The Beat of a Different Drum: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

by Jagdish Mehra

This definitive book deals with the life & scientific work of arguably the greatest American-born theoretical physicist of the 20th century. He was a great teacher, a born showman, bongo drummer, buffoon & iconoclast; a scientific magician capable of transcendental leaps of the imagination. During his career he was drawn into research on the atomic bomb before working out his path-integral formulation of quantum mechanics & quantum electro-dynamics. Subsequently he developed the diagrammatic technique, as a result of which Feynman diagrams became ubiquitous in quantum field theory, elementary particle physics & statistical mechanics. From 1950 he was based at the California Institute of Technology, where he worked on the superfluidity of liquid helium, the theory of polarons, the theory of weak interactions, the quantum theory of gravitation, partons, quark jets & the limits of computation. He'd a unified view of physics & nature. He took the whole of nature as the arena of his science & imagination. Jagdish Mehra personally knew Feynman for 30 years. In 1980 Feynman suggested he might do what he had already done for Heisenberg, Pauli & Dirac, that is write a definitive account of his life, science & personality. Mehra instantly agreed & subsequently spent several weeks talking to him. After Feynman's death Mehra interviewed almost 80 people who'd known him & aspects of his work. This book draws on this unique material & on Feynman's remarkable writings. It covers his childhood, his three marriages, his extraordinary range of interests. But most important, it deals with his scientific work in far greater detail than in any other biographical work. What has emerged is an authoritative account of Feynman's life & achievements.

Genres: Biography, Physics, Science, History, Nonfiction

662 pages, Hardcover

First published March 31, 1994

About the author

Indian-American physicist and historian of science born in Meerut, India on April 8, 1937. He came to the United States in 1957, and was educated at Neuchâtel, Switzerland, where he received his Ph.D. in 1963. He subsequently was appointed assistant professor of physics at Purdue University (1964-65), assistant professor of physics at University of Massachusetts, North Dartmouth (1965-67), program director of the Science Research Association at IBM Chicago (1967-69), special research associate at the University of Texas, Austin (1969-73), and professor at the Solvay Institute Brussels (1973-88).

Mehra served as UNESCO-Sir Julian Huxley Distinguished Professor of History of Science in Paris, and Trieste, Italy (1989-93), and was the Citadel Distinguished Professor of Physics in Charleston, South Carolina (1993-96). He has held distinguished visiting appointments in Houston, Texas, and Geneva, Switzerland, and as Regent's Professor in the University of California at Irvine. He now lives in Houston, Texas where he has been professor of science and humanities at the University of Houston since 1996.

Jagdish Mehra was trained as a theoretical physicist in the schools of Werner Heisenberg and Wolfgang Pauli. He came into close personal contact with all the creators of quantum mechanics, and has used these interactions to great advantage in The Historical Development of Quantum Theory (a six-volume work co-authored with Helmut Rechenberg). Mehra has published extensively on the historical and conceptual development of modern physics.

Taken from: http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/biogr...

Reviews

[Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bar none one of the best biographies of a physicist I've read. There was no skimping on the physics, detailing his contributions as well as the minutiae of his life.

[Qubits Force · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent, excellent book about the depth of Feynmann. I loved the fact that the late Mr Mehra did not shy away from the equations and the depth of the topics. The pathways and stumbling blocks to getting to a good understanding of QM, of the people and mathematics involved was a joy to read and process through, if humbling at times.

I have had this book on my shelf for over 20 years. It is a pickup book to get inspired, daunted and humbled and also get the grey cells moving. - especially when I am alert. Not a trivial read by any means.
Others have penned a more comprehensive description of the contents, I want to just say how much I admired Jagdish in taking on this task and writing the way a physicist wants to be read. His personal accounts of meeting Feynmann just added to the narrative.
Thank you sir, where every you may be now.

[Denis · Rating 5 out of 5]

By far one of the best biography of a physicist. My only criticism is toward the publisher to whom I sent two pages of corrections and never heard back.

