Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

by James Gleick

Overview

To his colleagues, Richard Feynman was not so much a genius as he was a full-blown magician: someone who “does things that nobody else could do and that seem completely unexpected.” The path he cleared for twentieth-century physics led from the making of the atomic bomb to a Nobel Prize-winning theory of quantam electrodynamics to his devastating exposé of the Challenger space shuttle disaster. At the same time, the ebullient Feynman established a reputation as an eccentric showman, a master safe cracker and bongo player, and a wizard of seduction.

Now James Gleick, author of the bestselling Chaos, unravels teh dense skein of Feynman‘s thought as well as the paradoxes of his character in a biography—which was nominated for a National Book Award—of outstanding lucidity and compassion.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780679747048
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/02/1993
Edition description:	1st Vintage Books ed
Pages:	560
Product dimensions:	5.22(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.23(d)

About the Author

JAMES GLEICK is our leading chronicler of science and technology, the best-selling author of Chaos: Making a New Science, Isaac Newton, and The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. His books have been translated into thirty languages.

www.around.com

Editorial Reviews

Gleick (Chaos) gives us a major biography of one of science's most endearing figures (except to snobs & frauds). Feynman's brilliance, independence, humanity are readably displayed. His contributions to physics are interpreted for the lay reader. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

"He is a second Dirac," Princeton's Eugene Wigner said, "only this time human." That's only one of the many pithy descriptions that Gleick (Chaos, 1987) quotes in this fine, monumental biography of a monumental figure in 20th-century physics. Readers whose appetites were whetted by the as-told-to collections of anecdotes in the Ralph Leighton books (Tuva or Bust!, 1991, etc.) will find gratification of a different kind here. There are wit and playfulness, yes, but what shines through is Richard Feynman's commitment to probe nature, a restlessness to understand why things happen, and the joy and beauty he felt when science yielded an answer—and that is the key to understanding what drove Feynman throughout his life. That, and a no-nonsense attitude that despised pretension, lofty language, and rote learning. In the post-Sputnik days of educational reform, Feynman was out in front criticizing the new math as utterly useless formalism (unless you could use it to explain to kids different orders of infinity). While Feynman was best known for his Nobel- winning work in quantum electrodynamics and subsequent achievements in particle physics, Gleick traces the many byways in the physicist's career: his study of helium superfluidity; his brief flirtation with molecular biology; his interest in sleep and dreams. And then there were his involvement with the Manhattan Project; the loss to tuberculosis of his beloved Arline; his relentless womanizing; his eventual marriage to Gweneth—the English woman he met on a beach in Geneva and arranged to bring over as his domestic servant; his children; his lectures; his refusal to take graduate students; his skepticism about grand unifiedtheories; the Challenger disaster. Gleick weaves all these threads into a rich portrait of an imperfect, complex, to-his-own-self-and-to-science-be-true figure, loved and admired, yet elusive. (Twenty-four pages of b&w photographs—not seen.)

Kirkus Reviews