The Pleasure Of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman, by Richard P. Feynman

I am not sure when exactly I became a fan of Richard P. Feynman. I was but a small child when he spoke up about the managerial failures of the American Space Shuttle program that led to the Challenger Disaster, which I observed personally as a small child growing up in Florida before entering kindergarten (one of my earliest memories, in fact). As a teenager, I read what he considered to be his strange diagrams in a book that was designed to make physics a less daunting subject, and I was pleased and impressed with his efforts to popularize what are often viewed to be esoteric and irrelevant sciences. This book, in providing a lot of small writings by Richard Feynman, also manages to provide a lot of information about the man. Part of this was because the man himself appears to be remarkably candid and honest about himself and about aspects of his life–including his enjoyment of the night life of Las Vegas and his fondness for safecracking as well as his general skeptical approach–that may not be viewed by all people (myself included) as praiseworthy. Yet this honesty and candor allows one to read what the author has to say with less offense than would be the case had the author sought to hide his views or his less praiseworthy aspects behind a cloud of lies and denials.

For those who are less familiar with the life of Feynman than I am, the man lived an almost impossibly exciting life, for which he was well rewarded in a variety of ways. Immediately after finishing his doctoral degree in physics, he worked in the Manhattan Project and played a role in the development of the atomic bomb even as his first wife was dying of TB. He won the Nobel Prize for work in solving some of the concerns of quantum physics in making it easier to test and calculate results in a collaboration with two other physicists who had different approaches to his own that all led to the same ends. He served, as mentioned, as a public ambassador of physics to the general public, where he was a frequent guest on television shows as a popular scientist with a common touch. This book contains a great deal of writings, many of which are related to the broader aspects of Feynman’s life, including his family background, where he gives a great deal of praise to his father for encouraging his love of science, even if his father was a uniform salesman and not a scientist himself. Other aspects of Feynman’s life concern his modest efforts at explaining his views of the philosophy of science and the problematic nature of morality in the pursuit of science. Feynman’s modesty, indeed, is one of the most notable and appealing aspects of his approach to writing and speaking and gained him a great many fans. Such popularity was well-earned.

In terms of its contents, this book is a bit more than 250 pages long and consists of 13 essays, most of which (but not all of which) have been previously published. The book begins with a foreword by Freeman Dyson, that shows Feynman as his mentor, and this is followed by the editor’s introduction to the work that follows. The titular essay begins the work, an essay that expresses the joy that people find in scientific endeavors in finding things out, in investigating and experimenting (1). After this the author gives some striking and even prophetic discussion about computing machines in the future, including a glance towards nanotechnology (2). This is followed by a look at Los Alamos and the development of the atomic bomb during World War II from the point of view of a low-ranking scientist there (3). After that the author discusses the role and problem of scientific culture in the contemporary world (4). A humorously titled essay provides another example of the author’s thinking about miniaturization and nanotechnology (5), after which the author opines on the value of science (6). This is followed by Feynman’s historic and pointed minority report on the inquiry after the Challenger disaster (7). This is followed by a philosophical essay where Feynman asks “what is science?” (8) as well as a discussion of the smartest man in the world (9). The author has some wise comments to make about cargo cult science (10) and the perils of pseudoscience, which are often to be found in the social sciences, after which the author discusses simplicity (11). Feynman writes about the universe (12) and then comments on the thorny issue of the relationship between science and religion (13), after which the book ends with acknowledgements and an index.