Quantum Man: Richard Feynman's Life in Science

by Lawrence M. Krauss

A gripping new scientific biography of the revered Nobel Prize–winning physicist (and curious character). Perhaps the greatest physicist of the second half of the twentieth century, Richard Feynman changed the way we think about quantum mechanics, the most perplexing of all physical theories. Here Lawrence M. Krauss, himself a theoretical physicist and best-selling author, offers a unique scientific biography: a rollicking narrative coupled with clear and novel expositions of science at the limits. An immensely colorful persona in and out of the office, Feynman revolutionized our understanding of nature amid a turbulent life. Krauss presents that life―from the death of Feynman’s childhood sweetheart during the Manhattan Project to his reluctant rise as a scientific icon―as seen through the science, providing a new understanding of the legacy of a man who has fascinated millions. An accessible reflection on the issues that drive physics today, Quantum Man captures the story of a man who was willing to break all the rules to tame a theory that broke all the rules.

Genres: Science, Biography, Physics, Nonfiction, History, Biography Memoir, Audiobook

368 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

Lawrence Maxwell Krauss is a Canadian-American theoretical physicist and cosmologist who taught at Arizona State University (ASU), Yale University, and Case Western Reserve University. He founded ASU's Origins Project in 2008 to investigate fundamental questions about the universe and served as the project's director.
Krauss is an advocate for public understanding of science, public policy based on sound empirical data, scientific skepticism, and science education. An anti-theist, Krauss seeks to reduce the influence of what he regards as superstition and religious dogma in popular culture. Krauss is the author of several bestselling books, including The Physics of Star Trek (1995) and A Universe from Nothing (2012), and chaired the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Board of Sponsors.
Upon investigating allegations about sexual misconduct by Krauss, ASU determined that Krauss had violated university policy, and did not renew his Origins Project directorship for a third term in July 2018. Krauss retired as a professor at ASU in May 2019, at the end of the following academic year. He currently serves as president of The Origins Project Foundation. Krauss hosts The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss and publishes a blog titled Critical Mass.

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this book very good at explaining Feynman’s contributions to physics from the context of the history of the science and ideas. It was a great complement to Glieck’s wonderful “Genius”, a biography which focused on the special qualities of his mind and personality. Krauss is a physicist himself, so the advantage here is his ability to convey the science as much as possible (without resorting to equations), and in the process he elucidates the paradoxical blend of individual genius, collaboration, and competition that drives progress. I came away with a deep respect for how Feymann’s ideas fueled not only his own successes with a theory of the electromagenetic force but seminal influences on work of others on all the other fundamental forces (strong and weak nuclear forces and gravity). Also, I understand better his pioneering work on superfluidity (which led to big advances by others in superconducters), foundational thinking about nanotechnology, and advances in computations science and prospects for quantum computing.

Like many ordinary citizens of the world, there is only so far I can get toward truly understanding the science of quantum physics. I was a biology major required to take physics in college in the 70’s, and I struggled through with a C in a standard intro course. But for a make-up class, I wrangled permission to take an intro to quantum mechanics and somehow took to it enough to garner an ”A”. I succeeded in imbibing the basics accepted at that time for accounting for the electromagnetic force and the yawning gap in attaining Einstein’s dream of a unified theory encompassing the other forces with a coherent scheme. I admired the innovation of “Feynmann diagram” which allowed one to visualize an interaction between particles in collision with tracking of exchange of photons to mediate the forces leading to changes in trajectories before and after. His diagrams combined with his path integral approach was seen by Feynmann as mathematical tricks that served to bypass (“normalize”) a lot of infinities that Dirac discovered as spoiling the success of the Copenhagen school model when one applies probability wave descriptions to situations beyond a simple hydrogen atom hanging out (in my dim understanding). But Krauss seems to favor the school of thought that the tools themselves, once found to be essential for the theories of the weak and strong nuclear forces, somehow represent a fundamental theoretical capturing of how reality works.


Simplest Feynmann diagram showing a collision between two particles, p, with exchange of momentum k mediated by a photon indicated with a dotted line

The picture that Krauss paints reveals Feynmann as quite collegial in many ways and driven more by the common enterprise of finding principles than in seeking selfish glory and ownership of original ideas. Yet he was also quite a loner and driven by a form of hubris that didn’t trust the work of others unless he could derive their advances in his own way. He often neglected advances with other approaches that might have helped his own progress. By the time he was 15 he had taught himself most branches of mathematics and his own ways of deriving proofs. He is famous for applying so-called path integrals as a mathematical approach to handling all the probability wave dynamics between one point and another, which proved essential for a Nobel-winning breakthrough in the quantum model for the electromagnetic force known as quantum electrodynamics. Krauss cites an early kernel of his methods in his high school fascination with the calculus innovations of Lagrange and Hamilton for describing pathways of motion based on accounting for continual interplay of potential and kinetic energy.

