Hacker News Reader

Feynman was a brilliant man and quite the character. If you haven't read "Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman" I highly recommend you give it a read.

"The title derives from a woman's response at Princeton University when, after she asked the newly arrived Feynman if he wanted cream or lemon in his tea, he absentmindedly requested both." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surely_You%27re_Joking,_Mr._Fe...!

View on HN

I liked that book and highly recommend it, but... by the end I got the impression that Feynmann was intentionally manufacturing interesting anecdotes in his life, not just randomly having all these interesting crazy coincidences happen to him.

Of course he was manufacturing them. He explicitly talks about the art of having an adventure in the book.

There's definitely an art to setting yourself up for suprising and interesting adventures in your life.

For a different source, Freeman Dyson's biography, Disturbing the Universe, is extraordinarily worthwhile. He has crazy Feynman stories too, and Dyson is a very sober witness to the bongo-drum-playing, picking-up-hitchhikers, getting-pulled- over-for-speeding Feynman that comes across in the books.

To be fair, she failed to use an exclusive or ;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com