"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"

The book collects anecdotes Feynman told to Ralph Leighton over several years of drumming sessions, transcribed and edited into short chapters. It runs from his childhood repairing radios in Far Rockaway through Princeton, Los Alamos, Cornell, Caltech, the Brazilian physics teaching year, and the safe-cracking, painting and samba episodes that fill the later sections.

The recurring theme is a refusal to accept authority or convention as evidence. Feynman describes cracking safes at Los Alamos to demonstrate that the security procedures were theatre, testing whether ants navigate by trail by drawing paper bridges, and confronting Brazilian physics education where students could recite definitions but could not describe the phenomena the definitions named. His account of textbook selection for California schools describes committee members rating books nobody had read.

The most useful chapter for a working reader is Cargo Cult Science, the Caltech commencement address included at the end. Feynman argues that scientific integrity requires reporting everything that might make your result wrong, not just what supports it, and that a scientist must lean over backwards to show ways the conclusion could fail. He uses the Millikan oil drop history to show how successive researchers converged slowly on the right value because each was reluctant to depart far from the previous published number.

The book is entertaining rather than reliable. Feynman told these stories repeatedly and improved them, and several accounts have been disputed by other participants. His treatment of women in the bar-pickup chapter and elsewhere has drawn substantial criticism and reads badly now. There is almost no physics in it. Read it for an attitude toward problems, not for history or for science.