Where I fail in confidence is in my understanding of the status of virtual particles and the energy inherent in a vacuum. Feynmann’s modeling made use of brief creation of particle pairs such as a photon and anti-photon, which could then annihilate each other with no violation of conservation laws. The virtual particles can have negative energy, and mathematically an antimatter particle can sometimes be described as like its counterpart running backward in time. What I can grasp is like Dirac’s prediction of antimatter and its confirmation by experiment, the application of quantum probability treatment to the nuclear forces by Feynmann’s Caltech colleague Gell-Mann predicted a host of particles similarly confirmed in high-energy collider studies. There were a couple of decades where there was a zoo of particles being predicted and discovered, and it all seemed mad. The solution of multiple quarks with properties of charm, color, and spin I now just shake my head over in dumb amazement. The final count I read in Wiki is 61, all elegantly systematized. The take home message I can manage is all forces are conceived as mediation by the quantized energy packets/particles, photons for the electromagnetic force, gluons for the strong nuclear force, and quarks for the weak force now integrated with electromagnetic as a unified electroweak force. Feynmann had his own scheme called partons, but he ultimately acknowledged Gell-Mann’s conception of quarks as more comprehensive. He dabbled with parallel quantum field representations of gravity mediated by gravitrons, but no clue to how to experimentally prove of their existence has been developed yet.

The book integrates coverage of his personal development, including his wives, his womanizing, his affinity for drumming, his humor, and his dedication to teaching. But such delving is not a strength of this book. The Glieck biography and his own memoirs (e.g. “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynmann”) are more satisfying in that regard. If you feel ready to be walked through a lot of physics without the challenge of equations (and thus without hope of attaining a deep appreciation of the subject), or have any interest in how science evolves from individual and collaborative achievements, then I bet you can gain more from this read than you might expect.

[Darwin8u · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really good short history of Feynman. I appreciate Krauss also including subjects (Nanotech, quantum computers, etc) where Feynman's questions or early exploration led other physicists to win the Nobel prize or whole new fields to grow.

Feynman's curiosity, integrity and personality make him one of my top 5 physicists of the 20th Century. He was an icon's icon during an era where physics seemed to produce new icons every year. Krauss, like Feynman, has the ability to communicate the complexities of physics in a way the amateur and the curious can understand.

My only gripe with this book is it is part of a series, but for some reason Norton/Atlas Books was like lets make this one look absolutely different than the other dozen books. Obnoxious in the extreme.

[Will Ansbacher · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a really good book but I can see why it got so many relatively poor reviews. Krauss explains Feynmann's work very well, and provides an arresting and insightful account of how his thinking developed over the decades. But it is about physics, not just the man and those aspects of Feynmann's life that made him an internationally-recognized name. I heard Feynmann lecture a couple of times myself and it's true, he was as dynamic and awe-inspiring as Krauss makes clear; on the other hand I have to admit I didn't fully understand the lectures either.
But it is such a joy to read a biography that isn't written by a popularizer who doesn't understand the subject matter enough to be other than an uncritical booster, that it really is worth the effort to read this bio.

[Carl Rollyson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nearly anyone writing about Richard Feynman is bound to seem staid compared with the man himself. The physicist, who won a Nobel Prize for explaining the interaction between electrons and protons in terms of quantum mechanics, was among the century's most celebrated popularizers of scientific thinking. His public talks were transformed into entertaining books like "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" (1985), and he was known for stunningly simple explanations, such as when he explained the disintegration of the space shuttle Challenger using a glass of ice water and one of the rocket booster's defective carbon o-rings. He was also famous for his quirky interests outside of physics—dancing, drawing, bongo playing, a devotion to strip clubs.

Lawrence M. Krauss is a physicist, and "Quantum Man" is part of a series dedicated to lives in science, meaning that much of the book consists of technical explanations that will be challenging for general readers. Mr. Krauss often seems to be addressing physics students. While it is undoubtedly important for readers to grasp Feynman's scientific work, Mr. Krauss rarely uses the sort of crystal-clear language with which Feynman himself used to enlighten listeners. Here, for example, is Feynman's introduction to physics for undergraduate students as recorded in the "The Feynman Lectures on Physics: The New Millennium Edition" (2010):

"If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms—little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.

It would be misleading to imply that Feynman's lectures are always as lucid as his one-sentence definition of the atomic hypothesis. But in many cases Mr. Krauss could have simply availed himself of his subject's own words.

Furthermore, even in a biography devoted to a man of science, the man has to emerge in situ, and such is rarely the case in Mr. Krauss's book. Perhaps because so much has already been written by and about Feynman, Mr. Krauss takes his subject's personality for granted. As Feynman himself liked to counsel young scientists: Never rely on the experiments of others. A biographer of Feynman should approach this most unusual genius by doing something fresh.

Mr. Krauss certainly finds room to discuss Feynman's offbeat personality, but he refuses to speculate on how it might have influenced his science. To be sure, Feynman disparaged the notion that his interests outside of science had anything to do with his physics. But such denial should serve to challenge the biographer: Feynman never worried about looking like a fool—as he said countless times to anyone who would listen—and neither should his biographer.

Take Feynman's desire to understand how electrons can behave as particles, as waves and as both, all at the same time—and can even be in two different places at once. Such behavior is not possible according to classical physics, but quantum mechanics suggest that it is. Feynman may have understood such logic—at least in part—because he retained a child-like quality, a sense of play, throughout his life. In a child's world you can be here and elsewhere at the same time—in Kansas and with the Wizard of Oz.

Linkages of these sorts can in fact be forged by reading Mr. Krauss alongside Feynman's own posthumous publications, such as "The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen Scientist" (1998) and "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out" (1999), in which Feynman discourses about himself and his intellectual adventures. Usually the biographer serves as a kind of check on a subject like Feynman, who, it is presumed, mythologized himself as most autobiographers do. But in this curious case, Feynman has to be consulted to make sense of his biographer's narrative.

