Genius. The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, James Gleick (ISBN 978-0679747048, Vintage)

After having reread the collected Feynman anecdotes from Surely You’re Joking and What do you care ? in the Classic Feynman edition I wanted to reread this biography by James Gleick again. The main reason being that the anecdotes focus on stories that happened to Feynman leaving out most of the science. Originally I read the stories again because I wanted to give them to my daughter to read as an unorthodox introduction in physics. But they are really ‘just‘ stories from a curious character as the byline in the title suggests. They are often funny, surprising and exceptional but the science only forms a kind of backdrop. To fill this gap I read the Feynman biography by James Gleick again. On Goodreads I read a comment about Surely You are Joking that it illustrated that Feynman was not special and it showed what can be achieved with hard work. No doubt Feynman worked hard to achieve what he did, the long struggles are well described in this book but claiming that his mathematical ability and physical intuition were not exceptional is nonsensical if you ask me. Feynman was clearly exceptionally gifted in these areas. In others he was quite normal and a child of his time. The way he talked about women in his stories would have caused him a lot more trouble today and rightfully so. Luckily the biography doesn’t attempt to turn Feynman into a saint, there is no need for that. He had opinions about for example art that one could describe as quite primitive. But we will not remember Feynman as an art critic but for his contributions to physics. The book describes at length the long and sometimes painful path Feynman followed to create his Nobel prize winning work on Quantum Electrodynamics. Co workers are quoted about how Feynman could somehow magically reach for a solution where they saw none. After reading the book you are left with the impression of a man of exceptional mathematical ability who had a trick for every problem where the standard approach didn’t work. This he combined with a phenomenal physical insight which guided him to solve hard physics problems. The parts of the biography describing the scientific work were detailed enough for me to connect them to things I studied at university and they mainly focused on the viewpoint taken by Feynman to tackle the problem. Possibly some will find these technical sections too detailed and too long but I found them interesting. In general what Feynman probably would have liked most is how it describes well how science is done, with many wrong turns and blind alleys and periods in which nothing useful seems to come from all the effort. Because the problems are hard to solve and there is competition and time pressure the biography reads like a detective story. One of the better scientific biographies I have read. Although it is more than 500 pages thick I managed to get through it in 2 weeks. If you have read Surely you are joking then some sections will be familiar and will go fast.