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No Ordinary Magician
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10094 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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4 / 1993 |
2,769 Words |
| Author
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Charles Sheffield
Charles Sheffield is the author of several science fiction
novels as well as numerous articles and essays on physics and
space science. |
GENIUS
The Life and Science of Richard Feynman
James Gleick
New York: Pantheon Books, 1992
531 pp., $27.50
When I was ready to complete my undergraduate degree in mathematics, I went to see my supervisor. He was the astronomer Fred Hoyle (now Sir Fred Hoyle). We discussed my interest in changing in fields from mathematics to physics, a decision with which he agreed. Then he gave me some advice as to subjects. "Astronomy is a good choice," he said, "in which there is plenty of important work to be done. However, I recommend against your going into quantum field theory, because anything that you do there Feynman will have thought of first."
That was a revelation to me. At the time, I regarded Hoyle himself as a man who knew everything worth knowing in mathematics and physics, and as the premier British astrophysicist of his generation. It was a shock to learn that there were people to whom he, too, bowed the knee.
It was also the first time that I had ever heard of Richard Feynman as a person. Prior to Hoyle's comment, Feynman was no more than the name of curious set of diagrams used in making scattering calculations in nuclear physics.
My meeting with Hoyle came years before Feynman's Nobel Prize, decades before Feynman's own best selling anecdotal books, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think? and generations before the national media publicity that resulted from Feynman's role on the mission investigating the Challenger spacecraft disaster. But I suspect that my experience was not as unusual as it seemed at the time. Thousands of people, like me, heard of Feynman's extraordinary abilities through the scientific grapevine, spread across every university in all countries. It would be possible to hold a good debate as to whether Feynman was the most original physicist of his time; what is not arguable is that he was the most talked about, the most colorful, the most exotic, the one about whom more anecdotes were told than anyone else: Feynman the impulsive, Feynman the unpredictable, Feynman the lighting calculator, Feynman the superlative teacher, Feynman the safecracker, Feynman the womanizer, Feynman the bongo-drum player; in short, Feynman the legend.
A biography of Feynman must describe a complicated,
...
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