James Gleick's "Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman" (1992) is a more supple treatment of the same basic material. To pick just one example, Mr. Krauss does not mention until page 210 that Feynman's sister, Joan, was also a physicist, while from Mr. Gleick we learn that she served as his lab assistant early in his career. Even so, neither volume quite gives readers the sense that they have penetrated beneath the flamboyant physicist's public pose—if that's what it was. Could Feynman really have been as genial and entertaining a fellow as he seemed? After all, Mr. Gleick notes that many of the justly famous Feynman sayings that seemed so spontaneous in his lectures and interviews were in fact labored over in private.

Yet consulting his selected letters, "Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From the Beaten Track" (2005), reveals the same amusing, shrewd character, evident on every page. This correspondence demonstrates that Feynman was not only a great monologist but a good teacher and interlocutor. One of the best letters is Feynman's reply to a publisher complaining that physics professors were selling complimentary copies of textbooks sent to them. Feynman argues that the very sending of the books accomplishes the publisher's purpose: advertising his wares. If the re-selling of promotional copies prevented the publisher from making a decent profit, Feynman advised, he should stop sending them. As for himself, Feynman concluded, he returned unsolicited books—but now, come to think of it, the publisher had given him a new idea about what to do with them.

Besides entertaining himself, why would Feynman spend so much time on such trivial correspondence? (The letter to the publisher is by no means atypical.) This question Mr. Krauss, for one, never asks. When he observes behavior in Feynman that he does not understand, he simply calls it "paradoxical." Perhaps the point about Feynman's character that this reveals is that nothing—at least potentially—was beneath his notice. Just as Feynman wanted to explore the constituents of the atom, he wanted to fathom other minds and would happily engage, say, a member of the John Birch Society in a discussion of the U. S. Constitution rather than simply dismiss extremist views—or even ridiculous ones. There is a lesson there about curiosity that his biographers would do well to heed.

[Ira (SF Words of Wonder) · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is no doubt that Feynman was brilliant and influential in the world of theoretical physics, but he was not without his flaws. Krauss does a great job examining Feynman’s life and explaining why he was so special. I much preferred hearing someone else talking about Feynman than I did hearing Feynman talk about Feynman.

[Louise Silk · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was not at all familiar with Richard Feynman until reading this very down-to-earth understandable biography that brings out the essence of a true scientific genius in the league of Einstein.

Krauss details Feynman's scientific contributions, their relevance, importance and uniqueness in fairly easy to understand layman's terms. He also delves into Feynman's more publicly known activities, including his bongo playing, nude painting and his famous demonstration of the failure of the O-rings in the Challenger space shuttle disaster.

Feynman's great influence on physics was not just the direct impact of his original ideas but also his compulsive need to work out everything from first principles, understanding it inside out, backwards and forwards and from as many different angles as possible-to think outside the box. He insisted on honesty and truth in science, reporting the negative as well as the positive results.

Richard Feynman was a scientist with striking intellectual originality that allowed him to look at the physical world in wholly unanticipated new ways. The biography does a good job of demonstrating that true success needs fearless determination and an unwavering belief in truth.

[Ibrahim Majed · Rating 5 out of 5]

كتاب جميل ورائع .. تعيش فيه قصة عالم فيزيائي ساعدنا على ان نغير نظرتنا للعالم دون ان نعرف .. جعل حياتنا اسهل من خلال افكاره الثورية في عالم التقنية ..

الكتاب يتطرق للمواضيع والمشكلات الفيزيائية التي تعرض لها فاينمان بشيء من التفصيل .. لذا من الجيد ان تكون ملما ببعض اسياسيات الفيزياء الحديثة قبل قراءته

[Vlad · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent scientific biography of Feynman. Going thru the Los Alamos years, improvement on Dirac's interpretation of QED, the rise of anti-particles, the Theory of Positrion 1949, the work on quantum field theory.

Creation of Feynman diagrams.
Vacuum polarization.
Radiation is photons.
Friendship and work with Hans Bethe.
Lamb shift calculations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamb_shift
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelter_...
Space-time approach to QED

Feynman on Scientific Method: http://youtu.be/EYPapE-3FRw

Improvement on Dirac: how quantum mechanics can be expressed in terms of a Langrangian

Probability amplitudes for paths, weight for probability is expressed in total action; add up all weights for the separate paths

relativity and QM require a theory than can handle a posibility of infinite virtual particles at a given instant

1963 Roger Penrose: past the event horizon falls into a singularity (infinity)

Julian Schwinger approach to QED at the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocono_C...
Freeman Dyson's first papers in 1949 using Feynman diagrams: unfies Schqinger, Feynman and Takana
The Slotnick incident
removing infinities from QED
the emergence of masons, condensed physics (low temperatures)
Feynman interested in Bose-Einstein condensation transitions
Murray Gell-Mann: new symmetries, quarks

Alan Guth: originator of inflation

"The game I play is a very interesting one. It's imagination in a tight straigtjacket".

Scanning tunneling microscopes and atomic force microscopes

Tsung-Dao Lee (born November 24, 1926) is a Chinese-born American physicist, well known for his work on parity violation, the Lee Model, particle physics, relativistic heavy ion (RHIC) physics, nontopological solitons and soliton stars.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chen_Nin...

weak interaction violates parity, beta decay

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_M... chair of Rochester Conference
In 1957, he and George Sudarshan proposed a V-A ("vector" minus "axial vector") Lagrangian for weak interactions, which was later independently discovered by Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann.

