Genius

*** By James Gleick.

In my continuing series of Feynman books comes this, the full biography. This one is considered the best among the person from whom I borrowed it (ahem). It's a very good read about a very interesting, and important, person.

Where Surely You're Joking is a collection of amusing anecdotes, this is a real biography, covering Feynman's entire life, and not just the amusing little tidbits. There are certainly plenty of those as well (many of them mentioned in Surely), but there's a great deal of serious material as well.

Feynman grew up at a very interesting time for science. Over the course of his life, scientists (especially in the U.S.) went from being almost completely unknown, to being revered (after the bomb ended WWII), to being somewhere in between (with the Cold War, the space program, and so forth). The progression and changes within the field of science at large is one theme in this book.

He was a man of unequaled intuition for physics, and had absolutely insatiable curiosity about the world. However, his contributions to the body of scientific literature, while quite big, are not as big as some of his peers. He hated to publish, hated to read what other people published, and yet he loved to work on all kinds of problems. We get to see how much he tried to cover in his life, and what an influence he had on everyone around him.

It's much too hard to summarize what's in this book, but I will say that it was a very good read if you have any interest in science or the lives of people. Of course, now I feel like I need to play catch up on my science reading—sometime in the next several months I'll be reading A Brief History of Time. Stay tuned.

Posted by Joe on September 7, 2002 02:09 PM