Genius: The Life & Science of Richard Feynman (book of the month July 2004)

[SteveDallas]

Have at it!

[Slartibartfast]

here we go again
:thumpsup:

[wolf]

I had actually posted a brilliant review before The Crash.

But actually it's kind of appropriate that I redo it today, on the anniversary of the Trinity Explosion.

And yes, I am wearing the tee shirt.



In any event ... I'm enjoying reading Genius. It's a lot longer than it looks, though ... man that print is TINY (or are my eyes just getting older?). I've just completed the section on The Manhattan Project. It's interesting to read the story I know so well focused on one of the "minor" players (yes, I know Feynman did a lot at Los Alamos, but most of the books that I have read focus mainly on Oppie, Teller, Szillard, Nedermeyer, and Bethe).

I'm a bit disappointed in what Gleick considers important and not in his writing the tale ... downplaying almost into insignificance Arline's death, for example, as well as providing very little commentary regarding Trinity.

One fun moment I've had was the rediscovery of the hexahexaflexagon. I read that section at work, and was fussing about in the office mumbling about it as I found instructions on the internet somewhere and made one for myself. My coworkers were not impressed at my ability to expose all six of the faces. We have a guy who has a master's in physics who works nursing to annoy his parents (he's apparently also teaching at Philadelphia Community College Part Time) who because of my enthusiasm pretended to know what I was talking about.

[Happy Monkey]

I just made one of those two or three weeks ago. Nifty stuff.

[SteveDallas]

I finished it.. probably been about 10 yrs since the first time I read it.

You're right, wolf, he does give short shrift to those things... tho imagine how long it would be if he didn't! I think he's really making it a working biography.. he's more interested in talking about how Feynman worked... and, by all accounts, Feynman at least tried to go on working as if he weren't affected. The Manhattan Project stuff, while historically important, didn't loom large in the context of Feynman's life's work and I think that might be why.

Still, it is a biography.. and Arline doesn't get as much time as I expected, and his second wife--tho it was a short marriage and apparently doomed from the start--barely gets a page.

What I did find interesting, that maybe nobody else did, was how Feynman fit (or didn't) into the academic world. As a frustrated PhD candidate who continued to work in higher ed, I found it fascinating. But it's not the stuff of high drama.

[wolf]

I've read Feynman's accounts of Arline's death ... Gleick nearly makes it a footnote in his life ... he spent more time discussing clinical trials of medicines that might have saved her life if only she'd been enrolled in them than he did in describing their relationship.

Gleick seems to be a lot more comfortable discussing science than people. Biographies should be about the people ... Heck, even Oppie, who by all accounts was as socially adept as he was brilliant comes across looking like a hopeless geek.

[wolf]

I did actually manage to finish this ... helped along by the copies endnotes and index. Darn but that print was tiny!

Since I was talking about how Gleick seemed to be having a hard time expressing the personalities of the various physicists and others, I found it a bit odd that the contrast between the personalities of Feynman and Gell-Mann actually was really focused on in the chapter on Caltech.

[SteveDallas]

Gleick's biography of Newton, which I've also read, has some of the sma eproblems I think... it's not a bad book, but like "Genius", it turns out to be very shallow.

One thing that would explain the bit with Gell-Mann, would be if it really was a kind of unique friendship that Feynman didn't share with anybody else... but if Gleick feels that to be the case, he never really comes right around to it. (And it does seem like Feynman didn't have a lot of close friends.)

Now that I reread it, I've also gotten the feeling there was more to be told about the whole business with Schwinger and the quarks.

Trivia: On the way home from NC (we made it without blowing any tires or hitting any deer this time) I started WITSEC, one of the other books I had suggested (and which I had actually expected to be the winner). This books co-author, Gerald Shur, also grew up in Far Rockaway (though a few years younger than Feynman).