What is Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman about?

Genius is James Gleick's biography of Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who developed quantum electrodynamics, cracked safes at Los Alamos, played bongo drums in bars, and became the twentieth century's most celebrated scientific personality. The book traces Feynman from his Queens childhood — his father a uniform manufacturer with deep scientific curiosity — through his graduate work under John Archibald Wheeler at Princeton, his crucial contribution to the Manhattan Project, his long career at Caltech, and his public reckoning with the Challenger disaster in the year before his death in 1988.

Gleick is unusually well-positioned to tell this story. He had access to unpublished letters, notebooks, and interviews, and his Chaos had already demonstrated his ability to make difficult physics accessible. The scientific sections of Genius are among the best popularizations of quantum electrodynamics ever written. QED — the quantum theory of how light and matter interact — was the problem of mid-twentieth-century physics, and Feynman's path integral formulation, along with the diagrams now called Feynman diagrams, gave physicists a new computational and conceptual tool of extraordinary power.

But Gleick is equally interested in Feynman as a type: the American pragmatist genius, allergic to abstraction and authority, who preferred working from first principles to citing established results. Feynman famously claimed not to have read most of the physics literature before solving problems, a claim that Gleick treats skeptically but uses to illuminate Feynman's genuinely unusual cognitive style. The book also deals honestly with Feynman's relationship with women — his charm, his serial womanizing, his first wife Arline's death from tuberculosis while he was at Los Alamos, and passages in his own writings that later generations have found difficult.

The result is a portrait of a particular kind of scientific mind: playful, concrete, physically intuitive, contemptuous of pretension, and capable of seeing through mathematical formalism to the underlying physical picture. Whether or not Feynman deserves the "greatest physicist of his generation" label sometimes applied to him, Gleick makes the case that he was genuinely singular.