The Feynman Gell-Mann paper on V-A

Feynman and Gell-Mann interrupting young Steven Weinberg who later unified weak interactions with electromagentism

Feynman lectures in 50s at Caltech

The Feynman Lectures on Physics is a 1964 physics textbook by Richard P. Feynman, Robert B. Leighton and Matthew Sands

The NBC interview

The Character of Physical Law book based on the 6 Messengers Lectures

A quantum world and a classical world can never be equivalent.

1985 paper: no quantum computation can be done without loss of heat/energy

Group theory, Gell-Mann, 1961, polyhedra, SU3, rotations, change particles into each other, "8 fold way", Buddha's 8 way, decouplet => new particle called "omega-minus", "nuclear democracy"

Feynman at http://www6.slac.stanford.edu/
Are partons real?

gauge symmetry ensures that the photon is massless

quantum chromodynamics, YangMills
David Gross and Frank Wilcheck -> QCD can explain strong interactions?
=> asymptotic freedom

confinement not fully proved to date

path integral formulation is the only formulation now

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good book about Feynman that complements other biographies of him by focusing almost completely on the actual science. Krauss is skilled at explaining that science for the lay reader, but I suspect this book works much better as a reading experience. I was trying it as an audio book, and I think that was a mistake. I found myself having to go back a lot as I kept missing details and losing the thread.

This is definitely a book I'll revisit as a print/e-book, though. I would recommend others try it that way, and give the audio book a pass.

[J.D. Steens · Rating 2 out of 5]

As in other accounts, Feynman as a person is interesting. In this account of Feynman's life, Krauss does a good job. Krauss lost me quickly, however, in his discussion of Feynman's quantum physics. Acknowledging that particle physics is a tough nut to crack, this is not a book, perhaps, for the general reader.

The best part of this book was toward the end when Krauss describes Feynman's attempt to seam particle physics with gravitation and general relativity, which Feynman called a quantum theory of gravitation. Krauss notes that while general relativity had become “an entirely self-contained field that could be understood apart from almost all of the rest of physics,” Feynman “rightly believed such a separation was artificial.” With gravitational waves, Feynman believed that “general relativity is not that different from the theories describing the other forces of nature. It can be described by the exchange of fundamental particles just like the rest.”

The discussion of Feynman's “quantum cosmology” where the universe is viewed as operating via quantum mechanics was difficult to follow, but was tantalizing, as was the discussion and statement that “the total energy of the entire universe might be precisely zero.” Boiled down, is the cosmos about energy differentials and balance?

[Ahmed Fawzy · Rating 3 out of 5]

بدأت قراءة كتاب "ريتشارد فاينمان .. حياته فى العلم" فقد كنت أطمح لمعرفة جوانب حياتية مر بها فاينمان، ولكن الكتاب صدمنى..

سبب اختيارى لهذا الكتاب هو سعيى لمعرفة كيفية نشأ ريتشارد فاينمان ومالسببب فى شغفه وعشقه للعلم والمعرفة رغم كون أبواه شخصان بسيطان غير أن أبيه كان يُجْلسه فى حضنه -وهو صغيرا- ليقرأ له من الموسوعة البريطانية وكان يُترج له ما يقرأه بقدر ما يستطيع بشكل يستوعبه الطفل ويحبه ويستمتع به

ولكن أحبطت عندما توغلت فى الكتاب أكثر وأكثر لأنى لم أجد ما أتمناه سوى فى كلمات بسيطة جدا نسبتها لا تقدر شيئا، فالكتاب علمى بشكل كبير حيث يتناول إسهامات فاينمان العلمية وكيف ساهم فيها ومن شارك معه فى ذلك، فالكتاب تناول الحياة العلمية لريتشارد فاينمان وأهمل -إلا فى مواضع بسيطة جدا- الحديث عن كيفية نشأة شغفه العلمى ونموه لكى تنتج تلك الشخصية العبقرية بإسهاماتها العظيمة

أنصح المهتمين بفيزياء الكم والجسيمات وميكانيكا الكم بقراءة هذا الكتاب فسيفيدهم فى التعرف على إسهامات هذا الرجل فى تلك المجالات.

هذا رابط فيديو لريتشارد فاينمان يتحدث فيه عن نفسه وعن متعة المعرفة
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eYve...

[Javier Santaolalla · Rating 4 out of 5]

Muy buena introducción a la vida y obra de Richard Feynman, uno de los mayores genios de la historia. En esta biografía el profesor Krauss indaga no solo en sus avatares, su frenética vida, sino que profundiza en su obra. Se analizan sus logros científicos con detalle y precisión, poniendo en relieve la originalidad e importancia científica de su obra.
Muy buen libro, una de mis principales fuentes para el vídeo sobre la vida de Feynman:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5l5r...

[Miguel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love how well this book married the scientific and personal life of Feynman, because they really could not be seen as separate at all. As someone exploring the field and meeting the people within it, it’s often quite fun to notice how personality traits can correlate with what scientific problems they like to face and how they like to tackle them.

Feynman’s love for Arline, and his subsequent malaise and sense of being lost after her death were particularly heartbreaking. His conversion to womanizer being an escape from his deep-seated loneliness can somewhat amusingly be seen to parallel his forays into other fields of physics when particle physics work didn’t pan out as much as he wanted to.

The author makes some very insightful points about how sometimes the seemingly more unintuitive ways of tackling physics like the Lagrangian and path integral formalisms, may be seen as more than just mathematical tools. Perhaps these are more fundamental than our balancing of forces etc., because of how these Lagrangians better handle the relativity of simultaneity etc.

