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A review by hayesall
The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman by Jeffrey Robbins, Freeman Dyson, Richard P. Feynman
2.0
Expectation: fun musings on science. Reality: Richard Feynman must have been an absolute nightmare to work with.
On the surface most of the stories seem lighthearted, or quirky, or have an air of "I'm just having fun figuring out how physics works." But from the first story up until the end there were little digs of maybe Feynman had some brilliant ideas about physics, computing, and nanotechnology; but didn't have a great filter to know when to stop talking. He kept slipping in little observations he had, like: "wow who knew women were capable of understanding geometry", or "there should only be one programming language," or "I routinely vandalized my colleagues' offices."
I'm pretty far separated from the 1950s - 1980s when Feynman was giving many of these as speeches, and it's nearly impossible to fairly assess tone when translating the spoken word to the written word (plus it doesn't appear that he even had a hand in putting this book together); but there's quite a bit of this that doesn't feel like it holds up well. Hopefully I just got unlucky on the first of his popular works that I picked up, and the others are better.
When the stories stuck to "how to rationally move from observation to conclusions" (i.e. the scientific method) his musings were pretty solid. The chapter on the Challenger disaster was a tragic reminder of what happens when too much emphasis is placed on a precedent of things not going wrong in the past (Sharon Bertsch McGrayne wrote in chapter seven of The Theory That Would Not Die that something similar occurred with nuclear weapons accidentally discharging, and credits Albert Madansky as possibly preventing further accidents with a "there's always a first time approach" to the chances of catastrophe. In a complementary direction, Amanda Ripley suggested in The Unthinkable that people exhibit a "normalcy bias" and tend to assume that disasters will not occur in the future so long as they don't occur today).
On the surface most of the stories seem lighthearted, or quirky, or have an air of "I'm just having fun figuring out how physics works." But from the first story up until the end there were little digs of maybe Feynman had some brilliant ideas about physics, computing, and nanotechnology; but didn't have a great filter to know when to stop talking. He kept slipping in little observations he had, like: "wow who knew women were capable of understanding geometry", or "there should only be one programming language," or "I routinely vandalized my colleagues' offices."
I'm pretty far separated from the 1950s - 1980s when Feynman was giving many of these as speeches, and it's nearly impossible to fairly assess tone when translating the spoken word to the written word (plus it doesn't appear that he even had a hand in putting this book together); but there's quite a bit of this that doesn't feel like it holds up well. Hopefully I just got unlucky on the first of his popular works that I picked up, and the others are better.
When the stories stuck to "how to rationally move from observation to conclusions" (i.e. the scientific method) his musings were pretty solid. The chapter on the Challenger disaster was a tragic reminder of what happens when too much emphasis is placed on a precedent of things not going wrong in the past (Sharon Bertsch McGrayne wrote in chapter seven of The Theory That Would Not Die that something similar occurred with nuclear weapons accidentally discharging, and credits Albert Madansky as possibly preventing further accidents with a "there's always a first time approach" to the chances of catastrophe. In a complementary direction, Amanda Ripley suggested in The Unthinkable that people exhibit a "normalcy bias" and tend to assume that disasters will not occur in the future so long as they don't occur today).