Book Review(s): Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman & What Do You Care What Other People Think?

I'm reviewing these two works together as "What Do You Care" is essentially an extension of "Surely You're Joking".  Both are written in the same style and contain the same themes.

If you're not familiar with Richard Feynman a brief primer on him is as follows--a NYC born and bread theoretical physicist he was a major participant in the Manhattan project and went on to win the Nobel prize along with rubbing shoulders as an intellectual equal with Einstein, Oppenheimer, Bethe, Bohr and others.  He has become well known in popular culture due to his participation in the Challenger disaster investigation as well as his decidedly non-traditional scientist personality.

The books are all told in first person by Feynman himself as he recounts in numerous short vignettes various occurrences in his life that shed light on his various viewpoints.  In truth all these viewpoints all support his main viewpoint--which is that in virtually all circumstances the perceived correct way to do things is wrong and that people do not often enough question authority or make their own path.  In this aspect the title the second work "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" more closely sums up the overarching themes than anything else.

I also found "What Do You Care" to be the stronger of the two works.  The short vignettes become largely forgettable after a while as they skip from one moment in his life to the next.  You get an overall feeling as to his irreverence and brilliance (sometimes wandering into inflated egotism) but they don't carry a great deal of weight as they involve mundane things like how he picked up on various women or played the bongos in plays or learned to pick locks/crack safes--all interesting occurrences in their own right but not anything that stays with you emotionally besides your realization that Mr. Feynman was a really unique character, memorable for reasons besides just his massive intelligence and impact on our understanding of the fundamental functioning of the universe.

"What Do You Care" contains an extended section on Feynman's involvement with the Challenger investigation and this is the most valuable part of the books.  Here we see Feynman at his best--not dealing with trivial matters but in focusing his abilities and stubbornness at a single complex issue.  he cuts through the bureaucracy and politics involved in finding the blame for its catastrophic failure.  It can be legitimately be said that if he wasn't involved in the investigation that its cause would likely have gone unpublished.

If I had one of the two to recommend it would then be "What Do You Care" though both are worth consuming for their the mindset that they convey--question everything, make your own path and don't give a fuck what anyone else thinks.

Book Review: The First War of Physics--The Secret History of the Atom Bomb 1939-1949

Been a bit since I've posted anything--holiday season and all so we'll start off slow.

The above titled book by Jim Baggot is no lightweight coming in at nearly 600 pages. Baggot has generally kept the scope of his writing to Physics related topics such as the Higgs Boson, Quantum Theory and other modern topics.  TFWOP reaches back some 70+ years to cover the creation of the first atomic and hydrogen bombs.

The scientists that take part in this story read like a laundry list of Nobel Prize winners including Einstein, Fermi, Bohr, Teller, Heisenberg, Feynman, Oppenheimer, etc., etc. and the book covers them all in one respect or another.  If you are looking for an in depth examination of the Manhattan Project or of the Russian intelligence program that stole many of the US developed "secrets" or of the military history behind the use of these weapons, or a detailed scientific treatise on the physics behind the bombs--that's not what this work is.

What Baggot achieves here is a broad overview of the worldwide effort towards the development and use of atomic weapons during this period.  You get the Germans who were off to an early start but fell behind for numerous (and readily debatable) reasons, you get the Russians playing catch-up with the Americans via their communist sympathizers in the States and England, you get England who had a well developed program but without the necessary resources and you get the US who is the beneficiary of massive industrial scale, and a combination of its own scientists and the flight of brilliant European theoreticians due to Hitler's policies.

In essence you get a primer on all four of the major atomic efforts at this time and a look at why each one succeeded or failed and their influence, either direct or indirect on one another.  There is enough here to satisfy the "spy enthusiast" involving secret missions of sabotage and assassination as well as the amateur physics buff with "lensing" discussions, stories behind the discovery of the various elements and their isotopes and the trial and error development of how to achieve a supercritical mass.

I feel vastly more knowledgeable about the events that went on to largely shape our modern world over the following half century or more than I was before reading this book.  Most impressive to me is that all of the work attributed to these scientists was done wholly without the benefit of modern computing power.  All theories, formulas, calculations, experiments, monitoring, and measurements were done with what we would view as archaic devices and methods, doing things by hand that we would task to an electronic device today.  That they were able to develop these devices in such an environment is astonishing--and this book should leave the reader with the appropriate sense of awe over just what the force of the human mind can accomplish.