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Book Cover for: Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, James Gleick

Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

James Gleick

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Nominee:National Book Award -Nonfiction (1992)
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-physicscommunity, 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 cha

Book Details

  • Publisher: Vintage
  • Publish Date: Nov 2nd, 1993
  • Pages: 560
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.05in - 5.19in - 1.15in - 1.23lb
  • EAN: 9780679747048
  • Categories: • Science & Technology• Physics - Quantum Theory• Nanoscience

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About the Author

JAMES GLEICK is our leading chronicler of science and technology, the best-selling author of Chaos: Making a New Science, Isaac Newton, and The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. His books have been translated into thirty languages.

www.around.com

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What people are saying

Mentioner image for: Lev Reyzin
Lev Reyzin
@lreyzin
2 years

Professor, https://t.co/HSHOQfSuMi. Site director, https://t.co/RbcEQzRCQ8. Machine learning, data science and cs theory researcher. Lover of freedom and anxious for the fray.

@paulg @tommycollison Have you read James Gleick’s Genius? I liked it even more than Feynman’s own books (which are also great).

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Mentioner image for: Tiago Forte
Tiago Forte
@fortelabs
2 years

The Second Brain Guy | Learn how to build one for yourself: https://t.co/vPhQg4soKp | Writing: https://t.co/x2KgFyuwlk | Videos: https://t.co/KkZYQItAvX

He believed that one sentence contained an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking were applied (From Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick)

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Mentioner image for: Paul Mainwood
Paul Mainwood
@PaulMainwood
2 years

Used to study physics. Now my job title has "strategy" in it.

@Quasilocal (Refs: James Gleick, Genius, pp. 378; David and Judith Goodstein, Feynman's Lost Lecture, Engineering and Science 1996). https://t.co/2VuvNsry4p

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