Surely You are Joking Mr. Feynman

The Tea Saucer

A woman ladling tea at the Princeton dean's reception in 1939 hands a saucer to a nervous twenty-one-year-old in a too-stiff jacket. The student, just down from MIT and unsure how this whole faculty thing works, asks for both cream and lemon. She laughs at him. "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman!" That sentence will follow him for the next fifty years and end up as a book title. It captures something the book spends three hundred pages arguing without ever saying directly. Feynman has not broken a rule. He has stumbled into a rule he didn't know existed, because nobody told him cream curdles in citric acid, and he'd been thinking about something more interesting than tea.

The gap between what everyone assumes you already know and what you can work out by looking — that is the entire memoir. Compiled in 1985 from taped conversations between Richard Feynman and his bongo partner Ralph Leighton, the book sells itself as the chuckling adventures of a curious character. Feynman won the Nobel Prize in 1965, and you'd hardly know it from these pages. What you get instead is a man who fixed radios at eleven, cracked safes at Los Alamos, taught himself trigonometry from scratch, played samba on a toy frying pan in Rio, and refused, again and again, to be impressed by his own reputation. The book is a quiet argument that genuine curiosity is rarer than genius and more useful.

The Boy Who Fixed Radios by Thinking

Feynman was eleven or twelve when he set up a lab in an old wooden packing box on the porch of the house in Far Rockaway, on the edge of New York near the sea. The equipment was the sort of thing a kid scavenges: a storage battery, a Ford spark coil, a Raytheon argon tube that glowed purple, foil-wrapped fuses he made himself, a five-watt bulb wired as a fuse indicator with brown candy paper turning the light red. He invented a burglar alarm out of a battery, a bell, and a wire on the door. He set a piece of paper on fire by accident, smothered it with a magazine, watched the wind reignite it through the window, hauled the burning paper back inside, and shook the coals out into the alley. Then he told his mother he was going out to play.