What Do You Care What Other People Think?: Further Adventures of a Curious Character
The best-selling sequel to "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"--funny, poignant, instructive. One of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century, Richard Feynman possessed an unquenchable thirst for adventure and an unparalleled ability to tell the stories of his life. "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" is Feynman's last literary legacy, which he prepared as he struggled with cancer. Among its many tales--some funny, others intensely moving--we meet Feynman's first wife, Arlene, who taught him of love's irreducible mystery as she lay dying in a hospital bed while he worked nearby on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos. We are also given a fascinating narrative of the investigation of the space shuttle Challenger's explosion in 1986, and we relive the moment when Feynman revealed the disaster's cause by an elegant experiment: dropping a ring of rubber into a glass of cold water and pulling it out, misshapen. A New York Times bestseller.Product Details
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
A thoughtful companion volume to the earlier Surely You Are Joking Mr. Feynman!. Perhaps the most intriguing parts of the book are the behind-the-scenes descriptions of science and policy colliding in the presidential commission to determine the cause of the Challenger space shuttle explosion; and the scientific sleuthing behind his famously elegant O-ring-in-ice-water demonstration. Not as rollicking as his other memoirs, but in some ways more profound.
From Publishers Weekly
Roughly half of these 21 short, colloquial essays deal with Feynman's firsthand investigaton of the Challenger space-shuttle disaster. He casts himself in the role of intrepid detective, and the first-person singular pronoun keeps intruding on the worthwhile things he has to say about flight safety and lack of communication within NASA. An appendix offers his chilling technical observations on the shuttle's reliability or lack of it. The remaining pieces are mostly a blur of international conferences, purveying slight anecdotes. But two essays touch genuine depths of feeling: his tribute to his father, who taught him to cultivate a sense of wonder, and his account of his love affair with his first wife (who died). In this posthumous miscellany, theoretical physicist Feynman displays only sporadically the adventurousness that captivated readers of Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Following the success of the late Nobel laureate's first commercial book, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman (1984), this second was perhaps an inevitability. The book has problems, but it is worthwhile nonetheless. In general, the new anecdotes lack the wit, novelty, and outrageousness of those in the earlier work. The book's second half is the high point; it is topical, entertaining, and illuminating, and telells of Feynman's work on the Rogers Commission, which investigated the Challenger space shuttle disaster. Readers who bypass the first part, which is rife with unconnected tales, will be happy to find this in their libraries. Gregg Sapp, Idaho State Univ. Lib., Boise
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Customer Reviews
Becoming a Scientist
I strongly encourage you to enjoy the pages of this book as I have. It portrays the study of science as something that curious people do to live well. Science is the study of how our world works. Scientists explore what happens and how it happens with the delight of children at play and the logic of objective experts. Mr. Feynman models the process in an inspiring and personally curious manner that can only come from someone that enjoys his life as he contributes to society.
There are few ways that show young people exactly what it is like and how to pursue a career in science. This book is fantastic for the job. It is recommended by the Young Adult Library Services Association as an outstanding book for the college bound under the category of Science and Technology. And, it is interesting with a very real and fascinating main character. You will enjoy reading it and learn about what it is like to be involved as a scientist with NASA.
This book is about the life of an internationally renowned physicist. It portrays Mr. Feynman's father as someone who encouraged him to think like a scientist from a very young age. Mr. Feynman talks about what it was like to be a young man falling in love and a married man relating in a loving, caring way with both his wives and children. He discusses his worldly working life and how he related to his friends. Most exciting, perhaps, is how he handled his investigation of the Challenger space shuttle disaster. Mr. Feynman exquisitely and humbly relates his life in the center of the greatest of man's scientific endeavors.
Although this book models the life of a fascinating scientist, it fails to answer questions about Mr. Feynman's life that naturally came to mind as I read the book. Mr. Feynman writes to his second wife while traveling, yet the book never mentions anything about how he came to marry a second time. And while I strongly recommend that young students read the book to know what it is like to be a real scientist, some of the technical material will probably be a bit beyond the comprehension of this audience.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book from cover to cover. I like the way Mr. Feynman related to the world as an ordinary person. Yet, his accomplishments and experience clearly define him as a man of extraordinary talent and high integrity. His story can be proudly held as a model of what a scientist is. As a teacher I would ask my students to be curious, ask questions, and relay information in an honest yet humane way as Mr. Feynman has so elegantly demonstrated in his biography.
Title: "What Do You Care What Other People Think?"Further Adventures of a Curious Character
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
Author: Richard P. Feynman, as told to Ralph Leighton
©1988, first published as a Norton paperback 2001
Reading Level:
Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 6.9
Fry Readability: Eighth Grade Level
Number of Pages: 255
Genre: Biography-Physicists-Science
Feynman was a great man
Not quite as funny as "Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman", but just as touching. A pleasure to read. This books makes us like not only the man, but it also inspires us to join his quest for scientific knowledge and rational thinking.
An adventurous and curious character.
"The scientist has a lot of experience with ignorance and doubt and uncertainty, and this experience is of very great importance, I think. When a scientist doesn't know the answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty darn sure of what the result is going to be, he is still in some doubt. We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress we must recognize our ignorance and leave room for doubt. Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty--some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none absolutely certain.
Now, we scientists are used to this, and we take it for granted that it is perfectly consistent to be unsure, that it is possible to live and not know. But I don't know whether everyone realizes this is true." Feynman, The Value of Science
The book's title relates to Feynman's telling of his relationship and experiences with his first wife, Arlene, a victim of Hodgkin's disease. But the subtitle of this book would have made a better title than the one used. Feynman was indeed a curious sort, and he begins by telling how his father encouraged his curiosity.
Feynman achieved a measure of celebrity that few scientists do, and as a result, he sometimes found a forum for his thoughts outside of strict science. He was a fun and likeable man, and an innovative thinker as regards certain scientific difficulties; he wasn't much of a philosopher (evidenced by the fact that he thought Voltaire was a good philosopher), and in fact didn't like philosophy. While he was intelligent enough to admit that his views on art, culture, history, religion, and politics should not be taken too seriously, he was generally happy, and perhaps anxious, to offer such of his views anyway, and they are usually entertaining: "I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy--and when he talks about a nonscientific matter, he sounds as naive as anyone untrained in the matter. Since the question of the value of science is not a scientific subject, this talk is dedicated to proving my point-- by example." RF, The Value of Science
It hardly seems correct to call the short articles he wrote `essays', so I'll call them writings. This volume is a collection of Feynman's personal writings, with some contributions from physicist friends Freeman Dyson and Henry Bethe. Most of the book is Feynman's account of his work as a Commissioner investigating the space shuttle Challenger disaster.
This isn't a great science text, it isn't great literature; it's more like listening in on Feynman's thoughts and conversations. Apart from minimal aspects of Appendix F (Feynman's appendix to the Presidential Commission Report) his book isn't particularly technical. It's rather `light' and entertaining, and anyone interested in Feynman, in NASA and the US manned space program, or in bureaucratic `ethics' (or perversion thereof), will almost certainly enjoy it.
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