书名：Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman别逗了，费曼先生
作者：Richard P. Feynman；Ralph Leighton
出版社名称：Vintage
出版时间：1992
语种：英文
ISBN：9780099173311
商品尺寸：12.9 x 2.3 x 19.8 cm
包装：平装
页数：352（以实物为准）
Winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1965, Richard Feynman was one of the world's greatest theoretical physicists, but he was also a man who fell, often jumped, into adventure. An artist, safecracker, practical joker and storyteller, Feynman's life was a series of combustoble combinations made possible by his unique mixture of high intelligence, unquenchable curiosity and eternal scepticism. Over a period of years, Feynman's conversations with his friend Ralph Leighton were first taped and then set down as they appear here, little changed from their spoken form, giving a wise, funny, passionate and totally honest self-portrait of one of the greatest men of our age.
Review
"There are two types of genius. Ordinary geniuses do great things, but they leave you room to believe that you could do the same if only you worked hard enough. Then there are magicians, and you can have no idea how they do it. Feynman was a magician" (Hans Bethe, theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate)
"A storyteller in the tradition of Mark Twain. He proves once again that it is possible to laugh out loud and scratch your head at the same time"(New York Times Book Review)
"Quintessential Feynman - funny, brilliant, bawdy...enormously entertaining" (New Yorker)
"Buzzes with energy, anecdote and life. It almost makes you want to become a physicist" (Science Digest)
本书仅仅是稍微触及了他的人生根本：科学。我们在这里或那里，能够看到，作为背景材料，科学只是一笔带过，而不是作为他的人生焦点来处理的，但他一代一代的学生和同事，都知道科学在他的生活中的分量。或许本书也只能这样来写，要把关于他和他的工作的那些爽人心神的故事组织起来，或许也真的没有办法：挑战与挫折，得到慧见时的兴奋，科学的理解带来的深深的喜悦，这才是他的人生快乐之源。
Richard P. Feynman (1918-1988) was one of this century's most brilliant theoretical physicists and original thinkers. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1965 for his work on QED. Books by Feynman in Penguin include The Character of Physical Law, Six Easy Pieces and Six Not-So-Easy Pieces.
To build the lamp bank I went down to the five-and-ten and got some sockets you can screw down w a wooden base, and connected them with pieces of bell wire. By making different combinations of switches—in series or parallel—I knew I could get different voltages. But what I hadn’t realized was that a bulb’s resistance depends on its temperature, so the results of my calculations weren’t the same as the stuff that came out of the circuit. But it was all right, and when the bulbs were in series, all half- lit, they would gloooooooooow, very pretty— it was great!
I had a fuse in the system so if I shorted anything, the fuse would blow. Now I had to have a fuse that was weaker than the fuse in the house, so I made my own fuses by taking tin foil and wrapping it around an old burrn-ow fuse. Across my fuse I had a five-watt bulb, so when my fuse blew, the load from the trickle charger that was always charging the storage battery would light up the bulb. The bulb was on the switchboard behind a piece of brown candy paper (it looks red when a light’s behind it)—so if something went off, I’d look up to the switchboard and there would be a big red spot where the fuse went. It was Jim!
I enjoyed radios. I started with a crystal set that I bought at the sore, and I used to listen (oil at night in bed while I was going to sleep, through a pair of earphones. When my mother and father went out until late at night, they would come into my room and take the eatphones off—and worry about what was going into my head while I was asleep.
About that time I invented a burglar alarm, which was a very simple-minded thing: it was just a big battery and a bell connected with some wire. When the door to my room opened, it pushed the wire against the battery and closed the circuit, and the bell would go off.
One night my mother and father came home from a night out and very, very quietly, so as not to disturb the child, opened the door to come into my room to take my earphones off. All of a sudden this tremendous bell went off with a helluva racket— BONG BONG BONG BONG BONG!!? I jumped out of bed yelling, “It worked! It worked!”
I had a Ford coil—a spark coil from an automobile—and I had the spark terminals at the top of my switchboard. I would put a Raytheon RH tube, which had argon gas in it, across the terminals, and the spark would make a purple glow inside the vacuum—it was just great!