Also cool to get a better idea of the history of QED and QCD, while having the concepts explained quite well at this level. QED gets stronger when you get to smaller scales and away from the virtual particle background, while QCD gets weaker due to asymptotic freedom.

Didn’t think I’d enjoy the condensed matter stuff as much, but there was much clarity in seeing Bose-Einstein condensates as a single quantum state. The symmetries of switching identical particles being why you aren’t able to generate enough of a perturbation to lead to a jump to the lowest available energy state was something I had to keep going back to at times, but when it clicked it was gold.

I probably would have appreciated a bit more critical of a look at Feynman’s showmanship, and what his building of the Feynman mythology was perhaps trying to hide or do.

[Bryan Higgs · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading this book. I had already read the very good biography of Feynman, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, but some time ago. This book goes into Feynman's physics in more detail, and with more context, than "Genius", which, from my perspective as a Ph.D. in Physics and one who has read fairly widely about Physics since retiring from a job that took me away from Physics for more than 30 years, is a good thing. However, I can understand how some others with less of a physics background might have found this a little tough going (although I don't think the book contains a single equation).

When I was an undergraduate in Physics, one of the recommended books was Feynman's classic The Feynman Lectures on Physics, which I found quite readable. Interestingly, it was never an assigned book in any of our courses. The more I learned about Feynman, the more interesting a character he became in my mind. In fact, when I applied to graduate schools, I wrote to him in the hope that I could become one of his graduate students (ah, the innocence of a callow youth!). Therein lies another story that I won't bore you with in this review. Suffice it to say that Feynman was then, and still is, a hero of mine.

In the intervening years I have learned more about Feynman, and have come to the conclusion that I probably would not have enjoyed being one of his graduate students, because I would not have been of sufficient caliber, and because he was not known for his support of graduate students.

This book gave a little more insight to his non-conformist genius, and made me aware of how influential he was in so many areas other than those for which he was awarded his Nobel Prize. I knew he had been in at the very beginning of nanotechnology, and this book filled in some of those details.

Overall, I highly recommend this book, as long as you are prepared to read and try to understand the physics parts.

[Mohamed al-Jamri · Rating 4 out of 5]

عنوان الكتاب: رجل الكوانتم - حياة ريتشارد فاينمان في العلم
المؤلف: لورنس كراس
عدد الصفحات: 368 - عشر ساعات ككتاب مسموع
سنة النشر: 2011
التقييم: ثلاث نجوم ونصف

هذا الكتاب عبارة عن كتاب علمي وسيرة ذاتية في نفس الوقت حيث أنه يتناول حياة وإنجازات عالم الفيزياء الشهير ريتشارد فاينمان والذي حاز على جائزة نوبل. يركز الكتاب بشكل أساسي على حياته العلمية.

تبدأ القصة منذ طفولة فاينمان ومن ثم دوره في مشروع مانهانتن وهو المشروع الذي أدى إلى صنع القنبلة النووية ومن ثم لاسهاماته في توحيد الميكانيكا الكمية مع الطاقة الكهرومغناطيسية. يتطرق الكتاب بشكل بسيط لحياة فاينمان الشخصية وزواجه إلا أن عامل التشويق غائب وبعض الأمور في العلمية غير واضحة ويصعب فهمها على القارئ غير المتخصص حيث أنه لا يعطي خلفيات كافية حول المواضيع التي يذكرها.

النصف الثاني من الكاتب أفضل بكثير من ناحية التشويق وإعطاء مساحة أكبر لحياة فاينمان، كما أن المواضيع العملية التي تطرق لها مثل الثقوب السوداء نظرية الأوتار سهلة الفهم، على عكس تعقيدات الميكانيكا الكمية.

فاينمان شخص رائع ومميز على المستويين العلمي والشخصي وقراءة سيرته الذاتية كان أمرًا رائغًا بحق.

[Jason · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is an interesting combination of biography and introductory physics. The life of Richard Feynman is intertwined with discussions of physics. While it might make for slow going for some, I quickly came to see that, to understand Feynman's life and work, one needs to have even a minor grasp upon and understanding of the questions with which he grappled throughout his life. Krauss does a fairly good job of keeping the physics at the level of the general reader, though I thought there were times where the discussion became bogged down in details and asides.

I have not read other biographies of Feynman, so I cannot comment on how this compares to them. As a basic introduction to Feynman and the physics questions of the twentieth century, it's pretty decent.

[Ulla Al-Najjar · Rating 3 out of 5]

ميكانيكا الكم, تكامل المسارات, تقنية النانو, وحتى في الجاذبية والفضاء والحاسوب. وغيرها الكثير مما اسهم في احداث تغيير عظيم في العلم ستجد لفاينمان مشاركة في اكتشافه او اكتشافه كاملاً
ريتشارد فاينمان ذاك الذي جعلنا نفكر خارج الصندوق ونرى العالم كما لم نرهُ من قبل ..
الكتاب سرديٌ بامتياز يسرد فيما يشبه سيرة ذاتية تتناول حياة فاينمان العلمية .
لا اظنه يعد مرجعا كاملاً لما اكتشفه فاينمان فهو لم يسلط الضوء بشكل كافٍ على اهم اكتشافات فاينمان في تقنية النانو وانما اكتفى بذكرها في بضع صفحات, يذكر الكتاب ايضاً كوكبة من علماء الفيزياء بشتى مجالاتها ممن واكبوا فاينمان وكذلك يذكر احداثاً طفيفة فيما يتعلق بمشاركة فاينمان في مشروع مانهاتن في صناعة القنبلة النووية ..

