Quantum Man

A fantastic biography of Feynman's scientific accomplishments, but it glosses over the other aspects of his life. While the book hits the science great, I found Feynman's own autobiographical accounts a more compelling narrative of his life and gave a better sense for him as a man.

Lawrence Krauss does a great job of presenting scientific ideas for a lay audience. In this latest effort, he turns these skills toward writing a fantastic biography of Richard P. Feynman, one of the most important and entertaining physicists of the twentieth century, using his life as a prism to explore the creation of the atomic bomb, the development of quantum electrodynamics, and the early days of string theory.

One of the difficulties in tackling a biography of Feynman is that he spent his life doing a superb job of writing his own autobiographies, sharing personal anecdotes about his life through books like Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman and What Do You Care What Other People Think?

With this being the case, Krauss makes the intriguing decision to avoid most of these interesting anecdotes entirely. There's a passing mention, for example, of his propensity for lock picking, including cracking top-secret safes at the Los Alamos facility during the Manhattan Project. His role in investigating the Challenger disaster is similarly drawn into the background.

No, Krauss instead tailors his narrative of Feynman's life around, as the subtitle suggests, "Feynman's life in science." The personality comes through, but with the emphasis entirely on how that personality reflects his scientific thinking.

Still, with Feynman there's more than enough material to keep this tactic engaging. Feynman's playful demeanor helped establish a scientific methodology in which he focused only on the problems that he found interesting, which in the case of someone as brilliant as Feynman led to some of the most insightful concepts in modern physics. He not only helped illuminate the underlying principles needed to finalize quantum electrodynamics, but also foresaw the fields of nanotechnology and quantum computers decades before they were feasible forms of technology.

The only problem with this book is that, as a biography, it does fall short in some areas. There's a complete picture of Richard Feynman the Scientist, but Richard Feynman the Man is lost in the story. Some might argue that this distinction didn't really apply to Feynman, but I don't think Krauss really justifies such a stance in the book. As great as Feynman's contributions to science, a life is about relationships and experiences more than scientific ideas, and these are the elements that are most missing from Quantum Man.

If you want to understand Feynman's science, then Quantum Man is a great place to look. If you want to understand Feynman's life, then look elsewhere.

Disclosure: A review copy was provided by the publisher. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.