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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 530.092
EAN num: 9780679747048
ISBN number: 0679747044
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 560
Printing Date: November 02, 1993
Publishing house: Vintage
Release Date: November 02, 1993
Sale Popularity Level: 125074
Studio: Vintage
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
From the author of the national bestseller Chaos comes an outstanding biography of one of the most dazzling and flamboyant scientists of the 20th century that 'not only paints a highly attractive portrait of Feynman but also . . . makes for a stimulating adventure in the annals of science' (The New York Times). 16 pages of photos.
Amazon.com Review:
If you've read any of Richard Feynman's wonderful autobiographies you may think that a biography of Feynman would be a waste of your time. Wrong! Gleick's Genius is a masterpiece of scientific biography--and an inspiration to anyone in pursuit of their own fulfillment as a person of genius. Deservedly nominated for a National Book Award, underservedly passed over by the committee in the face of tough competition, and very deservedly a book that you must read.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
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Adopting a definition of the word 'genius' as a 'truly original thinker', Gleick shows throughtout this entertaining book - how Feynman meets this definition. From his work on the Manhattan project to his investigation of the Challenger disaster, Feynman continues to approach problems from 'scratch' so to say. Feynman did not believe in reading his peer's papers - he believed in looking at the abstract and trying to figure out the contents on his own! He believed in solving every KNOWN problem very first - before dealing with unknown tough problems. There are several insights into his 'problem-solving' approach - which may have seemed madness to some - but Gleick goes on to show how there was method to his madness - and how his peers were more than aware of his brilliance.
There are several great anecdotes - from Feynman's time at Princeton, Caltech, Cornell and Los Alamos.
Rated by buyers -
Genius by James Gleick is a worthwhile read even if you don't have a clue who Richard Feynman was. This is one of those wonderful biographies that leaves you feeling you actually know the man and not just the image concocted by historians and public relations spin doctors.
Gleick does a really great job of showing Feynman growing up in pre world war II America and the beginning has an almost Tom Sawyer-like feel. Neither geek nor wannabe, not overly impressed by himself or anyone else, Feynman moves though childhood to become not only a brilliant mathematician, but a scientist who liked to play the bongo drums and also helped invent the Atomic bomb.
The tale becomes tragically beautiful as the almost gothic love story of his very first marriage unfolds and twists through his work at Los Alamos and the very first atomic bomb. Week after week a young Feynman hitchhikes alone across the country to visit his wife in the sanitarium and week after week the bomb comes closer to becoming a reality.
The story continues winding through the brilliant maze of Feynman's career with detail and clarity. Gleick's story is more about the man than his work so don't expect to understand Feynman diagrams when you're finished reading it, but you will be entertained.
Rated by buyers 
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For what is Feynman most famous:
1) his diagrams
2) his quantum electrodynamics renormalization
3) his tacyons
4) his path integrals
The only reason I give this book 3 stars is that it is a well researched
biography that deals with his life, times and personality.
as far as telling about the physics or any of the equations involved,
this is inadequate. I couldn't even find a mention of tacyons.
In this I see a certain contempt for the American
in the author. Since he is a famous and important
scientific author that is truly a disappointment.
There are 500 pages of Feynman's life with more about
his three wives and his behavior in lectures than
about why he is really important to the physics of his time?
There may be still some of my resentment in his Red books
being over the head of those people taking
beginning physics in 1964 at UCLA.
They were closer to upper division physics texts
than lower division, but because he was the wunderkind
of California physics, we got them.
For me they weren't bad as, just very very wordy/long
and hard to read,
but for many they were the kiss of death to their
science hopes. So calling Richard Feynman a genius may be
O. K. with some, but for me he was just an overrated fellow
who couldn't express himself very well.
This book actually made me want to find out more about Julian Schwinger!
Rated by buyers -
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 very 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.
Rated by buyers -
Richard Feynman was one of those individuals that appear on the scene and like the stars, burn bright for a short time before flickering out. In Feynman's case it is the story of a one-of-a-kind, an iconoclast who broke all the rules and relished in his bad boy reputation. He was a rampant womanizer, someone who liked to have fun but mroe than anything he was a man possessed by a brain and work ethic that causes one to gasp.
Reading the book, one discovers that it was not just his thought experiments or math skills or polymath catholicism of knowledge that impressed. All of these (or even one of these) would have have been exceptional but it was the ferocious speed of thought and the range of ideas that spewed forth. Indeed, even he admits he was not always right but like a bubbling cauldron, the conjectures and propositions kept rising to the top.
The writing hit just the right balance between necessary detail and a layman's endeavor to grasp his latest scheme. This is not an easy read for someone not aware of scientific advances or cognizant of recent theories in quantum mechanics. Yet - and this is what I find so distinctive - he managed to break down the most frightenting complexity to smaller problems that could be solved. Despite his abhorance of philosophy, art, music - the liberal arts that have dominated over hard science - his finding had deep philosophical conotations - cause and effect, time, predictability, chaos and order. He hated pretense (the "new" math), rote memorization, a single methodology and any kind of fuzzy thinking. His brilliant mind raced ahead of his speech as he thought of newer and better ways to arrive at solutions.
Like Einstien, he engaged in thought experiments. Einstein rode a beam of light; Feynman inhabited an electron or haydron or photon or meson or any of the innumercable sub-level particles. Like Einstein his work ethic was legendary and he was held in awe by those who knew him best. Unlike Einstein, his formulas were too esoteric for appreciation by the general public, no easy e=mc2. But thankfully he differed from Eingstein in another respect - Feynman remained scientifically creative until the end. He reveled in his allure - to women and men - yet he found peace in domesticity at last. In some ways it is almost impossible to approach such genius - all we can do is follow the path of all probabilities (lol).
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