Tuesday, April 25, 2006

surely u r joking Mr. Feynman

thats what i have been reading these days before i get to bed... and its been so long
since i blogged anything. Bro asks me over chat .. "i've been looking at ur blog ... nothing
after the kernel thing .." so i say to myself "come on .. !!"
this book is one of the most straightforward (yet amusing) accounts of personal life of a great scientist.
A must read for all researchers.
i was a big fan of Mr. Feynman since the time i was doing undergrad and found one of his
lecture series books in the library. It requires a lot of skill to be able to communicate an idea or a scientifc principle very effectively to a kid. I have no doubt that Feynman is stuffed with these skills.
Not everyone, however knowledgeable, can explain that way.

I had previously read "The Lost lectures of Feynman" ... an absolutely brilliant account of his work
in arriving at equations for the motion paths of planets using little more than high school geometry.
Ofcourse he wasn't awarded the nobel prize for that ... the was awarded for his work in accurately
measuring the influences of protons and neutrons over the motion of electron in an atom .

anyway, coming to this book i was reading these days ... it was written by Feynman himself ..
it has accounts of how he had a lab when he was young , how he used to confuse his classmates and
teachers with his wit, his work at MIT, Cornell, Princeton , in making bomb .. his experiments with
various languages ... etc etc
what inspired me most is his frankness and total focus on whatever he let his hands on (which is
a wide variety of things BTW .. geometry, algebra, almost all branches of physics, drums (yeah !!),
drawing, learning various tongues like portugese, japanese .. oh .. u must read this book ..)