Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman
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 | |
| Author | James Gleick |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Subject | Physics, Biography |
| Genre | Nonfiction |
| Publisher | Pantheon |
Publication date | 1992 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | Print (hardcover and paperback) |
| Pages | 530 |
| ISBN | 978-0679747048 |
| Preceded by | Chaos: Making a New Science |
| Followed by | Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything |
Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (1992) is a biography of the American physicist Richard Feynman by James Gleick.
Feynman's work involved quantum electrodynamics, for which he shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics.[1] Gleick writes that "At least three of his later achievements might also have done so: a theory of superfluidity, the strange frictionless behavior of liquid helium; a theory of weak interactions, the force that works in radioactive decay; and a theory of partons, hypothetical hard particles inside the atom's nucleus, that helped produce the modern understanding of quarks."[2]
In addition to his science, Feynman was famous for The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1964).[3] He achieved popular fame with Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (1985) and What Do You Care What Other People Think? (1988), consisting of stories told to his friend Ralph Leighton. Gleick said "I have tried not to lean on them too heavily," adding that they are "mostly accurate, but strongly filtered."[4]
Content
Gleick gives the context of Feynman's work, offering a brief history of quantum mechanics: Max Planck's discovery of quanta; Einstein's application of quanta to the photoelectric effect; Niels Bohr's model of the atom. In 1925, Schrödinger presented wave mechanics and Heisenberg presented matrix mechanics, which turned out to be equivalent. In 1928, Paul Dirac published his relativistic wave equation, which predicted the existence of anti-matter. Dirac's The Principles of Quantum Mechanics was an influence on the young Feynman.
He traces Feynman's life from his childhood in Far Rockaway, Queens to his education at MIT; from Princeton to Los Alamos National Laboratory, where his boss Hans Bethe persuaded him to come to Cornell; and finally Caltech. Gleick covers many other physicists, among them Feynman's theses advisor John Archibald Wheeler, his Cornell colleague Freeman Dyson, his competitor (and eventual co-Nobelist) Julian Schwinger and Feynman's sister Joan, an astrophysicist. He includes asides on the nature of genius and the relationship between science and religion.
He describes Feynman's marriage to Arline Greenbaum. She contracted tuberculosis, and they wed against their parents' wishes. When Feynman was at Los Alamos, he wrote to her at an Albuquerque sanitarium. She succumbed to tuberculosis in 1945. While researching the biography, Gleick came across a letter Feynman wrote to Arline after she died.[5] Gleick recalled that "My heart stopped. I have never had an experience like that as a biographer, before or since."[6]