Genius
A gem of a book, about the life and mind of one of the most influential and iconoclastic characters in 20th century physics. Really a pleasure to read.
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17recommend
32mentions
29people
2008–2026years
59% recommend34% neutral6% critical
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What Hacker News says
- It is very interesting to see completely different impressions of Feynman from comments here. As a physicist, I first got introduced to Feynman from his popular QED book as a freshman in college. Over the years, I came to admire his contributions and way of thinking but could also see the cult of personality that has formed.
Feynman is definitely not like Neil deGrasse Tyson or Kaku. He was a very creative and technically sophisticated physicist. All his popular books are based on lectures he wrote and gave but they were mostly "side projects" e.g. computation, lectures on gravitation, six easy pieces etc.
To get a better sense of his work, I would highly recommend:
- The Beat of a Different Drum by Jagdish Mehra
- Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick
- Selected Papers - https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/4270 (expensive and technical)
- QED and the men who made it by Schweber
There are also many historical physicists who are surprisingly unknown outside the field - Schwinger, Tomonaga, Landau, Sidney Coleman, Murray Gell-mann, Nambu, Steven Weinberg, Ken Wilson, Curtis Callan etc. I just randomly picked a few names before the 90s but these are all scientific giants. For example, Schwinger's papers are notoriously hard to read but his books are great after a first course. Sidney Coleman gave beautiful lectures on QFT. Landau is extremely famous for his 9 books with Lifshitz. It definitely is very surprising that Feynman has such an outsized share of interest. Maybe because he was a gregarious outgoing character?
Another interesting aspect is how a person is often viewed as an authority or even a genius because their work introduces an audience to the subject. Feynman with his lectures. To a far lesser extent (in my opinion), one sees this with Andrej Karpathy and Jeremy Howard. This is not to take away from their wonderful teaching work. I know how hard it is to distill material and convey it. But, there's a whole web of contributions that leads to a subject maturing enough to be taught clearly.
As I get older, I find it less useful to assign labels (names) to discoveries and contributions. As Feynman himself said in a lecture after drawing a Feynman diagram, "this is THE diagram" (and not the Feynman diagram).
- That's fair - although it's a really great video!
The section about 45m in ("The Myth of Richard Feynman) covers it in a hair under seven minutes.
She notices that in the preface to "What Do You Care What Other People Think?", the author says that people have the "mistaken idea" that "Surely You're Joking..." was an autobiography. The preface, which was written from the perspective of the author of the books, is attributed to Ralph Leighton, who has a Wikipedia article about him. It turns out that he wrote the books, years later, based on stories Feynman told him at drumming circles. So it's not exactly a secret, but also not exactly publicized - Leighton's name is nowhere on the book jackets, for instance.
The video goes onto explain that this is the case for anything commonly attributed to him - The Feynman Lectures, for instance, were transcribed/edited/turned into books by Robert B. Leighton (Ralph's father) and Matthew Sands.
She then cites the general "never wrote a book" claim as directly coming from James Gleick's "Genius", which is a well-regarded and fact-checked biography of Feynman.
- +1 for The Information - a great book.
Gleick's biography of Richard Feynman, Genius is also excellent. And Chaos and Time Travel: A History, although the latter looks at the subject from literary and philosophical perspectives as well as science.
Pair with Darwin Among the Machines and Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson.
- Also I recommend “Genius” by James Gleick which is a fantastic biography of him.
- Thanks for that link, the fuller Gell-Mann quote was good to note but that article by Gleick is so much more.
Gleick provides us with a vivid portrait of Feynman's character and his descriptions of what Feynman's contemporaries thought of him not only round out that portrait but also reveal parts of their characters. And he masterly weaves all that into the then - and still current - physics zeitgeist.
I'd not seen that article previously but I've Gleick's book Genius so much of it was familiar to me, but having not read it in years his NYT article was a wonderful short refresher.
Gleick's an excellent science writer, I'd highly recommended that those reading and or commenting here read the article.
- K&R C
Gleick Genius (although some prefer Chaos)
Hofstadter Godel Escher Bach
One taught C. One taught or showed the life of a non conventional smart guy. One made you think.
