Rating: 
Summary: different but in a way too different
Review: I found this book to be complicating as it jumped from subject to subject. It wasnt really that informative. It gave out the authors personal information and feelings rather than actual facts. I guess it was something that one with the same mind frame as him could relate to. I had to read this book for school. I got nothing out of it, except the ignorant and close minded thoughts of the author. The grammar was also terrribe. It wasnt written in a way that one could follow. I had to use my imagination to kind of figure out the authors feelings of whatever he was talking. It was written in a way as if he was actually talking to in person rather than through a book. But I do have to say that it was different. I guess if you are into and study science it is the book for you. But its not really a book to learn from. Instead its more like a book to say "Oh! I feel that way too." To conclude, I dont know what to say to those of you who are into science, but to those of you who do not have much of an interest in it i would reccomend that you choose another book.
Rating: 
Summary: Science made fun from a renegade physicist
Review: I judge this collection on its own merits as I have not read other collections of Feynman's writings. For non scientists, this book is enlightening. Lest you think that one of the most famous physicists of the century was a dull, scholarly guy, you'd be well off the mark. These essays give terrific insight into an extraordinary mind -- some of the essays trace how his father (not a scientist by trade, but certainly possessing a spirit of scientific inquiry) talked to him as a small boy and encouraged him to find out more about the world around him. Others give us the silly side of Feynman: while he and his colleagues were slaving away at Los Alamos to solve the problem of developing a nuclear bomb, he found time to devote a whole separate hobby of breaking into safes and locked cabinets. Even in these seemingly inconsequential anecdotes, the reader sees how a brilliant scientist pursues his various quests. He sounds positively elfish and was never afraid to speak his mind as we see in his most non personal essay in this collection about the cause of the Challenger Disaster -- he basically points out how unscientific the engineering was and why it was not all that surprising that it crashed because of the methodology used in the process.The only slight personal disappointment comes in his personal side, or lack thereof. He mentions his wife only a few times, and she dies almost in a footnote -- it made Feynman seem somewhat heartless, but let's assume that part of the problem had to do with the essay selection. These essays are fascinating both for their explanation of scientific genius and for their historical scope that sweeps through many of the most important discoveries of the century. Highly recommended.
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointment
Review: I just finished this book, and I must say I'm not at all impressed. Feynman's reputation as a scientist is well deserved, there's no doubt about that. But there's no evidence of his great intellect in these writings. The lecture on science education is particularly bad, in my opinion; it meanders back and forth, failing to make any kind of coherent argument. When Feynman apologizes at the end of the lecture for not having thought in advance about its content, he's not being modest ! The two chapters on computation and nano-technology are interesting, but they didn't really add anything to my (limited) understanding of these topics. Only Feynman's recollection of his time on the Manhattan project held my attention; I was disappointed to find that he completely avoids any discussion of the moral aspects of his work on the bomb (in a later chapter, on the other hand, he makes the eyebrow-raising point that science has *nothing* to tell us about moral behaviour). Overall, I'd give this a miss. Feyman's science books are certainly worth a read, but this one sent me to sleep.
Rating: 
Summary: The best overview of Feynman's thinking
Review: I recommend this book to people who have never read Feynman before, and to those people who only know Feynman's funny stories. This book is a good overview of Feynman's thinking and not merely a collection of his humorous anecdotes. If you have read many of his other works and you are expecting a great amount of new material, then this book will probably be a disappointment. However, if you are only marginally familiar with Feynman or not familiar at all with him, I highly recommend it. I believe some of the less than stellar reviews found here were written by Feynman fans who thought this book contained lots of new material. They are correct claiming there is not a lot of new material here for the well-read Feynman fan. However, for the unfamiliar who doesn't want to read everything he wrote, I believe this is the book to get. If you are interested more in his humorous storytelling, as opposed to his ideas, then I recommend 'Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman' instead of this book.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliance and charm: Feynman as a teacher
