What Do You Care what Other People Think?: Further Adventures of a Curious Character

Richard Phillips Feynman, Ralph Leighton

Bantam Books, 1989 - Biography & Autobiography - 255 pages

When Richard Feynman, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics, died in February 1988 after a courageous battle with cancer, the "New York Times" called him "the most brilliant, iconoclastic, and influential of the postwar generation of theoretical physicists." Here, in these "further adventures, " a companion volume to "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, " is another healthy dose of Feynman's irreverent zest for life and an even deeper, wiser level of reminiscence. He tells us of his father, who taught him to think, and of his first wife, Arlene, who taught him to love, even as she lay dying. And Feynman takes us behind the scenes of the presidential commission investigating the space shuttle "Challenger's" explosion and to the dramatic moment when the cause of the disaster was revealed simply and elegantly as Feynman dropped a rubber ring into a glass of ice water and pulled it out, misshapen.

Contents

• The Making of a Scientist: 11
• Its as Simple as One Two: 54
• Getting Ahead: 61

About the author

Richard Feynman, an American theoretical physicist, received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1942 and worked at Los Alamos, New Mexico, on the atomic bomb during World War II. From 1945 to 1950, he taught at Cornell University and became professor of theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology in 1950. Feynman made important contributions to quantum electrodynamics (QED) and electromagnetic interactions, such as interactions among electrons. In Feynman's approach, interactions are considered exchanges of virtual particles. For example, Feynman explained the interaction of two electrons as an exchange of virtual photons. Feynman's theory has proved to be accurate in its predictions. In 1965 the Nobel Prize for physics was awarded to three pioneers in quantum electrodynamics: Feynman, Julian Schwinger, and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga. Feynman was an outspoken critic of NASA for its failure to notice flaws in the design of the Challenger space shuttle, which resulted in its tragic explosion.

Bibliographic information

• Title: What Do You Care what Other People Think?: Further Adventures of a Curious Character; Bantam New Age Books
• Authors: Richard Phillips Feynman, Ralph Leighton
• Compiled by: Ralph Leighton
• Publisher: Bantam Books, 1989
• Original from: the University of California
• Digitized: Jan 28, 2011
• ISBN: 0553347845, 9780553347845
• Length: 255 pages
• Subjects: Biography & Autobiography / General; Biography & Autobiography / Science & Technology; Science / General; Self-Help / Personal Growth / Happiness