I just finished “Quantum Man”, Richard Feynman’s Life in Science, by Lawrence Krauss.
I finished Gleick’s Genius recently. When I finished that I thought I’d read all the Feynman biographies and autobiographies. However, I heard Krauss mention his Feynman bio on his origins podcast, a book that was not just a book on Feynman, but on Feynman’s science. I’m very pleased that the Toronto Public Library is finally operational again after the hacking fiasco last year, and was able to get this book to read with only a couple days wait.
A large part of this book isn’t a biography of Feynman, but the story of the creation of quantum electrodynamics. From a technical (physics) perspective, I know little bits of that story, certainly not as much as I would like. This book described a number of the key problems and solutions that were dealt with in the evolution of this science. Should I ever find the time to study more of the physics of QED, which I’d like to do, having read this story will provide some useful context.
There are a lot of tricky details of the theory that are explained in this book in an accessible way. I thought the description of positrons as electrons moving backwards in time was especially well done, possibly because it was set in the context of forward and backward time processes in classical electrodynamics. It seems clear that forward and backwards propagators are really the interesting character hiding behind the curtain here (but the book didn’t include any of the mathematics that would confirm that.) In a number of places, Krauss did a remarkable job of describing complex and abstract mathematical ideas in a way that was accessible.
A book on Feynman can’t just be about his physics, but also about the man. There were lots of examples of that here too, with lots to keep the reader laughing and amused. Here’s a characteristic quote from the book that I found particularly funny:
one of the items brought up in the divorce proceedings was telling. She reported, “He begins working calculus problems in his head as soon as he awakens. He did calculus while driving his car, while sitting in the living room and while lying in bed at night”
… all in all, this was a highly enjoyable book.