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not a full biography, but rather one that attempts to explain, for non-physicists, just why Richard Feynman was and is one of the most important scientists of the twentieth century. Krauss succeeds admirably in assessing Feynman's importance and his outsize influence on physical science which has endured for several decades after his death. Krauss argues convincingly that Feynman's importance will continue to grow as our knowledge of physics grows.

[Michael Huang · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good biography that explains the importance of Feynman’s contribution to physics.

[Tanvirul Islam · Rating 5 out of 5]

ভক্তদের ফাইনম্যান পাঠ শুরু হয় সাধারণত 'শিওরলি ইউ আর জোকিং মিস্টার ফাইনম্যান' দিয়ে। যেখানে আমরা দেখি একজন উচ্ছল প্রতিভাবান তরুণ, একজন নিরন্তর সাধক কীভাবে প্রচন্ড প্রাণশক্তিতে পেরিয়ে যাচ্ছে জীবনের নানা ঘাত প্রতিঘাত। আর সেসব করছে সদাহাস্যে জীবনকে তারিয়ে উপভোগ করতে করতেই। জানা যায় তার নোবেল পুরষ্কার পাবার কথা, কোয়ান্টাম ইলেকট্রোডাইনামিক্স এ তার মৌলিক অবদান পাথ ইনট্রিগাল ফর্মুলেশন, আর ফাইনম্যান ডায়াগ্রাম মেথড সম্পর্কেও টুকটাক ধারনা পাই আমরা। কিন্তু তাই বলে আইনস্টাইন উত্তর সময়ের সর্ব শ্রেষ্ট বিজ্ঞানী হিসাবে কেন ফাইনম্যানের নাম উঠে আসে সেটা এতদিন অজানাই ছিলো। এটা জানতাম যে আমেরিক্যান ফিজিক্যাল সোসাইটিতে দেওয়া এক ভাষণের মাধ্যমে 'ন্যানো টেকনলজি' নামক জ্ঞানের একটা শাখারই জন্ম দিয়েছেন ফাইনম্যান। সূচনা করেছেন কোয়াণ্টাম কম্পিউটিং নিয়ে প্রাথমিক আগ্রহের। তারপরও, এমন গোটা দশেক নোবেল জয়ীকে পাওয়া যাবে যারা একাধিক ক্ষেত্রে মৌলিক অবদান রেখে গেচ্ছেন। তার মধ্যে ফাইনম্যানের নামটা কেমন এত বেশি জ্বল জ্বল করবে? সেই উত্তরই পাওয়া গেল লরেন্স ক্রাউসের কোয়ান্টাম ম্যান বইটা পড়ে। ফাইনম্যানের কাজও জীবন নিয়ে আরো কয়েকটি প্রখ্যাতজীবনি আছে। সম্ভবত সেগুলো পড়লেও এ ধারণা পাওয়া যেত। তবে এই বইটির আবেদন আলাদা কেননা, এটা লিখেছেনও এ যুগের একজন প্রখ্যাত বিজ্ঞানী। একজন বিজ্ঞানীর চোখে অন্য বিজ্ঞানীর অবদান 'ভক্তি বিবর্জিত' তথা নৈর্বক্তিক হবার সম্ভাবনাই বেশি। সে হিসাবে বইটা নিরাশ করেনি। ফাইনম্যানের ফাইনম্যানের জীবনের গতি প্রকৃতি নিয়ে আগেই জানা ছিলো। বাড়তি পাওনা হিসাবে এ বইটি তার বৈজ্ঞানিক 'জীবনী' তুলে ধরলো আমার সামনে। সেই সাথে QED বাদেও কনডেন্স ম্যাটার ফিজিক্স, পার্টীকেল ফিজিক্স, সুপারকন্ডাক্টিভিটি, সুপার ফ্লুইডিডটি ইত্যাদি নিয়ে তার মৌলিক কাজগুলো জানলাম। জানলাম সেই সময়ের তার সহকর্মী জুলিয়ান সোয়াইগনার, মারে জিলম্যান, ফ্রিম্যান ডাইসনদের সাথে তার বৈজ্ঞানিক লেনাদেনার কথা।

ক্রাউসের মতে ফাইনম্যান অন্যদের থেকে নিজেকে আলাদা করে তুলেছিলেন, সব কিছু 'নিজের মত' করে করার নিরন্তর প্রচেষ্টার মাধ্যমে। তার বড় দুর্নাম ছিলো অন্যদের গবেষণা পত্র না পড়ার ব্যাপারে। কেউ কিছু একটা করেছে শুনলে, সেটা সে নিজের মত করে নিজেই নির্ণয় করত। এটা না করলে তার মতে ঘটনাটা 'বোঝা' হত না। ফাইনম্যানের লেখা বই, ও তার লেকচার শুনলে বোঝা যায়, যে সে 'ফিজিক্যাল ইনটুইশন' কে গুরুত্ব দিতো সবচেয়ে বেশি। ইন ফ্যাক্ট এই ব্যপারটা এত বেশি গুরুত্ব পেয়ে যায় যে অনেক সময় মনে হয় ফাইনম্যান বুঝি গণিতের ব্যাপারে একটু ছাড়ই দিত। কিন্তু এটা জেনে অবাক হতে হয় যে ফাইনম্যান মুখে যাই বলুন না কেন সেই সময়ের অন্যততম গণিতে পারদর্শি বিজ্ঞানী ছিলেন তিনি। বিশ্ববিদ্যালয়ে পড়ার সময়, আন্তবিশ্ববিদ্যালয় গণিত প্রতিযোগিতায় রেকর্ড স্কোর নিয়ে চ্যাম্পিয়ন হয়েছিলেন। জাগ্রত প্রতিটি মুহুর্ত হাজার হাজার পাতার গাণিতিক হিসাব করে যেতেন। এবং একবার একটা সমস্যা অনেক খেটেখুটে সমাধান করার পর, সেটা করার ইনটুইটিভ উপায় বের করতেন আরো অনেক খেটে খুটে। যেখানে অন্য কেউ হলে হয়ত প্রথমবার সমাধান পেয়েই খ্যান্ত দিত। তার গণিত করার অভ্যাস এতই 'মহামারি আকার' ধরণ করেছিলো যে তার স্ত্রীর অফিশিয়াল ডিভোর্স ফাইলে উল্লখে ছিলো, ফাইনম্যান সারাক্ষ্ণ মাথার ভিতর ক্যালকুলাস করতে থাকে। সংসারে কোনো মন নেই।

