Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James GleickMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Feynman has been a personal hero of mine for more than a decade now. The more I learn about him, the more my admiration grows. His steadfast belief about how Science should really be done, the exacting standards he had for himself and his courage place him in a league of his own. His ability to arrive at B from A in an inexplicable manner used to baffle even the smartest of his peers. He was truly a wizard. In the words of the mathematician Mark Kac, who had the privilege of watching Feynman at Cornell,
"There are two kinds of geniuses, the “ordinary” and the “magicians.” An ordinary genius is a fellow that you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what they have done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians. They are, to use mathematical jargon, in the orthogonal complement of where we are and the working of their minds is for all intents and purposes incomprehensible. Even after we understand what they have done, the process by which they have done it is completely dark. They seldom, if ever, have students because they cannot be emulated and it must be terribly frustrating for a brilliant young mind to cope with the mysterious ways in which the magician’s mind works. Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest caliber."
He had this sense of clarity - the ability to sift through a matter and break it down into its essential components, discarding the superfluous. He could thus identify the crux of a matter, and this ability definitely served him well through out his life, from his work in the Manhattan Project, to his last major contribution as a scientist, the investigation of the Challenger disaster.
His contempt for ceremony, for pretentious behavior and ostentatious customs is also testament to the same fanatically honest, no-nonsense character he was. During his lifetime, not only did he pursue Science brilliantly, but he also learned to play the bongo, crack safes, train dogs, speak portugese in a few months, be the conceptual father of nanotechnology, make a minor contribution to the field of biology and write 6 books. What an incredibly talented man he was.
Genius, by James Gleick, is not just about Feynman however. In a way, it is also a story of the Physics of that era, the era Feynman grew up. The books get quite technical at times, and if you have no inkling of Physics whatsoever, you will be at a loss. That being said, it is still a brilliantly spun yarn about one the most brilliant men the world has known.
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