[Patricia Comeford · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent book about the life and the many achievements of Richard P. Feynman. It was written by a former colleague of Feynman's who had the advantages of having an extensive background in theoretical physics and who also knew Feynman personally.
The author begins by describing Feynman's birth on May 11, 1918 in Queens, NY, and about his early intensive scientific development. Feynman was seen as a whiz kid in mathematics in elementary school, and he began fixing radios for money at an early age. He taught himself algebra and calculus in high school with the help of a few good books. It was at this time that he became an expert an integration and also learned about the principle of least action in physics, two things which would become fundamental to his later work.
Feynman's undergraduate days at MIT are recounted (1935-1939), including the books which were most influential on him, mainly Dirac's book on the principles of quantum mechanics, Arthur Eddington's mathematical theory of relativity, and Heitler's book on the quantum theory of radiation. Although Feynman was quite talented with his hands and extremely good at experimental physics, he decided at that point that the study of theoretical physics was the path he wished to follow.
The book describes how Feynman went on to Princeton for his graduate studies and how he became an assistant to Professor John Wheeler. They formed a deep friendship and collaborated on several interesting ideas and papers.
The book then describes how Feynman was able to clarify and formulate the principle of least action in quantum mechanics. In classical systems, the principle was first laid out by Maupertis in 1744, and also by Euler in 1744. Lagrange also did some work in this area, but it was actually the Irish physicist and mathematician William Rowan Hamilton who provided us with the modern classical formulation of the principle (a good book on Hamilton which I recommend is "William Rowan Hamilton: Portrait of a Prodigy" by Sean O'Donnell).
Feynman hadn't yet completed his doctorate when in April of 1942, he became a member of a theoretical physics group working on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. He worked with several other great physicists there, including Hans Bethe, Victor Weisskopf, Robert Wilson, and Robert Oppenheimer. One of the things Feynman did for entertainment there was to become an expert at opening safes and picking locks! He also began to enjoy drumming with his hands.
The book relates how after the Manhattan Project, he obtained his doctorate, and since he wished to continue working with Hans Bethe, he accepted a position as a professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY.
This book is particularly good at describing the thought processes which led up to his revolutionary and influential papers of 1948 and 1949 on the space time approach to quantum theory, where Feynman developed his ideas about path integrals and the superposition of amplitude techniques. Feynman was able to come up with the analogue to Christian Huygens' principle, applied to matter waves rather than electromagnetic waves. The book describes in a clear fashion how Feynman arrived at his results and how he was very good about checking them against other known results (such as Julian Schwinger's) as often as possible to ensure accuracy. When Feynman came up with his theory of Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) for which he, Schwinger, and Tomonaga won the 1965 Nobel Prize, it was Freeman Dyson (BA, Cambridge) who was able to prove that Feynman and Schwinger's formulations were actually equivalent. Interestingly, Dyson once described Feynman as "half genius, half buffoon"!
The book describes how Feynman worked in other scientific areas as well, and how he made contributions to the theory of superfluidity, polarons, quantum gravity, particle physics, and also how he uncovered the cause of the space shuttle Challenger disaster. The book also contains some excellent photographs, including some of Feynman and the author, Feynman with Schwinger, one with Paul Dirac, and also an interesting image of Feynman's face superimposed on a drawing of the great Isaac Newton. There is also information on Feynman's legendary teaching methods which he developed at Caltech and his pastimes.
Overall, this is a masterly and detailed work on how Richard Feynman developed his brilliant ideas and why he shall be remembered as one of the finest and most original minds of all time.

[Dan Cohen · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is an odd book. It's partly a biography of Richard Feynman, suitable for a lay audience. But it's also a technical exposition of some of Feynman's work, only suitable, I would guess, for a Physics PhD (or at least a post-grad). I've read a fair few popular science books on some of the subjects tackled but the manner of their treatment in this book meant that as I don't have even a bachelor's degree in Physics I was unable to follow. And there were hundreds of pages of this material.

The irony is that Feynman himself was a supreme exemplar of how to explain Physics clearly (even to a lay audience) without loss of precision. In this book the author failed to capture that spirit. I'm sure the technical sections could have been made easier to follow with a bit more explanation of the terms - a typical formula in the book is accompanied by explanations of what a few of the symbols stand for but all the rest are left for the reader to guess and, of course, this is impossible for a lay reader.

As for the biographical sections, these suffer from a lack of editing - there is much repetition (often even from one paragraph to the next). They feel a bit random - not providing a 360 degree view but, at the same time, providing interesting tid-bits that give the biographical material a distinctive character of its own. So, the biographical content is interesting and idiosyncratic, but not comprehensive.

I'd recommend this book if you are sufficiently educated in the Physics and mathematical techniques to be able to follow the technical sections, as long as you are also happy with a non-vanilla approach to the biography.

[Anders Mikkelsen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extremely physics (heavy) many equations, but great detail in every aspekt of RPF's life and work

[Abben · Rating 4 out of 5]

Phenomenal. Though there is much difficult, technical exposition on Feynman's work on quantum electrodynamics, superfluidity, and other subjects. Still there is much even a layperson can enjoy.