A Trip Down Memory Lane
Thursday, February 7, 2008
Classic Feynman: All the Adventures of a Curious Character by Richard Feynman, edited by Ralph Leighton
I recently picked up copies of Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! as prizes for two of my students (the day before our winter break we had a paper airplane competition - the student from each class whose plane went the greatest distance from my window won) and spent a few minutes looking through this more recent edition (which includes both Surely You're Joking... and What Do You Care What Other People Think?, Feyman's 2nd book of anecdotes.) Since my paperback copies are slowly but surely falling to pieces, I jumped at a chance to use one of my Borders Rewards coupons to knock a hefty 30% off the cover price of this wonderful hardcover collection... and found myself inexorably drawn into re-reading the stories that I first read over 20 years ago, when the books were first published back in the 1980's.
For those who don't know, Richard Feynman was probably the greatest theoretical physicist of the 2nd half of the 20th century. He participated in developing the 1st atomic bomb during the World War II and later made important contributions to superfluidity, particle physics, and quantum electrodynamics. He and two colleagues won a Nobel Prize in 1965 for their work on QED. He came to the public's attention in the 1980's through his participation in the Presidential Commission investigating the Challenger disaster; Feynman was the one to figure out that low temperatures drastically reduced the elasticity of vital O-rings in the rocket engines and publicly demonstrated the fact by dipping a sample of the material in a glass of ice water at a press conference. But Feynman was more than just a great physicist - he was a real character. He had interest in a wide variety of topics and dabbled in everything from art to drumming to juggling and more. In 1985 his semi-autobiographical book of anecdotes, Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman! made the NY Times Bestseller List for 15 weeks... and it was through this book of hilarious stories that I first was introduced to the free-spirited Feynman.
In 1985 I was in my sophomore year of college, and had spent much of my time up to that point limiting my roamings to the immediate Vassar College campus... of course, there were lots of places there to roam, so that wasn't too difficult! But at some point during my sophomore year I started to get my bearings in the wider Poughkeepsie community, and in addition to short trips off campus to the local book store (which had a large selection of science fiction and fantasy books, because the owner was a fan) and Iron Vic's Comics, I started making longer distance trips out to the local shopping centers. It seemed like quite a hike at the time, but it was really only a mile and a quarter or so... about half an hour one way. In later years I brought a bike down to Vassar and biked to both the shopping centers and to a much more distant used bookstore, almost 4 miles away... I remember several enjoyable rides on sunny fall and spring days to go buy used books. Anyway, my main reason for hiking out to the shopping centers was a store called Caldors. A long-deceased precursor to Wal-mart and Target, Caldor was in most ways a typical department store of the time... except it had a huge book department with an incredible selection of paperback and discount hardcover science fiction and fantasy. Once I discovered that, every month or so I would hike out there and buy some new books, and typically at the end of the school year I would celebrate by purchasing something more expensive, like a hardcover or an entire paperback series. (What can I say... I'm a major book geek.)
It was at Caldor that I first discovered Calvin & Hobbes, in the first collected edition of the newspaper strips (one of my friends was with me and commented on what a great comic strip it was, and she was so right!) And it was also at Caldor that I picked up my first copy of Surely You're Joking... , sometime in early 1996 after it was released in massmarket paperback. I was immediately drawn into the crazy and often irreverent world of Feynman and his whacky stories. Stories which I've repeated often in these years that followed, and stories which I've shared yearly with some of my top students by choosing Surely You're Joking... as our annual physics book award. Admittedly it's not much of a physics book - but it's a fantastic book for showing that not only can science be fun (if nothing else, Feynman made sure he had fun with what he did for a living) but also that scientists are real people who can definitely be interesting for outside of what they do for a living... I'll never be the character that Feynman was, but I'd like to think I'm definitely a character in my own right! I suppose I'm also drawn to Feynman's stories because he was an incredible teacher with a gift for explaining things in simple language, and I like to think I do a bit of that myself.
So I suppose, in the end, I've had a wonderful time re-reading these stories both because "hearing" Feynman relate some of his outrageous escapades is just so much fun, and because they bring back memories of some really fun times when I was a bit younger than I am now and things at least seemed a lot simpler (especially in hindsight!) I wouldn't go back to those days for all the money in the world, but it's definitely fun to revisit them in my thoughts.
JMH
