Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track (1 of 5 free samples)

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COPYRIGHT
Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track by Richard P. Feynman. Copyright 2005 by Michelle Feynman and Carl Feynman.
All Rights Reserved. Sharing not permitted.

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PERFECTLY REASONABLE DEVIATIONS FROM THE BEATEN TRACK
The Letters of Richard P. Feynman

Edited and with Additional Commentary by Michelle Feynman

Foreword by Timothy Ferris

For my parents, Richard and Gweneth

For my nieces, Rachel and Emma, and my children, Ava and Marco, so that they may better know their grandfather

FOREWORD
http://www.dailylit.com/books/perfectly-reasonable-deviations-from-the-beaten-track/foreword


INTRODUCTION

GENIUS TO YOU, FATHER TO ME: MY LIFE WITH RICHARD P. FEYNMAN

When I was very young, I thought my father knew everything. Indeed, Omni magazine once declared him "The Smartest Man in the World." Upon hearing this, his mother, who was immensely proud of her son--and who had a great sense of humor--threw up her hands and exclaimed, "If Richard is the smartest man in the world, God help the world!" My father was the first one to laugh.

As I grew older, I began to see only what my father didnÂ't know, and soon thought I knew everything. He would ask me questions whose answers I found to be painfully obvious, such as, "Hey, Michelle, where do we keep the spoons around here?" I discovered the real truth in my late teens: my father was a wise man with a tremendous appetite for life and aptitude for teaching. He had interesting, often profound ideas about life and the world and was highly engaging to listen to. I was eager to work on this book because I wanted to revisit him. It was fun to spend time with him again. I had no idea, but should not have been surprised, that he would still be teaching me things today.

Here, more objectively, are the basic facts of his life. Richard Phillips Feynman was born in New York City in 1918 and grew up in Far Rockaway, Queens. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an undergraduate, and he received his Ph.D. from Princeton University. In 1942 he married his high school sweetheart, Arline Greenbaum, despite the fact that she was ill with tuberculosis. That same year Richard was asked to join the Manhattan Project; he accepted and went on to become a group leader at Los Alamos, New Mexico. Arline died in 1945. After the war, he became a professor of theoretical physics at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. In 1950 he joined the faculty of the California Institute of Technology and spent the remainder of his career there. He had a brief marriage in the early fifties that did not work out. He married my mother, Gweneth Howarth, in 1960. My brother, Carl, was born in 1962, and I was adopted in 1968.

Though he remained forever ambivalent about it, his most public achievement came in 1965, when he won the Nobel Prize in Physics, sharing it with Julian Schwinger and ShinÂ'ichiro Tomonaga for their independent work in quantum electrodynamics. In 1986, he was again in the public eye, this time working on the commission investigating the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle. He died in 1988 after a long battle with abdominal cancer. It is no surprise to any of us who loved him that his memorial service at Caltech was attended by thousands. Anticipating large crowds on that day, Caltech planned to hold the memorial service twice. Even with such forethought, the auditorium quickly reached capacity both times.

He has been the subject of countless interviews, books, articles, a few stage plays, several documentaries, and one motion picture. He was sought after not only for his scientific achievements but also for his outsized curiosity, his irrepressible love of puzzles, and his embrace of life at large. He was an adventurer who made a hobby of cracking safes while working on the atomic bomb, who played bongo drums for a San Francisco ballet, and who decided to learn to draw in his forties--and became remarkably good at it.

As a result of the admiration people have felt for my father, a great many wonderful and interesting people, treasured friendships, and rare opportunities have come my way. But as with any privilege, being his heir comes with a significant responsibility. My brother and I find ourselves faced with a large demand for all things having to do with Richard P. Feynman, and we strive to balance that demand with maintaining his legacy in a conscientious manner. I hope that this book not only does justice to the spirit in which he worked, but also reveals more of the personality behind his many accomplishments.

For all the Feynman anecdotes that have been bandied about over the years, it is the lesser-known ones that I believe are the most telling. The story of my parentsÂ' courtship, for one, says a great deal about his unusual approach. My mother was from England, and when she met my father she was living in Switzerland, intending to travel around the world working as an au pair. Richard promptly invited her to come to America to work as his maid. She told him she would think about it. He met her again the next day and, fearing that a twenty-four-year-old woman would be put off by such an idea coming from a forty-year-old man, apologized for his impertinent suggestion. But she accepted. Many months later, and with one of my fatherÂ's future collaborators on The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Matt Sands, as the necessary immigration sponsor (the government was naturally suspicious of single men importing women), my mother moved in.

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