Richard P. Feynman was raised in Far Rockaway, New York, and received his Ph.D. from Princeton. He held professorships at both Cornell and the California Institute of Technology. In 1965 he received the Nobel Prize for his work on quantum electrodynamics. He died in 1988.
The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman
eBook
-
ISBN-13:
9780465013128
- Publisher: Basic Books
- Publication date: 04/06/2005
- Sold by: Hachette Digital, Inc.
- Format: eBook
- Pages: 300
- Sales rank: 390,811
- File size: 766 KB
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The Pleasure of Finding Things Out is a magnificent treasury of the best short works of Richard P. Feynmanfrom interviews and speeches to lectures and printed articles. A sweeping, wide-ranging collection, it presents an intimate and fascinating view of a life in science-a life like no other. From his ruminations on science in our culture to his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, this book will fascinate anyone interested in the world of ideas.
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Knowing that flexibility was crucial to the rubber o-ring's ability to contain the intense heat of the shuttle's solid-fuel boosters, Feynman immersed a piece of the material in a glass of ice water on the hearing-room table -- showing simply and clearly that the ring had lost its ability to flex on the cold January morning of the Challenger's launch. "Feynman," commission chair William Rogers is reported to have whispered to a colleague, "is becoming a real pain."
This Mr. Wizard Goes to Washington performance nicely summed up the public Richard Feynman: genius, rule-breaker, simplifier of the seemingly complex. And this was a guy who knew from complex. Winner of the 1965 Nobel Prize in physics for his work in reconstructing the theory of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman was recruited to the Manhattan Project while he was still in his early 20s. But unlike most people with intimate knowledge of subatomic particles, Feynman could function and communicate in the world of large, everyday objects.
The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, a new gathering of Feynman pieces, is as illuminating, pleasurable and frustrating as the scientist himself. Subtitled "The Best Short Works of Richard Feynman," the book presents a baker's dozen pieces culled from a career's worth of lectures, reports, interviews and articles. Feynman discourses on the philosophy of science, the relationship of science to religion and the world of the top-secret Los Alamos lab. The collection also gives us Feynman's prescient looks at "the future" that has become our present, seen most strongly in his groundbreaking 1959 Cal Tech lecture on the possibilities of miniaturization. Reading Feynman's Cal Tech musings on possible ways to build tiny electrical circuits makes you feel you are witnessing the birth of the silicon chip, and you pretty much are. Just as affecting in different ways are his descriptions of his father -- who encouraged Feynman's boyish scientific curiosity with "no pressure, just lovely interesting discussions" -- and an account of the physicist's deep despair after the product of interesting discussions at Los Alamos had twice been dropped on Japan.
Feynman was a world-class talker who seemingly had little time or patience for mundane rewrite work. So a large portion of this book consists of spoken-word transcriptions that could have benefited from the clarifying process of editing. Quite a few have already been edited, in fact, and appeared some years ago, polished up in two as-told-to books: Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think? To say Feynman needed an editor may be heresy to his disciples, who rival Bucky Fullerites in their level of devotion. But I'd hazard a guess that the man himself would be pleased to know, 11 years after his death, that he's still capable of being both a pain and a pleasure, and much more the latter.
Salon
Nature