Genius Richard Feynman

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Overview

Genius Richard Feynman - The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick.

I was very entertained by this book. It was somewhat unexpected.

Not from the stand point that I thought it would be uninteresting to learn more about Feynman, but this book took an unexpected turn for me.

Gleick not only described Feynman's scientific achievements, but addressed his family history, peer relationships, politics and professional relationships

Richard Feynman was a player with the ladies. It was well known that he had sexual relations with the wives of his coworkers.

Kind of creepy.

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Freeman Dyson

One of England's most brilliant mathematician prodigies had several interesting observations about Feynman.

At first meeting Feynman he wrote his parents,

"Half genius and half buffoon."

Dyson commented on Feynman's brilliant vision of physics,

"This wonderful vision of the world as a woven texture of world lines in space and time, with everything moving freely.

It was a unifying principle that would either explain everything or explain nothing."

Dyson describing what being around Feynman was like,

"He has developed a private version of the quantum theory...; in general he is always sizzling with new ideas, most of which are more spectacular than helpful, and hardly any of which get very far before some newer inspiration eclipses them.... when he bursts into the room with his latest brain-wave and proceeds to expound it with the most lavish sound effects and waving about of the arms, life at least is not dull."

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Observations

When you normally read about the accomplishments of historical scientific figures, it can be a literal listing of accomplishments and defeats.

However, this book told a very encompassing story about the non- scientific aspects of Richard Feynman's life.

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Accomplishments

• His work on the Manhattan Project
• Path Integrals used in Quantum Mechanics
• Feynman Diagrams
• Nobel Prize in 1965 for his contributions to Quantum Electrodynamics
• Considered by many to be the father of Nano-technology
• Too many to list...

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Physical Intuition

One of the many observations about Feynman was his keen ability to know if something would work or not.

Many peers did not like the way Feynman would go about figuring something out.

On the Manhattan Project, Paul Olum was brought on to work on the project.

He was considered to be Harvard's best undergraduate mathematician in 1940.

After meeting the genius Richard Feynman, he was devastated and his confidence was shaken.

Taken from the book:

What's happening here? Olum thought. Is this the way physicists are, and I missed it? No physicist at Harvard was like this.

Feynman, a cheerful, boyish presence spinning across the campus on his bicycle, scornful of the formalisms of modern advanced mathematics, was running mental circles around him.

It wasn't that he was a brilliant calculator: Olum knew the tricks of the game. It was as if he were a man from Mars.

Olum could not track his thinking. He had never known anyone so intuitively at ease with nature - and with nature's seemingly least accessible manifestations.

He suspected that when Feynman wanted to know what an electron would do under given circumstances he merely asked himself, "If I were an electron, what would I do?"

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Conclusion

There is a lot in this book and it is an entertaining read.

My observations are just some of the things I found most interesting.

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Links

Genius Richard Feynman

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