Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman! Adventures of a Curious Character

"Everyone should read this book, because it gets across why a subject like physics is so enjoyable. Physics is not just about sticky tape and rolling balls down hills and springs and batteries and ripple tanks—the sort of physics that a lot of people remember from school and may have turned them off the subject because they think it’s dry and boring. A book like Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! gives you the joy of discovery. Feynman is the most colourful character in physics and he just showed what an incredible adventure science was and is. He just makes you think: ‘Wow! How can the world be like that?! Wait until I tell everyone! I mean, you think the paranormal is amazing – let me tell you about quantum mechanics!’ Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Feynman epitomises this attitude, the absolute joy of seeking answers. He was a genius but he was also an extrovert and loved playing pranks. He was a very young scientist in Los Alamos, working on the Manhattan Project, and he recounts how he found a hole in the fence. There was all this security but he didn’t tell anyone he’d found a hole; he just came in through security in the morning and then crept out the hole and came in again, trying to see how many times he could do it before security noticed he hadn’t actually left. He just had this wonderful sense of fun and this book relates episodes from his life. Well, there’s a bit where he’s making spaghetti with a young researcher and he notices that whenever you break a stick of spaghetti it never breaks in two. It breaks into three pieces. The middle bit pings off. We would just say: ‘That’s weird.’ But Feynman studied it mathematically, looking at the properties of spaghetti and its bendiness. He was one of the committee looking at the space shuttle Challenger disaster and he realised that it was one of the rubber O rings in the fuel tanks that had got cold and brittle and had snapped. At the press conference he took a tiny rubber O and dropped it into his glass of iced water to demonstrate. He brought science alive to people."