The Nature of Genius

Perhaps the most significant purpose of "Surely Your Joking, Mr. Feynman" is to take the reader into the mind of the great physicist, in order to discover, more or less, how it works. While most biographies of highly accomplished people read like three hundred page resumes—focusing on why the person is famous and his or her major accomplishments, this narrative only brushes over these issues. It never even tells us specifically what his Nobel prize is for.

What we end up with is a series of anecdotes that clue us in to the goings on in the mind of a great genius. We learn what he is thinking as he watches gamblers in a casino, or watches ants on his window sill, or travels to a foreign culture. Through incident after incident, we learn how his unceasing thirst for knowledge and "out of...