What Do You Care What Other People Think: Further Adventures of a Curious Character

Front Cover
W. W. Norton & Company, Feb 14, 2011 - Biography & Autobiography - 256 pages

The New York Times best-selling sequel to "Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!"

One of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century, Richard Feynman possessed an unquenchable thirst for adventure and an unparalleled ability to tell the stories of his life. "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" is Feynman’s last literary legacy, prepared with his friend and fellow drummer, Ralph Leighton. Among its many tales—some funny, others intensely moving—we meet Feynman’s first wife, Arlene, who taught him of love’s irreducible mystery as she lay dying in a hospital bed while he worked nearby on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos. We are also given a fascinating narrative of the investigation of the space shuttle Challenger’s explosion in 1986, and we relive the moment when Feynman revealed the disaster’s cause by an elegant experiment: dropping a ring of rubber into a glass of cold water and pulling it out, misshapen. 
 

Contents

Preface
EPILOGUE
The Making of a Scientist
What Do You Care What Other People Think?
Its as Simple as One Two Three
Getting Ahead
Who the Hell Is Herman?
Just Shook His Hand Can You Believe
Check Six
Gumshoes
Fantastic Figures
An Inflamed Appendix
The Tenth Recommendation
Meet the Press
Afterthoughts
Personal Observations on the Reliability of the Shuttle

Letters
Preliminaries
The Cold Facts
Preface
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2011)

Richard P. Feynman (1918–1988) was a professor at Cornell University and CalTech and received the Nobel Prize for physics in 1965. In 1986 he served with distinction on the Rogers Commission investigating the space shuttle Challenger disaster.

Ralph Leighton lives in northern California.

Bibliographic information