Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

Many accounts of Feynman read as a sequence of gee-whiz feats of dazzling theatricality. Gleick's take on him is more measured. The author nevertheless manages to capture the irreverent spirit and ebullient persona of this larger-than-life physicist while using everyday language to describe the latter's brilliant contributions to quantum electrodynamics (QED).

Throughout the book, Gleick gives us many instances that showcase Feynman's lifelong refusal to abide by what he considered pointless or hypocritical social norms. He carried over this unorthodoxy to his work, often coming up with approaches often considered bizzarre by his peers, to deal with the conundrums of QED.

In deft language and simple analogies, Gleick outlines the developments of quantum mechanics until Feynman's time. The author them goes on to describe the renormalization approach of Feynman, Schwinger and Tomonaga that offered an ingenious method of removing the puzzling self-interaction terms that would otherwise lead to infinite (unphysical) field quantities.

In chronicling Feynman's life, Gleick gives us vivid vignettes of the physicist's encounters with the other luminaries in his field, his refusal to accept anything unquestioningly, the sheer energy, originality and versatality with which he approached every aspect of his life and his often messy and volatile relationships with women. Paying tribute to Feynman's genius while portraying the many aspects of this brilliant persona is a daunting task; Gleick has risen to the monumental challenge with grace and profound insight.

There are a couple of biographies that ascend beyond the level of our expectations, William Manchester's two-volume biography of Churchill is one, and "Genius" is another. Dick Feynman makes a biographer's work easier, the depth of his character, genius, and humor are limitless. Physicist Richard Feynman was also an accomplished safecracker, the inventor of QED (quantum electrodynamics), and whatever he turned his hand to, be it bongo drums or painting, the results were invariably immortalized in museums or symphony orchestras. Feynman famously dipped an O-Ring into ice water to demonstrate the cause of the Challenger disaster, and estimated the kilotonnage yielded at the Trinity test by observing the displacement of a handful of shredded paper.

Feynman was no slouch as a writer himself, penning "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman", "Adventures of a Curious Character", and "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out." James Gleick has written a number of books, beginning with "Chaos" a good introduction to the science, and he has progressed as a writer to works like "Faster", "What Just Happened", and "Isaac Newton." A finalist for the National Book Award, "Genius" is Gleick's finest work and undeservedly missed out.

Biography and popular science description of Feynman's work tells the personal story of one of modern physics most unique minds. Feynman won a Nobel Prize in the field of quantum physics in 1965, and was a leading thinker in the Los Alamos project. Gleick does a decent job of making the physics understandable at a popular level.

Never a manager or administrator of the "big science' that 20th century physics created in the war and post-war periods, Feynman stuck to his theoretical roots.

He was a bundle of contradictions:

He seldom read in the literature, reading only enough of books and papers to understand the problem, then resolving it in his own way, often quicker and better than others.

He was a devoted husband to his tubercular first wife, then a womanizing scoundrel afterwards.

He was a professor who disliked teaching, a theorist who thought in concrete analogies, a middle-class Jewish boy from Long Island who was only admitted to anti-semitic Ivy League institutions (with their shameful quotas in the pre-war period) because of the brilliance of his mind at that early stage, who became the highest-paid professor at CalTech during the post-war years.

He was even called by many who knew him and worked with him by the label "Genius". Gleick spends some time talking about what constitutes genius and how to identify it. I believe Feynman defines his genius in this statement: "A theorist who can juggle different theories in his mind has a creative advantage, Feynman argued, when it comes time to change the theories." (p. 368) Feynman's genius consisted of his ability to envision complex physical analogies, and quickly compute complicated formulas from the many in his memory.

An inveterate story teller and shaper of his own legacy, he memorized and crafted stories and anecdotes to mold his image. As Gleick recounts one story about the difference between colleague Murray Gell-Mann and Feynman: "Murray makes sure you know what an extraordinary person he is, they would say, while Dick is not a person at all but a more advanced life form pretending to be human to spare your feelings." That's genius.

This makes a good companion to Richard Rhodes "Making of the Atomic Bomb" which covers the Los Alamos period from a broader perspective.

This is the only book I will ever give 5 stars, because reading it is a spiritual experience. It came from my old supervisor's library collection and later I purchased my own copy.

Gleick's conception of physics is quite accurate, and his writing style is sufficiently colourful, that this is one of the few books I always go back for passages. His writing of Feymann, his colleagues, and certain events are almost like reading a novel, adding charm to the otherwise blend perception to the world of science.

More importantly, it is Gleick's portrayal of Feymann as human -- with flaws, feelings, friends and enemies -- than a mystical figure, that makes it wonderful to read as a biography. He made no attempt to glorify his achievements, nor did he praise his talents. This, I find, a very humble gesture.

In fact, this is such an impact to me, when I finished reading this book, I decided to quit work and persue my Ph.D., which I am doing now.

If getting people to turn pages was the only measure of a writer, Gleick would be at the top of his craft; I ripped through this book in 3 days (and likewise found Chaos very compelling). But, alas, there are other considerations and for me, the most curious thing about this book is the degree to which the author sets the table and serves a burning meal then leaves most the courses half eaten.

For instance, you would think from the title, that you were also in for a discourse on the concept and/or practice of genius. Instead, predictable anecdotal information comes along (more often than not reinforcing the cliche rather than an individual experience of genius) and then, when the author decides to take up the topic, he makes a few remarks about the geneology of the concept, tries to talk about Mozart in a way that borders on hamhanded (while it also produced an unfortunate flashback to surely one of the most banal treatises on genius: Amadeus) and then after a few other observations, he moves on. The title seems to promise the cliche, but the wonderful quixotic image that emerges from the long course of Feynman's life is rather the retreat of the concept. As the most likely Einstein of his generation, Feynman ended up making significant contributions, but certainly fell far short of the previous generation's measure of genius: general relativity. Instead whole hordes of people pushed the ball forward little by little into the quantum age and Feynman ironically became one of the ones who defied the belief in a grail that would unlock all the secrets.

The other part that seemed truly neglected was the final scene when Feynman served on the Challenger committee (shortly before his death). Gleick leaves the only commentary on his role to Freeman Dyson, despite the fact that the scene is loaded with possibilities: Feynman setting aside the sheaths of a billion dollar, protected industry to reveal, through a failed experiment that an 8 year old could have performed, the culprit in what can only be called murder.

To his credit, Gleick does manage to allow a real person to emerge from behind the cliches. It's a remarkable reversal that in the beginning Feynman seems like a crude, cliche of a person who is going to set the world on fire, and at the end, though he didn't end up singlehandedly rewriting his realm of science, he did end up a wise, caustic, fearless contrarian.

Oppenheimer once said that it would take a modern Sophocles to write the history of the dawning of the quantum era. Gleick sets the scene but spares a lot of the drama, even though it seems like he secretly understands it all. Still a very powerful read.