Richard Feynman has been one of my heroes, ever since the end of my freshman year at Harvard. After my last final exam, but before I headed home for the summer, I was able to sit in the beautiful Lowell House library, without any obligations, and just read chapters from his wonderful Lectures on Physics. After that there wasn’t much doubt in my mind about what I wanted to do with my life.
There’s a lot to say about Feynman, but I will restrict myself for now to a couple rather recent items which give a picture of the character of this remarkable man. First, there is this 1981 BBC Interview, recently released to the web, where you can see him briefly discuss a few of the things that were important to him.
Secondly, if you haven’t read Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From the Beaten Track, the collection of his letters edited by his daughter Michelle Feynman that was published in 2005, you owe it to yourself to do so. I was skeptical at first that a book of letters, even those of Feynman, could be very interesting, but I wound up reading every word.
Let me just give you one example of a pair of letters from 1964:
Dear Professor Feynman,
Dr Marvin Chester is presently under consideration for promotion to the Associate Professorship in our department. I would be very grateful for a letter from you evaluating his stature as a physicist. May I thank you in advance for your cooperation in this matter.
Sincerely,
D.S Saxon
Chairman
Dick: Sorry to bother you, but we really need this sort of thing.
David S.
Dr. D.S. Saxon, Chairman
Department of Physics
University of California, Los Angeles
Los Angeles, California
Dear David:
This is in answer to your request for a letter evaluating Dr. Marvin Chester’s research contributions and his stature as a physicist.
What’s the matter with you fellows, he has been right there the past few years–can’t you “evaluate” him best yourself? I can’t do much better than the first time you asked me, a few years ago when he was working here, because I haven’t followed his research in detail. At that time, I was very much impressed with his originality, his ablity to carry a theoretical argument to its practical, experimental conclusions, and to design and perform the key experiments. Rarely have I met that combination in such good balance in a student. Was I wrong? How has he been making out?
Sincerely yours,
R.P. Feynman
The above letter stands out in the files of recommendations. After this time, any request for a recommendation by the facility where the scientist was working was refused.
Edit: In the comments below, Shimon Schocken recommends Feynman’s “QED.” I thought of this book after finishing this post. It’s an amazing work. In it, Feynman gives a popular account (you don’t need any physics background to follow it) of his theory of quantum electrodynamics, for which he won the Nobel Prize. But it’s a popular account that makes no compromises in its scientific accuracy. The other books recommended in the comments (“Six Easy Pieces” and “Surely You’re Joking”) are also definitely great books, but “QED” is somehow often overlooked, even though it is the book that Feynman himself recommended to those interested in his work.
Nerd Wisdom 