James Gleick

A biography of the flamboyant Nobel Prize-winning scientist describes how Feynman cracked safes, played the bongos, studied the behavior of Jell-O, and conducted experiments in seduction, all in the name of science. Reprint. 125,000 first printing. $50,000 ad/promo. Tour.

The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

Genius

Gavin

Engrossing and detailed. Feynman is different from other first-rank minds: he values clarity and humour above all. He's a slightly hazardous role model though: his sheer speed, creativity, and high standards, which justify his arrogance and deviance, cannot be emulated by ordinary people; his mantra - "disregard [what other people are doing]" - is similarly high-risk; and his pickup-artistry after Arline died is at least icky. But the big accessible hazard is his thrilling science-supremacism. Gleick:

Feynman told them [his self-spun legend]:
 how he became known in Far Rockaway as the boy who fixed radios by thinking; how he asked a Princeton librarian for the map of the cat; how his father taught him to see through the tricks of circus mind readers; how he outwitted painters, mathematicians, philosophers, and psychiatrists.

Feynman:

 For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?


His cheeky scientism will make unread teenagers insufferable at parties. More seriously, it could return our scientists to unreflective, uninspired positivism. But his anti-authoritarianism, his anti-pretension, his honest and sweeping scepticism, his existential peace, more than compensate. Filtering out the above, his life is an enormously fruitful applied epistemology.

It is shocking, to anyone who knows the modern salami-slicing academic world, to hear how many breakthroughs he didn't publish, just out of high standards:

 A great physicist who accumulated knowledge without taking the trouble to publish could be a genuine danger to his colleagues. At best it was unnerving to learn that one’s potentially career-advancing discovery had been, to Feynman, below the threshold of publishability. At worst it undermined one’s confidence in the landscape of the known and not known.


And how he resisted emeritus disease to the end. Hawking: “We may now be near the end of the search for the ultimate laws of nature,”. Feynman:

 I’ve had a lifetime of that. I’ve had a lifetime of people who believe that the answer is just around the corner. But again and again it’s been a failure. Eddington, who thought that with the theory of electrons and quantum mechanics everything was going to be simple... Einstein, who thought that he had a unified theory just around the corner but didn’t know anything about nuclei and was unable of course to guess it... People think they’re very close to the answer, but I don’t think so...
 
Whether or not nature has an ultimate, simple, unified, beautiful form is an open question, and I don’t want to say either way.


Feynman's ideas are still completely modern. He'll be modern for a long time to come, too: as the main theorist of the path integral formulation of QM, the first theorist of nanotechnology and quantum computing, as storyteller, as a complete master of applied epistemology for humans.

New York Times Bestseller: This life story of the quirky physicist is “a thorough and masterful portrait of one of the great minds of the century” (The New York Review of Books). Raised in Depression-era Rockaway Beach, physicist Richard Feynman was irreverent, eccentric, and childishly enthusiastic—a new kind of scientist in a field that was in its infancy. His quick mastery of quantum mechanics earned him a place at Los Alamos working on the Manhattan Project under J. Robert Oppenheimer, where the giddy young man held his own among the nation’s greatest minds. There, Feynman turned theory into practice, culminating in the Trinity test, on July 16, 1945, when the Atomic Age was born. He was only twenty-seven. And he was just getting started. In this sweeping biography, James Gleick captures the forceful personality of a great man, integrating Feynman’s work and life in a way that is accessible to laymen and fascinating for the scientists who follow in his footsteps.

Bouke van der Bijl

Super fun to read! I read another bio (I think 'Surely you're joking...') a while ago, but it was fun to read this one. Feynman seemed to just play his way through life, not taking things too seriously and always looking through bullshit to get at the core of things. I recognize some of myself in that attitude, although he was 100x as smart of course.

Genius The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

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