Richard Feynman, one of the finest physicists of the 20th century, had an insatiable appetite for adventure and an unrivaled capacity for storytelling. Feynman’s final literary contribution, “What Do You Care What Other People Think?” was written with his drummer friend and collaborator Ralph Leighton. We meet Feynman’s first wife, Arlene, who taught him of love’s irreducible mystery as she lay dying in a hospital bed while he worked nearby on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, among its many tales—some hilarious, others very poignant. We are also given a fascinating account of the investigation into the 1986 explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, and we get to relive the moment when Feynman used a beautiful experiment to determine what caused the catastrophe: he dropped a rubber ring into a glass of cold water and pulled it out with a misshapen shape.
