Where to Start with Richard Feynman: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Richard Feynman — how to approach Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman, his essential memoir of scientific curiosity and adventure. A complete reading guide.
By Elena Marsh
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) was an American theoretical physicist who made fundamental contributions to quantum electrodynamics — work for which he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 — and was also one of the most charismatic and celebrated science communicators of his era. He was a key figure in the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, a beloved professor at Caltech for decades, and a member of the presidential commission that investigated the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (1985) is a collection of his stories, transcribed from recorded conversations with his friend Ralph Leighton.
Where to Start: Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (1985)
The essential Feynman — and one of the most purely entertaining science books ever written. The title comes from a story in which a young Feynman, invited to take tea with the wife of a dean at Princeton, is asked whether he prefers cream or lemon. He asks for both. “Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman!” she says. He isn’t. He simply hadn’t noticed that cream and lemon were mutually exclusive — he had been thinking about something else. The story captures him precisely: absorbed, oblivious to social convention, slightly competitive, and genuinely amused by the result.
The book collects stories across Feynman’s life without systematic chronology. The Los Alamos section is the most famous: Feynman spent his spare time during the Manhattan Project cracking the safes of other scientists’ offices, not to steal anything but because the safes were interesting problems and Feynman could not encounter an interesting problem without needing to solve it. The delight he takes in both the solving and the subsequent bewilderment of his colleagues — physicists who could solve differential equations but had never thought to check their safe combinations — is characteristic. He also discovered that the censor who reviewed outgoing mail at Los Alamos was not checking incoming mail, and spent time reconstructing letters he had sent to his wife that she had already received — just to see if he could.
The Brazil chapter is the book’s most pointed intellectual contribution. Feynman spent time teaching at a Brazilian university and discovered that the physics students could recite formulas flawlessly but could not answer the simplest observational questions — could not identify polarised light, could not tell you what a physics problem described in terms of real objects rather than symbols. They had learned to pass exams without learning any physics. Feynman’s analysis of what had gone wrong — and why the system was producing this result — is one of the most acute critiques of rote education in popular science literature.
The through-line is Feynman’s personality: insatiably curious, allergic to intellectual authority, competitive without being territorial, and genuinely delighted by everything from bongo drums to drawing to Portuguese. His argument by example — that intellectual life is most worth living when you treat every domain as fair game for curiosity — is not made explicitly but is present on every page.
Reading Richard Feynman
Begin with Surely You’re Joking — it is his most accessible and entertaining book. What Do You Care What Other People Think? (1988) is its natural companion: more personal stories including the Challenger investigation. Both standalone.
For the full Richard Feynman bibliography, reviews, and biography, visit the Richard Feynman author page on Editors Reads.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Richard Feynman?
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (1985) is Feynman's essential book — a collection of stories transcribed from recorded conversations, covering his time at Los Alamos, his safe-cracking hobby, his work on the Challenger investigation, his teaching in Brazil, and his many other adventures. One of the most purely entertaining science books ever written, and an irreplaceable portrait of what scientific curiosity actually looks like in practice.
What is Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman about?
Surely You're Joking is a collection of anecdotes from Feynman's life, organized thematically rather than chronologically. It covers the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos; his compulsive safe-cracking as a hobby; his years at Caltech and Cornell; a teaching stint in Brazil where he discovered that physics students could recite formulas but not answer observational questions; his late career as a painter and bongo drummer; and his investigation of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. The through-line is Feynman's personality: insatiably curious, allergic to authority, competitive, and delighted by the universe.
Is Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman a physics book?
Surely You're Joking is not a book about physics — it contains almost no physics. It is a memoir of a physicist's life, and its value is the portrait of a scientific mind in action: how Feynman thought, questioned, played, and refused to accept received wisdom or authority without testing it himself. Readers looking for Feynman's actual physics should read his Lectures on Physics (technical) or QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (popular science) instead.
What should I read after Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman?
After Surely You're Joking, Feynman's What Do You Care What Other People Think? is its natural companion — more personal stories, including his account of the Challenger investigation. James Gleick's Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman is the definitive biography and covers his physics seriously. For the scientific culture at Los Alamos, Richard Rhodes's The Making of the Atomic Bomb covers the Manhattan Project from the historical perspective.