ফাইনম্যানের ধারণাগুলো কেমন যুগান্তকারী ছিলো তার উদাহরণ হচ্ছে, প্রতি-কণিকারা আসলে সাধারণ কণিকাই, যারা সময়ের বিপরীত দিকে চলছে! এই ধারণা প্রবক্তা ফাইনম্যান। অর্থাৎ, আমাদের সময় যেমন বর্তমান থেকে ভবিষ্যতে ধাবিত হচ্ছে, কাল যদি এন্টিম্যাটার দিয়ে তৈরি কোনো ব্যক্তির দেখা পাই, সে ধাবিত হচ্ছে বর্তমান থেকে অতীতের দিকে। এরকম একটা কল্পবিজ্ঞানকে হারমানা ধারণাকে গাণিতিক ভিত্তিতে প্রতিষ্ঠা করার জন্য যতটূকু বৈজ্ঞানিক প্রতিভা প্রয়োজন, তার সবটুকুই ছিলো ফাইনম্যানের। কোয়ান্টাম মেকানিক্সকে আতুরঘর থেকে তুলে বর্তমান স্টান্ডার্ট মডেলে পৌছে দেবার পিছনে ফাইনম্যানের কিছু মৌলিক ধারণা কাজে লেগেছে। একইভাবে ব্লাকহোল, কিংবা হকিং রেডিয়েশন এর আবিষ্কারের অনেক ধারণার পিছনের 'ইন্সপিরেশন এর' সূত্রপাতও ফাইনম্যানের হাত ধরেই। ফাইনম্যানের একটা বদ অভ্যাস ছিলো, কোনো ব্যাপারের মৌলিক ধারণাগুলো নিজে সন্তোষজনক ভাবে ফর্মুলেট করতে পারলেও সেটা পাবলিশ করত না। হয়তো কলিগ ছাত্রদের বলে দিল, ব্যাস ওটুকুই। নইলে হয়তো আরো অনেক কিছুর সাথেই মৌলিক প্রবক্তা হিসাবে ফাইনমানের নাম জুড়ে থাকত। তার সমসাময়িক বিজ্ঞানীরা যারা এখনও জীবিত আছেন, তাদের মুখে তাই ফাইনম্যানের প্রশংসার কোনো শেষ নেই। লরেন্স ক্রাউসও এই উপসংহারই টেনেছেন যে শুধু একটা মাত্র নোবেল জয়ী কাজের জন্যই নয়, ফাইনম্যানের সম্পূর্ণ ভিন্ন আলোয় সবকিছুকে দেখার নিরন্তর প্রয়াস পদার্থবিজ্ঞানকে যে অভাবনীয় অগ্রগতির পথে এগিয়ে নিয়েছে, সেটাই ফাইনম্যানকে নিয়ে গেছে তার নিজস্ব উচ্চতায়।

[M A Spiro · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is about theoretical physicist Richard Feynman and is written by Lawrence Krauss, who is also a theoretical physicist. Krauss says his book is "accessible," but I strongly disagree. To me accessible means that the content could be read by a lot of different people and still be appreciated. I think that even people who are knowledgeable in physics would have trouble following this book. I listened as a an audio book, which probably made it even harder to follow. The central focus of the book is Feynman's major scientific achievements and the processes by which he arrived at his conclusions (or lack thereof). It also talks a little bit about his personal life, his work on the Manhattan Project and his interactions with others in the scientific community. But mostly the book returns again and again (I think) to Feynman's attempt to remove the infinities from an equation that describes the number of possible pathways that an electron can take between point A and B. This is called the sum-over-paths equation (or the path-integral formulation of quantum mechanics). If you don't know what this is, this book might not be too fun for you. Despite some training in physics, much of the book was incomprehensible to me. But what I did find interesting was Feynman's admirable tenacity to chase down an idea. You learn a lot about the scientific process, competition, politics and drama in academia. But what might be most important is just to remember that there are many ways to go from point A to B, we just don't know if that number is infinite or finite, yet. Or maybe we do know. I don't know. If you are interested in a book about Richard Feynman that is accessible, I would suggest, "Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman" that Feynman wrote himself and is highly accessible.

[Courtney Johnston · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really really wanted to like this book, as I've been wanting to get back into the swing of science reading. But Lawrence Krauss lost me on two counts.

First, the physics easily makes up 60% of the book, and dives in pretty deep. I appreciate that the Krauss is trying to give equal focus to Feynman's science and his larger-than-life personality, but I got lost pretty quick, and gave up 60 pages in when I realised that I was skimming the science searching for the next bit of bio. It certainly understood more than I would have two years ago, but it wasn't what I was reading for and I got a bit thrown by that.

