Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

by James Gleick

When his son, Carl, ended his flirtation with philosophy and took up computer science, Feynman, too, looked again at the field he had helped pioneer at Los Alamos. He joined two Caltech authorities on computation, John Hopfield and Carver Mead, in constructing a course on issues from brain analogues and pattern recognition to error correction and uncomputability. For several summers he worked with the founders of Thinking Machines Corporation, near MIT, creating a radical approach to parallel processing; he served as a high-class technician, applying differential equations to the circuit diagrams, and as an occasional wise man among the young entrepreneurs (“Forget all that ‘local minima’ stuff—just say there’s a bubble caught in the crystal and you have to shake it out”). And he began to produce maverick research at the intersection of computing and physics: on how small computers could be; on entropy and the uncertainty principle in computing; on simulating quantum physics and probabilistic behavior; and on the possibility of building a quantum-mechanical computer, with packets of spin waves roaming ballistically back and forth through the logic gates.