What Do You Care What Other People Think?: Further Adventures of a Curious Character
by Richard P. Feynman
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Book Summary Information
Author: Richard P. FeynmanEditor: Ralph Leighton
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2001-01
ISBN: 0393320928
Number of pages: 256
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Book Reviews of What Do You Care What Other People Think?: Further Adventures of a Curious Character
Book Review: The ordinary genius: serious and romantic edition
Summary: 5 Stars
Feynman's book "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman" is a lot of fun. But fun was not the only thing in Feynman's life. "What Do you Care What Other People Think" is a rather different book.
Don't get me wrong: there are various funny stories in this book, too. And the book also describes various controversies - for example the story in which the silly feminists called Feynman "a sexist pig". Feynman never hesitated to inform morons (especially the pompous fools) that they were morons, and this book is another proof of it. Nevertheless, the main focus of the book is different.
Feynman first talks about his childhood - especially his father who taught him to question the orthodox thinking, and who probably always wanted Richard to become a scientist. On the other hand, Feynman's father was not an intellectual. One of the special features of Feynman is that he was brought up in an ordinary family - not in a family of professors which is unfortunately the case of most professors today.
The second part of the book is very sad and very emotional. It's about his first wife, Arlene. I think that the book will show you how much they loved each other and how big influence Arlene had on Feynman. Well, a problem was that she suffered from tuberculosis. She was dying while Feynman was working on the atomic bomb in Los Alamos. This part of the book could compete with any good fiction - the difference is that this story is real and it happened to one of the most influential physicists of all time. I am sure that you will agree that Feynman's heart was at least as strong as his brain.
However, it's not just a sad love story: Feynman also describes their tricks that they used to send letters to each other (circumventing the censorship in Los Alamos) and other amusing details of this period.
The third portion (about 55%) of the book is dedicated to the commission that investigated the explosion of the Challenger, the space shuttle in 1986. Feynman was always eager to get to the very heart of the matter and he never cared whether he looked "nice" to others. Even Ronald Reagan knew about that, and therefore he personally asked Feynman to serve on the committee (with Neil Armstrong and others).
Feynman did not disappoint and the book reveals the findings in depth - well sometimes the description is too detailed, I would say. It shows how some people in NASA - for example an executive called William Rogers - preferred the image (their personal image as well as the image of NASA) over the truth. You will also learn about many technical details that have led to the explosion. Feynman was thinking differently - unlike the chairman of the commission who thought that everyone should sit in a room and ask the experts, Feynman decided to talk to the engineers. Feynman's analysis is also a critique of the government bureaucracy.
Although NASA was probably a unified force when it sent the first men to the Moon, it became fragmented afterwards, Feynman argues. The engineers estimated the probability of the failure to be about 1:300, while the top bosses were painting an optimistic picture to the Congress that the probability of an explosion was about 1:100,000, and NASA can be both cheap as well as efficient.
Feynman's most visible conclusion is that the space shuttle program may have been a mistake because the public had to be fooled that the project was better than it actually was.
Feynman always believed that the public must be allowed to decide whether they want to fund you and your projects, after you honestly tell them what the project means. Unlike many unrealistic people in the academia who believe that an arbitrary amount of money paid for an arbitrary project in science is a good investment - and that it is always OK to fool the ordinary people to get some money - Feynman understood economics and the workings of the society very well. Moreover, honesty was his primary goal in debates with the laymen.
At the end of the book, Feynman advocates science and its principles. However, you don't need to be trained in physics to understand the book.
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Summary of What Do You Care What Other People Think?: Further Adventures of a Curious Character
The New York Times bestseller: 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 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.
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