Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman. Adventures of a Curious Character, Richard P. Feynman (ISBN 978-0393355628, W. W. Norton)

I read this book in a Dutch translation a long time ago. And last week, looking for some light reading in the ‘scientific’ section I picked this up from the shelf. I had bought the English edition a few months back as I had given the Dutch translation to my daughter. I figured it was possibly an easy introduction to physics. Having read it again I am not sure as it is mostly about the scientific mindset. All the stories are about things that happened to Feynman in his life but underneath there runs this steady constant current about how he looked at things and approached life always guided by this scientific mindset. On Goodreads I saw that quite some people didn’t like the book at all. And I can see how that could happen if you don’t appreciate this undercurrent. All these stories might easily be mistaken to be simply boasting. Even if Feynman boasts in some stories about his skills you can forgive a guy that won the Nobelprize in physics to boast that he was good at physics and mathematics. Anyway, I don’t think that is the point of these stories. To quote Warren Oates in Blue Thunder ‘every story has a moral’ and the moral of these stories is that if you look at the world in a scientific way it makes it easier to distinguish facts from figments, to get a clear view and to avoid getting trapped in useless arguments. This attitude is illustrated in these stories. Of course they are stories, building up a certain image of Feynman but he isn’t hiding it. In the section about Los Alamos he describes how sometimes by luck he could answer something that he could normally not have answered but he let people assume he could answer because he was even smarter than he really was and how that helped building his reputation as a genius. So these are probably carefully selected and crafted stories to create an image of himself, how he liked to be seen and remembered but it isn’t a hagiography in which everything he does is brilliant and superior in every way. I found this a nice collection of amusing stories, sometimes funny, sometimes less so giving an insight in who Feynman was, how he looked at the world. It doesn’t cover his contributions to physics at all. For me it was light reading and I finished the roughly 400 pages in a week which says enough. But I wouldn’t recommend It to my daughter as an introduction to physics or science, this is more for people interested in Feynman and the time in which he lived and how people thought about every day things in life in those days, including Feynman himself.