The New York Times bestseller: sequel to "Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!" —funny, poignant, instructive. One of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century, Richard Feynman possessed an unquenchable thirst for adventure and an unparalleled ability to tell the stories of his life. "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" is Feynman’s last literary legacy, which he prepared as he struggled with cancer. Among its many tales—some funny, others intensely moving—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. We are also given a fascinating narrative of the investigation of the space shuttle Challenger ’s explosion in 1986, and we relive the moment when Feynman revealed the disaster’s cause by an elegant experiment: dropping a ring of rubber into a glass of cold water and pulling it out, misshapen.

本书出自数学家G.波利亚的手笔，虽然它讨论的是数学中发现和发明的方法和规律，但是对在其他任何领域中怎样进行正确思维都有明显的指导作用。本书围绕“探索法”这一主题，采用明晰动人的散文笔法，阐述了求得一个证明或解出一个未知数的数学方法怎样可以有助于解决任何“推理”性问题——从建造一座桥到猜出一个字谜。一代又一代的读者尝到了本书的甜头，他们在本书的指导下，学会了怎样摒弃不相干的东西，直捣问题的心脏。