The Beat of a Different Drum: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

Mehra, Jagdish

ISBN 10: 0198518870 / ISBN 13: 9780198518877

Published by Oxford University Press, 1996

About this Item

630pp. Rubbing to cover.

Seller Inventory # 056749

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Beat of a Different Drum: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication Date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0198518870
• ISBN 13: 9780198518877
• Binding: Soft cover
• Edition: First Paperback
• Condition: Very Good
• Seller catalogs:
  • Biography
  • Science

About this title

Synopsis

This definitive book deals with the life and scientific work of arguably the greatest American-born theoretical physicist of the twentieth century. He was a great teacher, a born showman, bongo drummer, buffoon, and iconoclast; a scientific magician capable of transcendental leaps of the imagination. During his career he was drawn into research on the atomic bomb before working on his path-integral formulation of quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. Subsequently he developed the diagrammatic technique as a result of which the Feynman diagrams became ubiquitous in quantum field theory, elementary particle physics, and statistical mechanics. From 1950 he was based at the California Institute of Technology, where he worked on the superfluidity of liquid helium, the theory of polarons, the theory of weak interactions, the quantum theory of gravitation, partons, quark jets, and the limits of computation. Feynman had a unified view of physics and nature: he took the whole of nature as the arena of his science and imagination. Jagdish Mehra personally knew Feynman for thirty years. This book is intended for physicists at all levels; historians and philosophers of science; the scientifically literate general reader; biography enthusiasts.

About the Author

Jagdish Mehra is the author of many articles and books on twentieth-centuryphysics, including Einstein, Hilbert, and the Theory of Gravitation and the first five volumes (seven books) of The Historical Development of QuantumTheory, with Helmut Rechenburg. The Citadel Distinguished Professor of Physics at Charleston, South Carolina, Jadish Mehra received the Humboldt Prize in 1976.