Review: I very much enjoyed this entertaining and delightful collection of lectures, talks and essays by the world-renown and sorely missed Professor Feynman, Nobel Prize winning physicist, idiosyncratic genius and one of the great men of the twentieth century. I particularly enjoyed the subtle yet unmistakable way he scolded the people at NASA for putting their political butts before the safety of the space program they were managing in his famous "Minority Report to the Space Shuttle Challenger Inquiry." But the chapter that really sold me on Richard P. Feynman, boy wonder grown up, was "It's as Simple as One, Two, Three" in which he explores the ability to do two things at once through an experiment with counting. Such a delight he took in learning as a kid from his friend Bernie that we sometimes think in pictures and not in words. And then the further delight he took in learning that some people count with their inner voice (himself), and others (his friend John Tukey) count by visualization. I was also loved the chapter, "What is Science?", a talk to science teachers in which Feynman demonstrates that the real difference between science and other ways of "knowing" (e.g., religion) is the ability to doubt. In science we learn, as Feyman said he himself learned, to live with doubt. But in the religious way of "knowing" doubt is intolerable. Feynman gives an evolutionary illustration of why doubt is essential. He begins with the "intelligent" animals "which can learn something from experience (like cats)." At this stage, he says, each animal learned "from its own experience." Then came some animals that could learn more rapidly and from the experience of others by watching. Then came something "completely new...things could be learned by one animal, passed on to another, and another, fast enough that...[the knowledge] was not lost to the race...," and could be passed on to a new generation. Now, let's stop for a moment. What a great teacher does--and here and elsewhere Feynman proves himself to be a great teacher (although he said he doubted that!)--is to guide the student just enough so that the student arrives at or anticipates the point of the lesson before the teacher gets there. What is the punch line of this lesson for the science teachers? Namely this: with the passing of knowledge from one generation to the next it became also possible to pass on false knowledge or "mistaken ideas." Feynman calls this a "disease." "Then a way of avoiding the disease was discovered. This is to doubt that what is being passed from the past is in fact true, and to try to find out ab initio, again from experience, what the situation is, rather than trusting the experience of the past..." In other words, don't blindly accept the word of authority. Test it for yourself! And this is what science does. It tests and it tests again, and it doubts and it doubts--always. I loved this because one of my dictums is "always guide the experts"--the lawyer, the doctor, the insurance adjustor, et al. Always guide them because, although they are the experts, you're the one who really cares. To this I can now add that you should also doubt the experts because even though they are experts they can be wrong. And, as Feynman showed in his report on the Challenge disaster, they can be wrong for reasons that have nothing to do with their expertise. I also liked the commencement address he gave at Caltech on "Cargo Cult Science...and How to Not Fool Yourself." We fool ourselves a lot. The managers at NASA fooled themselves; what's their names of cold fusion delusion fame fooled themselves. Feynman has noted that he has fooled himself. Science, he avers, is a tool to help us to not fool ourselves. He is profoundly right. Without science we would go on fooling ourselves with all sorts of mumbo-jumbo, "revealed" religiosity and scientific-seeming stuff such as Rhine's ESP experiments some years ago at Duke, the entire litany of New Age pseudobabblese, and--yes!--such stuff as the amazing Cargo Cult Science in which some Pacific Islanders, in an attempt to attract the big birds of the sky with their cargoes of goodies, built "nests," that is, landing fields with empty cargo boxes, and faux towers, etc. in the hope that the planes flying overhead would see them and land on their island. Feynman has taken this as an example of pseudoscience, that is, behavior in the form of science without the substance of science, without the "integrity" of science. The integrity of science, Feynman advised the graduates, demands that all the information about the experiment be given, even detrimental facts. Feynman contrasts this idea with that of advertizing in which only that which makes the product look good is given. When reading this book it helps to imagine that one is listening to Feynman speak. The text includes repetitions and the omissions which he no doubt conveyed with his voice, expression or gesture. When one reads him this way, some of Feynman's endearing charm and the gentle, self-effacing humor for which he is famous comes through. Here's a joke from pages 206-207: He is at Esalen in a hot bath with another man and a girl. The man begins to massage the girl's foot. He feels something in her big toe. He asks his instructor, "Is that the pituitary?" The girl says, "No, that's not the way it feels." Feynman injects, "You're a hell of a long way from the pituitary, man." And they both look at him. "I had blown my cover, you see--and she said, It's reflexology. So I closed my eyes and appeared to be meditating." Yes, Feynman is a long way from reflexology.
Rating:
Summary: Slightly Disapppointed
Review: I was only slightly disappointed in reading this book because the subject is such a famous physicist that some of the pieces seemed lacking in a coherent comprehensiveness and detail. They were more anecdotal and disjointed, all in all, not a whole story, as I might have liked. This does not detract from the book at face value, which reads great and, at that level, is a wonderful book. Other books attempting similar things, however, are much more detailed and read with full plots-- Sobel's Galileo's Daughter and the Zoland book Nabokov's Blues. But perhaps what the editor preferred here was something more general and disjointed since the subject is a celebrity anyway. I did not find this a problem once I realized what the book seemed to be attempting; I think I got spoiled by reading other scientific "biographies" with a real plot. Yet, for anecdotal charm, wit, and poignancy relative to some of the problems of our times-- like Challenger and all it symbolized for America-- this book still hits hard.
