52 pages • 1 hour read
Richard FeynmanSurely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1985A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Key Figures
Richard Feynman
Born on May 11, 1918, in New York City, Richard Feynman was a physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1965 for his contributions to quantum physics. His father was a Jewish immigrant from Belarus who came to the United States in 1895, and his mother’s parents immigrated from Poland.
Feynman attended high school in the Far Rockaway district of Queens. He gained notoriety for teaching himself trigonometry and calculus by the age of 15 and winning the New York University Math Championship during his senior year. Though Feynman applied to Columbia University, his application was rejected because of a quota Columbia (and many other schools) had for Jewish students. He went on to pursue his undergraduate and graduate degrees at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Princeton University, respectively.
After graduate school, Feynman worked on the Manhattan Project, America’s mission to develop nuclear weapons. And after World War II, he taught physics at Cornell University and the California Institute of Technology. He developed a reputation as a demanding and inspirational teacher as well as a cutting-edge researcher.
Feynman married three times. He wed his high school sweetheart Arlene Greenbaum in 1942; for their entire marriage, Arlene was gravely ill with tuberculosis, to which she succumbed in 1945. He married Mary Louise Bell in 1952, and they divorced in 1958, with Bell citing Feynman’s “extreme cruelty” and violent temper as grounds. And finally, he married Gweneth Howarth, an English woman, in 1962. They had two children and remained married until Feynman’s death on February 15, 1988, from complications of liposarcoma, a rare form of cancer.
Ralph Leighton
Ralph Leighton is the son of Richard Feynman’s Caltech colleague and fellow physicist Robert Leighton. Born in 1949, Ralph is known as a biographer and close friend of Richard Feynman and as a film producer. Leighton collected the anecdotes for Surely You’re Joking during “seven years of very enjoyable drumming with Richard Feynman” (Preface). Leighton also co-wrote with Feynman another memoir, What Do YOU Care What Other People Think?: Further Adventures of a Curious Character, which was published in 1988. Leighton, who also worked as a high school math teacher, also published the book Tuva or Bust (1991), which chronicles his attempts with Feynman to visit the Soviet Republic of Tuva during the late 1980s.
The Leighton/Feynman relationship is analogous to the one between James Boswell and Samuel Johnson in 18th-century Britain. Boswell was the younger contemporary and biographer of the well-known intellectual Johnson. The two developed a close friendship and Boswell’s biography of Johnson, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1791), was one of the first biographies to reproduce quotations and conversations from its subject. The biography is also distinguished by the way it represented Johnson as an idiosyncratic individual rather than a stock character.
John Wheeler
Born July 9, 1911, John Wheeler was a physicist and professor who spent the majority of his career at Princeton University. After graduating from Baltimore City College, he earned his PhD at Johns Hopkins University in 1933. At Princeton, Wheeler served as Feynman’s doctoral advisor. Only seven years older than Feynman, Wheeler served as an intellectual mentor, and Wheeler’s thinking greatly influenced his student. They collaborated on the Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory, a significant advance in quantum physics. Wheeler, who had studied under such eminent figures as Niels Bohr, Karl Herzfeld, and Gregory Breit, serves as an example of how academia fosters the work of subsequent generations through personal contact. Wheeler emphasized teaching, especially to first- and second-year undergraduates, something that may have influenced Feynman’s view of pedagogy.
Wheeler, like Feynman, contributed to the Manhattan Project, and Wheeler went on to work with Edward Teller on the hydrogen, or fusion, bomb, the successor to the atomic bomb. Wheeler popularized the term “black hole” which is now a central concept in physics and astronomy, and he also coined the term “wormhole” which is an important concept in physics as well as in speculative fiction. Wheeler died in 2008, at the age of 96.
Jirayr Zorthian
Born April 14, 1911, Jirayr Zorthian was an Armenian American artist who befriended Feynman in the 1960s. Zorthian earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from Yale University and gained renown during the Great Depression for painting a series of large murals in the Tennessee State Capitol that depict the history of Tennessee.
In the 1960s, Zorthian lived in Altadena, California, not far from the Caltech campus, where his Zorthian Ranch became a gathering place for artists like Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, Andres Segovia, and Charlie Parker. Known in his later years for painting nudes, Zorthian gave art lessons to Feynman and encouraged him to develop his artistic talents. Feynman in turn gave Zorthian lessons in physics, though they appear not to have been nearly as successful. Zorthian represented a lifestyle outside the stereotypically stuffy world of academia. Zorthian died in 2004 at the age of 92.
