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Title details for Genius by James Gleick - Available

Genius

The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

by James Gleick
Dick Estell
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available
To his colleagues, Richard Feynman was not so much a genius as he was a full-blown magician: someone who “does things that nobody else could do and that seem completely unexpected.” The path he cleared for twentieth-century physics led from the making of the atomic bomb to a Nobel Prize-winning theory of quantam electrodynamics to his devastating exposé of the Challenger space shuttle disaster. At the same time, the ebullient Feynman established a reputation as an eccentric showman, a master safe cracker and bongo player, and a wizard of seduction.
Now James Gleick, author of the bestselling Chaos, unravels teh dense skein of Feynman‘s thought as well as the paradoxes of his character in a biography—which was nominated for a National Book Award—of outstanding lucidity and compassion.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    February 1, 2011

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780307915115
      • File size: 578883 KB
      • Duration: 20:06:00

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      It would be easy to write a biography of Richard Feynman with the kind of manic iconoclasm that marked his life. But that would be a disservice to the significant contributions of this Nobel laureate physicist. The same goes for the reading of the audiobook. To deliver it with bombast would be unfair to both the book and the man. Dick Estell offers a steady reading in this reissued production. He varies his pacing well, adding speed when he reads some of the nearly stream-of-consciousness descriptions of Feynman by others and by Feynman about himself. He declines to differentiate individual speakers, but this matters little as the author always makes clear who is speaking. The book offers solid scientific history as well as biography, and Estell's evenhanded reading makes it easy to comprehend. R.C.G. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      August 31, 1992
      It would be hard to tell personal stories about the late Nobelist Feynman (1918-1988) better than the subject himself did in What Do You Care What Other People Think? To his credit, Gleick does not try. Rather, he depicts Feynman's ``curious character'' in its real context: the science he helped develop during physics' most revolutionary era. Fans of Feynman's own bestseller, ``Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! , '' won't be disappointed by his colleagues' recollections of his reckless obsession with doing science (a grad-school dorm neighbor once opened Feynman's door to find him rolling on the floor as he worked on a problem); but the anecdotes punctuate an expanded account of Feynman the visceral working scientist, not Feynman the iconoclast. This biography wants to measure both the particle and the wave of 20th-century genius--Feynman's, Julian Schwinger's, Murray Gell-Mann's, and others'--in the quantum era. Gleick seems to have enjoyed the cooperation of Feynman's family plus that of a good many of his colleagues from the Manhattan Project and the Challenger inquiry (in which Feynman played a scene-stealing role), and he steadily levies just enough of the burden of Feynman's genius on the reader so that the physicist remains, in the end, a person and not an icon of science. A genius could not hope for better. Gleick is the author of Chaos: The Making of A New Science.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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