Second, Krauss overdoes the exclamation mark. Your average biography, to my mind, shouldn't use exclamation marks outside of quoted dialogue, and your average science book should also employ them warily. And sentences like this are simply not improved through their inclusion:

But unlike conventional repairmen, Feynman would delight in solving radio problems not merely by tinkering, but by thinking!

Needless to say, when the experimenters involved in the claimed discovery went back to their device and looked at it there was the bolt!

Those two examples were on pages 4 and 5. I don't know why it grates on me so badly, but it does.

If you physics is stronger and your aversion to !!! weaker than mine, you might get a lot more out of 'Quantum Man' than I did. But I'm going back to James Gleick's canonical biography myself.

[Tom Richards · Rating 4 out of 5]

'Genius' by James Gleick is probably the more comprehensive picture of Feynman the man, giving more colour about his childhood and his motivations, as well as more stories showing Feynman the iconoclast and practical joker. 'Quantum man' is nevertheless a valuable complement to the other Feynman literature, because it tells us more about Feynman the physicist. Going through Feynman's original papers, Krauss puts them in their historical context, showing what was novel about his approach. He often shows how ideas that Feynman introduced radically changed the fields he introduced them to, even if he didn't take them all the way to their often nobel-prize-winning conclusions. It was almost as if he was giving the other physicists a chance by not keeping up with the current literature, preferring to figure things out by himself. Apparently, he even nearly missed his own Nobel by being lackadaisical about publishing, and only the efforts of Freeman Dyson in evangelising his work and forcing him to write a paper allowed the world to recognise the value of his 'sum-over-histories' approach. But for him, it wasn't about the accolades or getting priority for his discoveries. As the title of yet another book about Feynman implies, for him it was 'the pleasure of finding things out'.

[Bibliovoracious · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hard for me to rate this because I don't have many comparatives in the Physics Biography genre, but this is not just a Feynman biography. It's an overview of Quantum theory, the last 100 years of Physics, and the major players in the field.

Writing for the layperson, Krauss has the expressed intention of helping the reader understand why Richard Feynman was so important and revered in science. In order to do that, he goes fairly deep into the last century of Physics and the dive the science took into Quantum theory. I struggled with this, even while knowing he was giving the most accessible overview he could (and I knew a little about most of it already). Quantum theory is rough going, since practically all the laws are in direct contradiction to how we observe our daily reality, and it's dizzying to imagine the quantum rules - they are very strange, even while they underpin our entire physical world.

Besides that difficulty with the details, this book is an excellent play by play of the developments and major discoveries in Physics, and well-drawn sketches of the major players in the field, woven into Feynman's career and his many contributions during his life, as he collaborated, co-discovered, and influenced many other scientists throughout his life.

[Bettie · Rating 2 out of 5]

From the opening: 'Feynmann won a nobel prize because he explained how an anti-particle is a particle going backwards in time.'

Lots of this will go straight over the top of the noddle, however I will soak up some, I'm sure.
:O)

Wish I could be 'there' as well as 'here' simultaneously - does this mean that the 'beam me up' could actually be viable in practice later on?



Susanna once remarked (as a comment on Pickwick Papers):

My step-father's dad, a physicist, once said he believed in steady-state and the Big Bang on alternate days. And multiple universes on Leap Days!

Priceless.



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[Iain · Rating 4 out of 5]

Richard P. Feynman was an interesting guy. I really loved "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" and Krauss's biography of him from the point of view of his research in physics is especially interesting reading if you like popular science.

Although the concepts are sometimes hard to grasp, they are explained very well. Quantum theory is, in itself, very hard to grasp, after all. Krauss's use of Feynman's analogies really helps, though, and where necessary Krauss uses his own.

The interspersal of Feynman's scientific work with anecdotes and information about his personal life adds a human dimension to the story. I had heard he was a genius. This book taught me about his influences and his vices. The story of Feynman and his first wife, Arline, is particularly touching.

[Jesus · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a "science biography", that explains what Feynman studied along his life. So requires some interest in particle physics to read it. I was amazed to discover how he had started so many new fields, then continued and completed by others. Also surprising is his lack of credit-greed, his will to help others in their researches (even while facing cancer), and above all his unquenching curiosity. This curiosity made him go to all seminars (what amazed students) and even to use in his walks always a different path to see new things... WAIT!, so he was also using the "sum over all possible paths" while walking to work . :-) Amazing man.

[Lemar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Krauss proves that being well versed in the profession of one's bio subject makes a big difference. He was able to explain the nuances as he offered a history of quantum mechanics while tying it to the life and work of Richard Feynman.
Krauss emphasized how and also why Feynman loved to arrive at a scientific conclusion on his own and preferably via his own path. A book like this presents the author with the challenge of how much detail to present and for me Krauss went with better to present too much than not enough and I'm glad he did.

[Fredrik · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interessant og bra om *fysikeren* Feynman. Den uutdannede leseren lærer en del fysikk underveis - samtidig som en lærer om hvordan Feynman likte å forske (finne ut alt selv, forske på ting andre ikke forsket på, forstå grundig). Veldig lærerikt - og artig å lese om en fascinerende person.

(men hadde kanskje vært enda mer interessant om han hadde vært matematiker - da hadde jeg forstått hva han forsket på...)

[Wayne · Rating 5 out of 5]

got this for 3 bucks