The Pleasure Of Finding Things OutThe Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman

Interviews, lectures and speeches from the 1965 winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics.
For most folks, winning the Nobel Prize is a life-altering event. For renowned physicist and iconoclast Feynman, it was no great shakes. “I don’t see that it makes any point that someone in the Swedish Academy decides that this work is noble enough to receive a prize,” Feynman once told the BBC. “I’ve already got the prize. It’s the pleasure of finding things out, the kick in the discovery.” Feynman, who died in 1988, won the award in 1965 for his research in quantum electrodynamics. He was at his happiest contemplating scientific conundrums and causing trouble, and there’s much to marvel at in this collection of interviews, lectures and speeches skillfully narrated by television and film actor Dan Cashman.

Among the highlights: Feynman’s historic Minority Report to the Space Shuttle Challenger Inquiry, his ponderings on the role of scientific culture in modern society and his account of working on the atomic bomb. As a young grad student, he participated in the Manhattan Project, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Robert Oppenheimer and Niels Bohr, cracking safes and rattling the security guards by exiting the premises, then sneaking back in through a hole in the fence. Cashman’s resonant voice and conversational style make this audio book easy to listen to, even if the material was at times quantum leaps over my head.