| Edition |
First edition. |
| Description |
x, 532 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 499-516) and index. |
| Summary |
A genius, a great mathematician once said, performs magic, does things that nobody else could do. To his scientific colleagues, Richard Feynman was a magician of the highest caliber. Architect of quantum theories, enfant terrible of the atomic bomb project, caustic critic of the space shuttle commission, Nobel Prize winner for work that gave physicists a new way of describing and calculating the interactions of subatomic particles, Richard Feynman left his mark on virtually every area of modern physics. Originality was his obsession. Never content with what he knew or with what others knew, Feynman ceaselessly questioned scientific truths. But there was also another side to him, one which made him a legendary figure among scientists. His curiosity moved well beyond things scientific: he taught himself how to play drums, to give massages, to write Chinese, to crack safes. In Genius, James Gleick, author of the acclaimed best-seller Chaos, shows us a Feynman few have seen. He penetrates beyond the gleeful showman depicted in Feynman's own memoirs and reveals a darker Feynman: his ambition, his periods of despair and uncertainty, his intense emotional nature. From his childhood on the beaches and backlots of Far Rockaway and his first tinkering with radios and differential equations to the machine shops at MIT and the early theoretical work at Princeton - work that foreshadowed his famous notion of antiparticles traveling backward in time - to the tragic death of his wife while he was working at Los Alamos, Genius shows how one scientist's vision was formed. As that vision crystallized in work that reinvented quantum mechanics, we see Feynman's impact on the elite particle-physics community, and how Feynman grew to be at odds with the very community that idolized him. Finally, Gleick explores the nature of genius, our obsession with it and why the very idea may belong to another time. Genius records the life of a scientist who has forever changed science - and changed what it means to know something in this uncertain century. |
| Contents |
Far Rockaway. Neither Country nor City. A Birth and a Death. It's Worth It. At School. All Things Are Made of Atoms. A Century of Progress. Richard and Julian -- MIT. The Best Path. Socializing the Engineer. The Newest Physics. Shop Men. Feynman of Course Is Jewish. Forces in Molecules. Is He Good Enough? -- Princeton. A Quaint Ceremonious Village. Folds and Rhythms. Forward or Backward? The Reasonable Man. Mr. X and the Nature of Time. Least Action in Quantum Mechanics. The Aura. The White Plague. Preparing for War. The Manhattan Project. Finishing Up -- Los Alamos. The Man Comes In with His Briefcase. Chain Reactions. The Battleship and the Mosquito Boat. Diffusion. Computing by Brain. Computing by Machine. Fenced In. The Last Springtime. False Hopes. Nuclear Fear. I Will Bide My Time. We Scientists Are Clever -- Cornell. The University at Peace. Phenomena Complex - Laws Simple. They All Seem Ashes. Around a Mental Block. Shrinking the Infinities. Dyson. A Half-Assedly Thought-Out Pictorial Semi-Vision Thing. Schwinger's Glory. My Machines Came from Too Far Away. There Was Also Presented (by Feynman). . . Cross-Country with Freeman Dyson. Oppenheimer's Surrender. Dyson Graphs, Feynman Diagrams. Away to a Fabulous Land -- CalTech. Faker from Copacabana. Alas, the Love of Women! Onward with Physics. A Quantum Liquid. New Particles, New Language. Murray. In Search of Genius. Weak Interactions. Toward a Domestic Life. From QED to Genetics. Ghosts and Worms. Room at the Bottom. All His Knowledge. The Explorers and the Tourists. The Swedish Prize. Quarks and Partons. Teaching the Young. Do You Think You Can Last On Forever? Surely You're Joking! A Disaster of Technology. |
| Subject |
Feynman, Richard P. (Richard Phillips), 1918-1988.
|
|
Feynman, Richard P. (Richard Phillips), 1918-1988.
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Physics -- History -- 20th century.
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Physicists -- United States -- Biography.
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Physics -- history -- United States.
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Physics -- United States -- Biography.
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| ISBN |
0679408363: $27.50 ($34.50 Can.) |
|
9780679408369 |
|
