| | "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!", by Richard P. Feynman.
Richard P. Feynman was a physicist,
probably most well known for working on the Manhattan Project,
what's equally one of the greatest and worst achievements
in science. A whole section in the physicist and teacher's
autobiography is devoted to his time at Los Alamos, but
rather than learning about his work on the bomb, the reader
hears stories about him and his wife passing codes back
and forth past the mail censors, the author's experiments
with human smell, and cracking the safes of scientists and
military men on the top secret project. That's not to say
Feynman didn't work and excel at his work. He received the
Nobel Prize, taught at Cornell and Caltech, and worked at
the Center for Physical Research in Brazil, among many jobs.
Like Los Alamos, his stories in Brazil deal more with his
performing in a mambo band than any actual scientific work,
though during his time there we see his devotion to science
as he criticizes the country's education and educators --
to their face, not just in this book -- for teaching facts
rather than understanding.
While Feynman does not try to educate
the reader on science, he expresses a genuine exuberance
for the physical world and understanding the way it works,
be it the behavior of ants in his apartment, gambling odds
in Vegas, or the laws of beta decay. Eventually we come
to understand that one cannot separate Feynman's work from
his escapades; they are one and the same in the life of
an adventurous and "curious character."
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