Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - Softcover

Gleick, James

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679747044 ISBN 13: 9780679747048

Publisher: Vintage, 1993

Synopsis

A genius, a great mathematician once said, performs magic, does things that nobody else could do. To his scientific colleagues, Richard Feynman was a magician of the highest caliber. Architect of quantum theories, enfant terrible of the atomic bomb project, caustic critic of the space shuttle commission, Nobel Prize winner for work that gave physicists a new way of describing and calculating the interactions of subatomic particles, Richard Feynman left his mark on virtually every area of modern physics. Originality was his obsession. Never content with what he knew or with what others knew, Feynman ceaselessly questioned scientific truths. But there was also another side to him, one which made him a legendary figure among scientists. His curiosity moved well beyond things scientific: he taught himself how to play drums, to give massages, to write Chinese, to crack safes. In Genius, James Gleick, author of the acclaimed best-seller Chaos, shows us a Feynman few have seen. He penetrates beyond the gleeful showman depicted in Feynman's own memoirs and reveals a darker Feynman: his ambition, his periods of despair and uncertainty, his intense emotional nature. From his childhood on the beaches and backlots of Far Rockaway and his first tinkering with radios and differential equations to the machine shops at MIT and the early theoretical work at Princeton - work that foreshadowed his famous notion of antiparticles traveling backward in time - to the tragic death of his wife while he was working at Los Alamos, Genius shows how one scientist's vision was formed. As that vision crystallized in work that reinvented quantum mechanics, we see Feynman's impact on the elite particle-physicscommunity, and how Feynman grew to be at odds with the very community that idolized him. Finally, Gleick explores the nature of genius, our obsession with it and why the very idea may belong to another time. Genius records the life of a scientist who has forever changed science - and cha

About this title

Review:

the book is a moving, beautifully written literate and perceptive account of Feynman's life. (NATURE)

I came away from Genius feeling that I knew a lot more about Feynman and his play in 20th century science. (SUNDAY TIMES)

Gleick's narrative, consistently measured and elegant is a formidable work of scientific biography. (NEW STATESMEN)

thoughtful and fascinating. (THE LITERARY REVIEW)

Book Description:

The life of Richard Feynman and the story of modern physics itself.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0679747044
• ISBN 13: 9780679747048
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 560