Quantum Man: Richard Feynman’s Life in Science (Great Discoveries)
March 8, 2011 by Actaphysica
Filed under Physics Book Reviews
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Separating the man and his science from the legend,
First the perpetual question. With so many authoritative biographies of Feynman, do we need another? The answer in case of this new biography is a big “Yes!”. Richard Feynman died in 1988 and James Gleick’s engaging and masterful biography of him appeared in 1993. Jagdish Mehra’s dense, authoritative scientific biography came out in 1996. Since then there has been a kind of “Feynman industry” in the form of tapes, books, transcripts, interviews and YouTube video clips. While this has kept Feynman alive, it has also turned him into a kind of larger-than-life legend who is more famous in the public mind for his pranks and other exploits than for his science. Most laymen will tell you that Feynman was a brilliant scientist but would be hard-pressed to tell you what he was famous for. It’s time that we were again reminded of what most contributed to Richard Feynman’s greatness- his science. Krauss’s biography fulfills this role. You could think of Gleick’s biography as a kind of Renaissance painting, an elaborate piece of work where he gets everything accurate down to the eyebrows of the men and women. Krauss’s biography is more like the evocative impressionistic art of the French masters, more of a lucid sketch that brings out the essence of Feynman the scientist.
The biography is essentially aimed at explaining Feynman’s scientific contributions, their relevance, importance and uniqueness. Thus Krauss wisely avoids pondering over oft-repeated details about Feynman’s personal life. He compresses descriptions of Feynman’s childhood, the tragic story of his first wife’s death and their extremely touching relationship and his time at Los Alamos into brief paragraphs; if we want to learn more we can look up Gleick or Feynman’s own memoirs. What concerns Krauss more than anything else is what made Feynman such a great scientist. And he delivers the goods by diving into the science right away and by explaining what made Feynman so different. Perhaps Feynman’s most unique and towering ability was his compulsive need to do things from scratch, work out everything from first principles, understand it inside out and from as many different angles as possible. Krauss does a great job in bringing out this almost obsessive tendency to divine the truth from the source. It manifested itself at a very early age when Richard was cranking out original solutions to algebra and arithmetic problems in school. And it was paramount in his Nobel Prize winning work.
Krauss succinctly explains how this intense drive to look at things in new ways allowed Feynman to do novel work during his PhD with John Wheeler at Princeton in which he formulated theories that described antiparticles as particles traveling backwards in time. Later Feynman also applied the same approach in using a novel method based on the principle of least action to explain the dizzying mysteries of quantum electrodynamics. Krauss does an admirable job in explaining the physics behind these contributions in layman’s terms. Feynman’s prescription involved taking into consideration all of the infinite paths that a particle can take when getting from the beginning to the end point. This was a bizarre and totally new way of looking at things, but then quantum mechanics is nothing if not bizarre. As Krauss describes, the moment of revelation for Feynman came in a meeting where, using his techniques and intellectual prowess, he could finish in a few hours a complicated calculation for mesons that had taken another researcher several months. Krauss also narrates how Feynman brought the same freewheeling, maverick approach to thinking about superfluidity, beta decay, the strong nuclear force, gravity and computing and the book contains the most complete popular scientific treatments of Feynman’s thoughts about these important problems that I have seen. The approach did not always work (as it did not in case of superconductivity) but it encouraged other physicists to think in new ways. In fact as Krauss lucidly narrates, Feynman’s great influence on physics was not just through the direct impact of his ideas but also through the impact of his unconventional thinking which inspired students and other scientists to think outside the box.
As scientifically brilliant as Feynman was, Krauss also does not gloss over his professional and personal flaws and this biography is not a hagiography. Professionally, Feynman’s independent spirit meant that he often would not read the literature and would stay away from mainstream interests which his colleagues were pursuing; while this greatly helped him, on more than one occasion it led to him being scooped. At the same time Feynman also did not care about priority and was generous in sharing credit. As for mentoring, while Feynman was a legendary teacher by way of example, unlike his own advisor John Wheeler he left few bonafide graduate students because of his compulsive tendency to solve problems…
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A great addition to the Feynman bookshelf,
This new volume, very well written by one of the best popular authors on physics, fills a gap in the Feynman bookshelf. At one end is the best biography of Feynman, “Genius” by James Gleick, which includes much personal history. At the other, “QED”, by Sylvan Schweber, which covers the entire sweep of the work by Feynman, Dyson, Schwinger, Tomonaga and others on quantum electrodynamics, the centerpiece of Feynman’s legacy.
Krauss writes a mainly scientific biography, and manages to cover this work without mathematical detail, but with well-chosen technical illustrations, which give the flavor of the work. Gleick provides much more on the personal life, and if you have the background, Schweber will fill in the details of QED. (If you want more background on Feynman diagrams, beyond the very good introduction in this book, I recommend “Drawing Theories Apart” by David Kaiser.)
Of course one must also read Feynman’s own popular writings, both his own and those co-authored, and at the undergraduate level I wish I had his “Lectures on Physics” when I was a student in the early 1950′s.
The new Krauss book definitely deserves 5 stars.
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