The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

"Everything is interesting if you go into it deeply enough" says Richard P. Feynman in "The Smartest Men in the World", one of the many pieces in this collection of Feynman's best short works. Here we see Feynman as he was - a brilliant physicist who consistently rejected authority, wholeheartedly embraced the value of doubt, and whose infectious sense of curiosity infused everything he did. This wide-ranging collection includes uproarious tales of Feynman's early student experiments (with himself, his socks, his typewriter, his fellow students); his youthful experiences on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos during World War II; his famous report on the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster; two seminal lectures on the future of computers and nanotechnology; stories of safecracking and plaguing US censors with talcum powder; and tales of the physicist as a child - how his father delighted in showing him the world, and how he, the young boy, took great pleasure in "finding things out".