Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

A Review/Teaser by Milo

As a child, Robert Feynman came up with numerous ideas to entertain himself, such as building things in his "lab" (a small wooden box with shelves in it) and fixing radios. He got very good at the latter, and started a business. He got a lot of customers because it was the depression and he charged less than big radio-fixing companies. When he was in high school, he invented new ways to do a lot of trigonometry. Sometimes, his work was much simpler than the textbooks, sometimes vice versa. He didn't like a lot of the confusing symbols in trigonometry, so he created his own. It backfired, however, when he started explaining something to someone and began to write the problem down using his own symbols, and they had no clue what he was talking about. After that, he switched to standard symbols. When he was seventeen or eighteen, he worked a summer job at his Aunt's hotel, and came up with tons of great ideas for innovation, such as a new way to slice string beans and potatoes, and a way to tell where a call was coming from on the switchboard before he got to the other side of the desk, to save time. He was accepted at MIT, and while there, he was inducted into the Phi Beta Delta fraternity, where social people who didn't get good grades could learn school stuff from studiers, and studiers could learn social stuff like how to dance from the social people. Later, one guy taught Robert how to drive. While at MIT, he enjoyed playing pranks, such as telling everybody that at the lowest point on a French curve, the tangent is always horizontal. Everyone was amazed and impressed, but every curve in the world works like that. In another prank he pulled, he got up at five in the morning and noticed that someone's door was missing. However, that person's room had two doors, so he took the other one. After the original perpetrator was caught, they still couldn't find the door. Eventually, he confessed. After MIT, he got a summer job metal-plating plastic business. There were a grand total of five people working there: The Vice President (an old friend of his), the President (his friend's dad), a salesman, a bottle-washer, and a chief research engineer (him). Their biggest job involved metal-plating plastic pens, and everything worked well at first; but then the pens developed blisters. Everyone picked at them, the plating came off and the company was faced with an emergency problem. The company later folded due to poor management choices. When he came back to MIT for graduate school, Professor Slater said they wouldn't let him back in because he had to see the rest of the world. So he went to Princeton for graduate school. It was incredibly easy for him to make social mistakes, so he didn't have a very good time there at first. During the war, Mr. Feynman had to work on targeting devices for plane guns for a while, but when told to make shells explode at the right time at high altitudes he quit and went back to Princeton. It wasn't long at all before he got back into work on the war, though: he was called into Los Alamos to work on "the bomb." However, when everyone who was working on "the bomb" got to Albuquerque, they discovered that nothing was finished being built. There was supposed to be a fence around the compound, there were supposed to be dormitories, there was supposed to be a lab; none of it was done. Later it was finished, and the bomb was completed. When they tested it, Mr. Feynman and the rest of the workers had to stand twenty miles away and wear dark glasses, and he knew that no one would be able to see anything, so before the bomb went off, he took his glasses off and thus became the only living person to see the atomic bomb blowing up with the naked eye. Despite his thought that that they wouldn't be able to see anything, the bomb blast was blinding. It was also really pretty. After the bomb was finished, Robert got drafted, but didn't pass the physical. They thought he was crazy. He got a "D" for deficient on his psychiatric test. He went to Brazil for a few months and learned to play samba music. He could play the frigideira quite well. He became a teacher, but couldn't decide to work for Cornell or Caltech, because they each kept offering him higher raises than the other. He finally decided on Caltech, because they would give him sabbatical leave and he wanted to go to Brazil again. Almost every summer, he would try to cross the U.S. in his car, but he always got suck somewhere, usually LA. Once, while there, he learned not to gamble by losing five dollars. Over the next years, he solved a beta-decay problem, went to Japan, and became a great artist. He drew a lot of nude women, and they became his favorite thing to draw. What a pervert! After that phase, he got on an education board and had to judge three hundred pounds of schoolbooks that were filled with garbage. He started a second year, but the garbage was no better so he quit. Also, on trip they refused to pay his expenses unless he had a receipt for everything. Then, he won the Nobel Prize. He didn't want it, but he found out that there would be more hassle if he didn't accept it than if he did. He had to go through the whole ceremony, but fortunately the Swedish people had loosened up considerably, so it was bearable. Parts of it were actually fun (!). He got another chance to go to Brazil as the guest of honor, he thought because he had won the Nobel Prize… In fact, it was because the original guest of honor got sick and the Governor panicked. He later resigned because of his decision to invite Mr. Feynman. Finally, in 1988, Robert P. Feynman died at the age of 79. No one can say he didn't lead a long, full, productive life.