The Physicist As Magician

By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK

TITLE: GENIUS: THE LIFE AND SCIENCE OF RICHARD FEYNMAN

AUTHOR: JAMES GLEICK

PUBLISHER: PANTHEON; 531 PAGES; $27.50

THE BOTTOM LINE: A monumental portrait of one of the giants of modern science, at once definitive and crystal clear.

"There are two kinds of geniuses," the eminent mathematician Mark Kac once remarked. "An ordinary genius is a fellow that you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better." The other kind Kac called magicians. "Even after we understand what they have done, the process by which they have done it is completely dark . . . Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest caliber."

That may come as a surprise to those who have read Feynman's two popular autobiographies, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think?, or to those who watched him dip a bit of rubber in ice water during the Challenger accident investigation, making it crack and proving that cold temperatures had led to the space shuttle's 1986 crash. Feynman's public image was that of a skirt-chasing, bongo-playing wise guy, a man who thought he was smarter than anyone else, and who therefore probably deserved to be taken down a peg.

Yet as James Gleick makes clear in his monumental and deeply thoughtful biography, the Brooklyn-bred and -accented Feynman, who died of cancer in 1990 at 72, really was smarter than just about anyone else. He was a physicist's ( physicist who saw more deeply into the workings of nature than anyone but Einstein and perhaps a handful of others. His greatest achievement was the theory of quantum electrodynamics, which described the behavior of subatomic particles, atoms, light, electricity and magnetism. He also made significant contributions to areas outside his own field, including astrophysics, solid- state physics and computer science -- a rare breadth of accomplishment in the rigidly specialized scientific world.

What made Feynman a magician, though, was not any one of these achievements by itself, but the way he went about them. One of the common-nonsensical premises of quantum physics is that particles can travel from one place to another without traversing the space in between, and Feynman's thought process seemed to go from problem to solution in just about the same way. He rarely studied what was already known about a problem before attacking it. He was more interested in getting the solution than in doing the problem according to the rules, and he often ended up reinventing physics as he went.

This focus on answers rather than methods first became evident when Feynman led the math team in high school in Far Rockaway, New York. As undergraduates at M.I.T., he and a friend, Theodore Welton, re-created for themselves much of the physics discovered in the quantum revolution that had taken place in Europe during the 1920s. And although he shared the 1965 Nobel Prize for the theory of quantum electrodynamics with Julian Schwinger and Shin'ichiro Tomonaga, Feynman had an approach that was typically bizarre. Instead of using conventional calculations, he invented "Feynman diagrams," arrows and squiggles that mapped the comings and goings of particles so effectively that they are now a standard tool of physicists.

Relying in part on sources never before made available to the public, Gleick explains with crystal clarity the paradoxes of quantum physics -- a subject that Feynman himself said nobody understands -- just as he laid bare the arcana of higher mathematics in his 1987 best seller, Chaos. Gleick also uncovers some of the forces that created a man who could devotedly nurse his first wife as she lay dying of tuberculosis in a sanatorium a few miles from the wartime Manhattan Project, where he worked, yet later in life could make a sport out of picking women up in bars; a man who despised hero worship yet wrote books in which he was the hero; a man who rarely taught classes or took on doctoral students but is regarded as one of physics' great teachers. If some questions remain about exactly what made Feynman Feynman, and not just a garden-variety genius, that is no fault of Gleick's. A magician who reveals all his secrets, even from beyond the grave, is a magician no longer.