Skip to main content

Richard Feynman: A Life in Science - John and Mary Gribbin ****

Feynman is a personal hero of mine and I have made it something of a mission in life to consume all the books, audiobooks, videos, podcasts and whatever other media available that has something to do with Feynman. To me, he is endlessly fascinating. With that said, it is easy to be disappointed by many books that have been written about him. There is a tendency to focus on his wild tales without adding any context to them, while certainly not telling them better than the man does himself. There are also many texts that try to capture the man and bypass, to a large extent, his enormous scientific output and why it was important. Some of this is due to Feynman himself who spread so many amusing tales about his adventures, but it is a disservice to those who are particularly interested in physics, and in science in general. This is because Feynman had incredibly important things to say about the nature of science and its limitations, and why it is a beautiful and wondrous thing because of its nature and its limitations. He also demonstrated through his work and, more importantly, how he approached his work, how science should be conducted and what it is to really know something. 

The two books that I have read that have been the best at trying to capture as much of the man as possible, both his irreverent personal side and his scientific achievements, are James Gleick’s excellent biography Genius and Lawrence Krauss’s Quantum Man. The former capturing Feynman’s interesting life and the latter exposing his gigantic contributions to physics and science at large. 

This book written by the Gribbins, however, is the best at combining both elements of the personal and the scientific. John Gribbin is one of the best science writers around and demonstrates, yet again, his splendid grasp of the importance of the science and ability to describe it for the lay reader. The book flows spectacularly well, alternating by chapter between Feynman’s personal life and more in-depth analysis of his scientific exploits. It is stated, and obvious, that Gribbin is an admirer of Feynman, but he treats his subject with as much objectivity as one can expect. Gribbin convincingly argues that had Feynman been faster to publish several of his projects it is conceivable that he could have won at least one more Nobel Prize and possibly more than that for his contributions to modern physics. 

Beyond winning the prize for quantum electrodynamics (QED), Feynman made enormous contributions to the understanding of superfluidity, weak interaction, quantum chromodynamics (QCD) and a quantum theory of gravity. Interestingly, though the book was published in 1998, the chapter on Feynman’s long attempt to develop a quantum theory of gravity chimes well with the recent discoveries by the LIGO project. Had Feynman been in better health and lived longer, it is conceivable that he would have made a major breakthrough in this area as well. 

Another aspect of the book that is excellent is the inclusion of quotes from Feynman’s many televised appearances and recordings to illustrate or make a point. The book feels distinctly modern in that it relies on a wide array of source material to provide a more complete picture of the man and his science.

Though it is out of print, it is relatively easy to find good used copies through online booksellers. I would urge anyone who has a deep, or even passive, interest in Feynman to read this book, as it really is a great biography of one of the most interesting and important figures in science of the last century.
Paperback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Ian Bald
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Introducing Artificial Intelligence – Henry Brighton & Howard Selina ****

It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge  Introducing  … series (a vast range of books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as …  for Beginners , puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point. Funnily,  Introducing Artificial Intelligence  is both a good and bad example of the series. Let’s get the bad bits out of the way first. The illustrators of these books are very variable, and I didn’t particularly like the pictures here. They did add something – the illustrations in these books always have a lot of information content, rather than being window dressing – but they seemed more detached from the text and rather lacking in the oomph the best versions have. The other real problem is that...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more