Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

Richard P Feynman received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965. Here’s a semi-autobiographical account of some anecdotes from his life. It’s a humorous presentation of some incidents from his life. The book is not much of a literary read, neither it is a blow by blow account of his scientific achievements. But it is a collection of representative moments of the scientist’s life when he was at his wittiest.

So I enjoyed reading his story, though at times his scientific explanations were too technical and therefore, dragging. No, he hasn’t talked much about his scientific theories, but Feynman presumes that an ordinary reader will appreciate his commentaries on matters such as neutron-proton disintegration and the like.

He was a man of many talents. He was a curious person who would try his hand at anything, for instance, writing a book. He successfully took to painting, playing music, breaking locks, learning many languages and lecturing on theology. He was into a few other unrelated fields. He was one of the scientists who worked for the making of the atomic bomb, a disgraceful invention against humanity. He does not show any kind of remorse at the monstrous development, even after it was used, though he mentions one scientist, named Bob Wilson who says, “It’s a terrible thing that we made.” And Feynman says, “But you started it. You got us into it.”

He interacted with the greatest names of those days in science and drops their names liberally – Einstein. Oppenheimer, Neil Bohr, Gell-Mann, and Sudarshan and Marshak. I didn’t know who Sudarshan was, though he was undoubtedly an Indian. So I googled to find that E. C. George Sudarshan is an Indian Physicist who was a professor at the University of Texas. He is the originator (along with Robert Marshak) of the V-A Theory which was later propagated by Feynman. I learned, regretfully, that Sudarshan was passed over TWICE for the Nobel Prize and at both times he was the originator over which other scientists worked and took their share. (Feynman is not among those others here, though he also developed on Sudarshan’s V-A theory, but he acknowledged the Indian scientist’s contribution.)