What Do You Care What Other People Think? [Audio Book]

Review:

I'm amazed anyone had to ask him that

From the form of the title of Richard Feynman's second collection of lively personal anecdotes, "What Do You Care What Other People Think?", one might wonder if it is some kind of trick title. After all, Feynman is one of the twentieth century's relatively few "personalities" in the physics world and is known for his quirky mannerisms as much as for his Nobel Prize winning quantum theories. Yet the title is a direct quote from his first wife who, it seems, had to remind him periodically to be him.

Like his earlier "Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman!", the present volume covers a variety of observations from Feynman's life. The breadth of topics, however, is not nearly as great as the earlier volume. Two things stand out. The first is a long story of his relationship with his first wife Arlene, from their first meeting to her death. The second is the topic of the entire second half of the book and covers Feynman's time on the Presidential Commission to investigate the Challenger disaster in 1986. Though he is best known for his on-camera low-tech demonstration of the loss of elasticity in O-ring material in cold conditions, his work covered so much more than that. In this section we are presented with the detail-oriented and no-nonsense manner in which his mind worked. Naturally he has as much to say on the subject of Washington bureaucracy as he does on technical investigation. Even now, twenty years later, there's stuff to be learned on the subject for anyone not an aficionado of the subject at that time.

While not quite the dazzling collection of quick stories of the Joking text, What Do You Care is certainly a pleasant addition to the body of Feynman lore and a must-read for fans everywhere.

Audio Download will be updated soon.

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