Rating:
Summary: Read Feynman as he speaks his mind out
Review: If you want to immerse yourself in the human side of the great Richard Feynman without having to struggle with a book full of equations, then this book is for you. As the subtitle of the book suggests, this book is a compilation of short works by Richard Feynman. Most of them are transcriptions of public talks and interviews, some other are short essays and one of them is the famous report he made after participating in the committee that investigated the reasons behind the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle. Throughout the book you learn how much of an influence his father (who was a simple uniforms salesman) was on Feynman's deeply scientific mind as well as on his irreverent attitude towards authority. Standing out among the many chapters is 'Los Alamos from Below', in which he talks about the whole experience of being part of the Manhattan project. From the moment in which he was invited to participate in the project, all the way to his analysis of the morality of creating the atomic bomb, years after it was completed. In this chapter you also learn about his infamous ability to crack safes. My favorite passage is where he describes what science is to a group of science teachers. I love the way he explains how the human ability to learn from others experience and to pass this knowledge from one generation to the next is both a blessing and a curse of our species, and why science is the cure for it. After reading this book, you really end up with a clear idea of why Richard Feynman is one of the most revered scientists of the twentieth century.
Rating: 
Summary: Rutherford, Retherford, what's the difference?
Review: Most of these articles are in print already. I have only lightly skimmed a few of them. I hadn't previously seen the Omni interview, which described how the discovery of the Lamb effect in 1947 spurred Feynman to finish his formulation of QED. The interview has Feynman saying that the measurements were done by Lamb and Rutherford, and the biographical footnote on the page correctly dates Rutherford's death in 1937. (Rutherford discovered the atomic nucleus in 1911 when he noticed alpha particles scattering backwards from atoms instead of going through as everyone would have assumed.) For some reason, the editor didn't catch the inconsistency (the co-discoverer was actually Retherford, not Rutherford). There are other indications of editorial sloppiness, such as the editor's statement in the preface that light is slowed down in glass or water by a fraction of a percent (compared to the speed in vacuum). It's more like 30 percent, as anyone who has taken high school physics may remember. I think Feynman deserves better -- the editor should have run this book by a physicist before publishing it.
Rating:
Summary: Feynman walks with integrity through the ether and the real
Review: Mr. Feynman refers to the work that merited his Nobel Prize as an example of the "swindle" that is science. He is neither displaying false modesty nor disrespect for his own work. Simply, in his usual, colorful language, he reminds us that even though we may bring the best in rigor to science, we still must admit that we Know nothing. In fact, Mr. Feyman states in various speeches that he is content "not knowing", settling for the space between the absolutes of truth and falsity. That said, of course he has contributed major work to our understanding of how the world works. Yet he did this without the distorting bias for discovering the specific fundamental meaning and composition of life. We discover what we discover. If it is not what we expect or theorize, then nothing is lost, even if the discovery has no practical use. There is still beauty there -- in seeing one more thing about the world in which we live. This is the integrity Mr. Feynman brings in these essays. He was a man who doggedly worked out critical problems, but who at the same time had the sense to be humble in the face of the universe and infinity. If you want a practical expression of this, consider the Challenger incident. Respectfully disagreeing with a previous reviewer, I think that his essay on the Challenger incident was perhaps his most accessible. Mr. Feynman speaks in human and prophetic terms as he explains that experiments demand honest controls if they are to become reference points or that declaring a system "safe" using the "it worked o.k. before" criterion is not good science. Integrity, Brilliance, Humility, and Humour are on marvelous display in this series of essays. Nature demands these elements in our approach to understand, because the truth of nature can not be avoided, cheated,or taken lightly. Humour should perhaps be considered as the backdrop, because we should be ready at any one moment to stop and laugh at the folly of our human understanding in the context of the universe(s?)
Rating:
Summary: Like Astaire, Feynman makes it look easy
Review: Over in English departments they like to say that, 'For every difficult question, there's a simple answer. And it's wrong.' Not true for physics. We derive our common sense from the things around us--if the laws we use to describe the world strike us as any more complicated that their phenomenon, we should be suspicious. Feynman's physics always inspires me with the same simplicity as I find in the world--it's a joy to read. Just because it's simple, though, shouldn't make you doubt his intellect. The great dancers always make it look easy, too. His chapters on computation, for instance, are the grist for the yet-to-be tested quantum computer, still very much on the cusp of QM. Presented here for anyone to understand. If beautiful physics carries a sort of necessity, this thing has got to be built.
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