Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

Thoughts on reading Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick.

Cover of Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

Start Date: 8 January 2021. End Date: 17 March 2021.

I love this book. It’s a priceless gem and one day I will put down in paper all that I want to say about this biography. But today is not that day. I will however take this space to direct your attention to a few articles that I had read. It is necessary since it is a boyish folly to put our heroes on a pedestal.

• Richard Feynman, sexism and changing perceptions of a scientific icon by Ash Jogalekar, July 2014.
• Surely You’re a Creep, Mr. Feynman by Leila McNeill, Baffler, January 2019.
• Feynman, Harassment, and the Culture of Science by Aida Behmard, Caltech Letters, October 2019.

underlined:

A [physics student] … discovers unpublished lecture notes by Richard Feynman, circulating samizdat style. He asks Gell-Mann about them. Gell-Mann says no, Dick’s methods are not the same as the methods used here. The student asks, well, what are Feynman’s methods? Gell-Mann leans coyly against the blackboard and says, Dick’s method is this. You write down the problem. You think very hard. (He shuts his eyes and presses his knuckles parodically to his forehead.) Then you write down the answer.
(from an interview with Sidney Coleman, p. 315)

If that’s the world’s smartest man, God help us.
– Richard’s mother, Lucille Feynman, after Omni magazine named him the world’s smartest man (1979), p. 397.