marveling at the complexities of 'Genius'

book revu: Genius - the life and science of Richard Feynman --- by james gleick -- Pantheon: 532 pp - $27.50 -- revu: Karl Ackerman special for USA Today

The stories are legendary, polished and retold by the subject himself, the graduate student who is sharply rebuked by a world know physicist only to be rescued by the great Einstein; the young scientist building an atomic bomb at Los Alamos, a man with an intuitive ability to spot mathematical errors ( "something about the smoothness of the numbers or the relationships between them" ), hovering behind his colleagues, stabbing a finger at their mistakes; the elder skeptic called upon to examine the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, using a pitcher of ice water, a clamp and a piece of rubber to demonstrate that the shuttle's O-ring lack resiliency at low temperatures.

That Richard Feynman was as James Gleick states in this fascinating biography, the "most brilliant, iconoclastic, and influential physicist of modern times" is indisputable. More elusive is the nature of Richard Feynman's genius. How did a kid from Far Rockaway, NY with a knack for taking apart anything from a radio to a mathematical formula, a boy with the "merely respectable" IQ 125 grow up to become a Nobel Prize-winning scientists whose very name has become a measure of genius ( "He's no R. Feynman, but . ").

"Originality was RF obsession," Gleick writes, "he had to create from first principles

Leyden note:
a "constructivist" if ever there was one; HE had to DO it -- himself. None of this cooperative learning stuff for him. He'd cooperate after he found out the answer, first. OR -- got stuck and had to scream for help.

. . . . a dangerous virtue that sometimes led to waste and failure. He had the cast of mind that often produces cranks and misfits: a willingness, even eagerness to consider silly ideas and plunge down wrong alleys. This strength could have been a crippling weakness had it not been redeemed, time and again, by a powerful intelligence."

Richard Feynman was a visionary. He had little interest in publishing his results or keeping abreast of the research of follow physicists. "I've always taken an attitude that I have only to explain the regularities of nature -- I don't have to explain the methods of my friends," he once said.

Scientists seeking Richard Feynman judgment often found themselves bullied by him. He would result them a full explanation; it spoiled his fun. A brief introduction to their work would propel him to the blackboard, where invariably he skipped over the offered result and produced a more general theorem.

In his personal life, too, he was possessed by a manic desire to figure out how things work. At Los Alamos, he used shrewd power of observations and the rules of probability to teach himself the art of safe-cracking. He trained his dog to perform counterintuitive tricks -- circling the garden before retrieving an object, say - by breaking the task into discrete steps. Once during a sabbatical he dabble in the filed of biology and made a valuable observation about the mutation of genes.

Richard Feynman does not come across as a particularly likable man in this book, but he does become real, and his brash character is always overshadowed by his prodigious talents. There are moments when the lay reader will get lost in a thicket of physics, moments that serve to illuminate the plight of a hapless reporter who pressed RF to describe briefly the groundbreaking work in quantum electrodynamics that won him the Nobel Prize in 1965. "Listen buddy," if i could tell you in a minute what I did it wouldn't be worth the Nobel Prize."

Gleick is a masterful storyteller, and Feynman's life makes a fine tale indeed.

6/18s/95