Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character is the first memoir of Nobel Prize-winning nuclear physicist Richard Feynman, published in 1985. The book is directed primarily at non-scientists, and the anecdotes Feynman recalls concentrate on explaining how he came to have a reputation as an eccentric who craved adventure and mischief. The conversational tone of the autobiography derives in part from the way it was produced; most of the text is transcribed from tape-recorded conversations with his friend Ralph Leighton, who shared Feynman’s hobby as a musician and was the son of one of Feynman’s colleagues at the California Institute of Technology. On the surface, the memoir revels in Feynman’s fraternity pranks, social blunders, ability to crack safes, and participation in a Brazilian samba school, but each adventure also gives insight into how one of the most important scientists of the Atomic Age developed from a precocious child during the Great Depression into one of the most respected thinkers and teachers of his era. The edition used for this guide was published by Norton in 2018.

Plot Summary

Feynman’s narrative is organized into five parts, the first of which, “From Far Rockaway to MIT,” begins with the science lab he created for himself when he was in sixth or seventh grade. Though he nearly burns down his house, his homemade lab helps him quickly develop a reputation as a boy genius with a knack for fixing radios and solving complex math problems. Though he attends public schools, Feynman portrays himself as largely self-taught. Along with his love of puzzles and riddles, Feynman’s natural curiosity motivates him to take up new areas of inquiry and ask both fundamental and outrageous questions.

Later, as a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Feynman develops a reputation as a practical joker who is difficult to read as a person. His classmates have difficulty discerning when he is serious and when he is joking. He also struggles with feeling like an outsider, because of his Jewish heritage and personal awkwardness, especially with women. Yet, as he does with math and physics, he sees his perceived social shortcomings as a puzzle that can be solved through experimentation. As he moves on to his PhD at Princeton University, Feynman makes plenty of blunders, both in and out of the science lab, but he also views mistakes as a means to improving himself and his ideas. Indeed, Feynman enjoys teaching himself subjects in which he is not an expert, such as biology and psychology, even when experts in those areas scoff at him. When Albert Einstein suggests to him in a seminar that his ideas are intriguing (although probably incorrect), Feynman derives confidence from the interaction.

Feynman departs Princeton to work on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. He recounts his experiences with this project, which created the atomic bomb, not to describe the science and engineering but to illuminate how he grew as an intellect and a person. While at Los Alamos, Feynman frequently finds himself frustrated with bureaucratic structures and the rigid thinking they demand. He finds the US military to be especially bad. To exercise freedom of thought and action, Feynman teaches himself how to open all the locked files and safes at the top secret location. Initially, safecracking is both an interesting puzzle and a practical joke on the establishment, but ultimately it allows Feynman to express himself outside mainstream ways that he finds limiting.

After the use of the atomic bomb ends World War II, Feynman becomes a professor, the job he will hold for the rest of his professional life. He is worried, however, that even that career will be stifling to both his intellect and his eccentric nature. He begins his career at Cornell University and finds many ways to bump up against Ivy League decorum. Whether by sleeping in the student union or teaching classes after being bloodied in a bar fight, Feynman feels compelled to follow his whims rather than act professionally. On a trip to teach in Brazil, he finds satisfaction in being accepted at a samba school. Returning to the United States, he decides to learn to pick up women in bars and pal around with celebrities and professional gamblers in Las Vegas, in part because these kinds of activities seem fun to him in ways that physics no longer does. Later, he accepts a faculty position at the California Institute of Technology, which he will hold until his death in 1988.

Being a Caltech professor does little to curb Feynman’s eccentricity. Though he is at the height of his career, going on to win the Nobel Prize in 1964, he thinks the award is a mistake and, with glee in his telling of it, finds ways to insult dignitaries at the award ceremony. In the final section of his memoir, Feynman emphasizes that science has endangered itself by becoming an overly complex, expert-only field that has difficulty both finding and resolving its own mistakes. Though his love of, and pleasure in, science remains strong, he finds some of his greatest joys in humanistic pursuits, such as drawing and music. These are fields in which he can learn and grow, experiment, and make mistakes, without the weight of expertise and authority burdening him. Indeed, Feynman grows skeptical of how science is taught and used, discussing how mediocre school textbooks produce poor thinkers. The memoir ends with Feynman’s graduation address to the Caltech class of 1974 in which he concludes that scientists have a duty not only to be honest with themselves but also to be truthful and transparent with the public.