52 pages • 1 hour read
Richard FeynmanSurely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1985A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Prefatory Materials (2018 Edition)Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Preface Summary
The preface describes how Ralph Leighton, the co-author of this book, gathered the stories of Richard Feynman’s life. Feynman and Leighton played drums together, and Leighton admired him for his unusual life and the eccentric curiosity with which Feynman approached the world.
Note on Centenary Edition Summary
The 2018 edition of Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! celebrates the 100th anniversary of the physicist’s birth. Though Feynman passed away in 1988, three years after the original publication, Leighton writes that his friend’s spirit and contributions live on, so much so that Leighton has launched a webpage dedicated to the scientist’s life and his work: www.feynman.com.
2018 Introduction Summary
Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft and an icon of the contemporary tech world, offers a short introduction to the 2018 edition, which attests to Gates’s emotional and intellectual attachments to Feynman. Gates says that he “fell” for the physicist by watching films of his lectures that he checked out of a library. Impressed with the physicist’s teaching, Gates reports that he later helped make these lectures available online for free.
Gate’s introduction also highlights several key themes of the book: the power that can come from being a “geek”; how to work well in a group; the importance of a sense of humor; how people build myths about themselves; and how luck, when it is accompanied by wisdom and intellect, can often be a scientist’s greatest asset.
Introduction to Previous Edition Summary
Albert Hibbs provides the Introduction to the 1985 edition, which is reprinted in the 2018 version. Hibbs was a physicist and mathematician who spent the majority of his career working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He was also one of Feynman’s students at the California Institute of Technology. Though Hibbs is a well-known scientist in his own right (and also a qualified astronaut), his introduction emphasizes that Surely You’re Joking is not, primarily, a book about science; it is a book about Feynman’s humanity and the joy that he took in his work.
Vitals Summary
Feynman offers his date of birth, hometown, educational background, occupation, and information about his travels and family life.
Prefatory Materials (2018 Edition) Analysis
The prefatory materials of the 2018 edition speak to both the unusual way the memoir was created and the impact of Feynman’s life and teaching on notable people.
Leighton’s preface signals that this book is not a formal autobiography; rather the stories in the memoir were collected casually and haphazardly. They are reminiscences by Feynman, a spoken record that was transcribed over many years. They are random, even “lucky,” stories that might challenge the reader’s preconceptions of what a scientist is or does. Leighton’s website provides even more access to anecdotes that were not selected for the book.
Though Feynman lived in the pre-internet era, the prefatory materials link the Atomic Age to the Information Age by including an introduction by Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft and one of the world’s most recognizable internet entrepreneurs. Gates builds a connection between the eras by focusing on himself as a “geek” who loves to learn. In many ways self-taught like Feynman, Gates emphasizes an emotional attachment, saying he “fell for” Feynman by watching his lectures on film. Gates lays the groundwork for reading the book as an emotional as well as intellectual memoir, proclaiming Feynman “one of the most interesting characters of his era” (11), a sentiment echoed in Albert Hibbs’s introduction to the 1985 edition, which emphasizes the importance of Feynman’s “delightful stories about himself and his work” (13). Readers are invited to enjoy Feynman’s quirky personality as much as his grand intellect and are assured that even across historical eras and differing backgrounds, they will be able to connect to this “curious character,” as Feynman describes himself in the subtitle of the book.
