"What Do You Care What Other People Think?"

Like the "funny, brilliant, bawdy" (The New Yorker) "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" this book's many stories-some funny, others intensely moving-display Richard P. Feynman's unquenchable thirst for adventure and unparalleled ability to recount important moments from his life. Here 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 on the atomic bomb at nearby Los Alamos. We listen to the fascinating narrative of the investigation into the space shuttle Challenger's explosion in 1986 and relive the moment when Feynman revealed the disaster's cause through an elegant experiment: dropping a ring of rubber into a glass of cold water and pulling it out, misshapen. In "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" one of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century lets us see the man behind the genius.

Review

A gentler book [than "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"], and for those interested in the man, a more substantial one.--Bettyann Kevles "Los Angeles Times"

Feynman's voice echoes raw and direct through these pages.--James Gleick "New York Times Book Review"

One final, welcome jolt from Mr. Feynman...There are a great many things for all of us in this book.--Peter Gorner "Chicago Tribune"

One of the greatest minds of the twentieth century...[He] was also stubborn, irreverent, playful, intensely curious and highly original in practically everything he did.-- "New York Review of Books"

There is nothing obtuse or difficult about [this] book. Indeed, Feynman's rendering of such a potentially complex subject as the Challenger disaster is straightforward, lucid, and accessible.-- "San Francisco Chronicle"

About the Author

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.