and made the whole thing a lot more unpleasant. I’m not sure if I’d want to recommend the book honestly after that.

               In his later life, Feynman made money semi-professionally as an artist and as a drummer, which was cool to see someone reinventing themselves late in life. I enjoyed his old-school Jewish humor and with the exception of those two chapters on women, the book was great. He’s very entertaining and the book is easy to read.