2004-03-07 As insightful a scientific biography as ever written

Feynman may or may not have been a genius (the description is so difficult). Michael Berry (as of Berry's phase in quantum mechanics) once wrote in a review in Physics World that Feynman was not a physicist of the first rank - which Berry reserved for figures like Einstien and Dirac. That may well be true in a more dispassionate assessment of Feynman. However, what is impossible to deny is that he was one of the most innovative and creative scientists of his age, with a lightning quick mind who left his peers in no doubt that he was a genius. He certainly had the ability of genius - to see patterns and simplicity where others saw just complexity. It takes a deeply creative mind to ascribe pattern and simplicity to nature. Nature does not reveal her secrets easily to lesser mortals (now is that a Feynman quote?).

Feynman the genius needed a genius of a biographer - one who could truly understand the complex melody that was the entirety of the man. Richard Feynman may have marched to the beat of a different drum, as Julian Schwinger so eleganly put it, but it needed another genius to explain and critique the beats, rythms and melodies the great scientist heard. Gleick has made this beat and rythm, the entire symphony if you will, available to the rest of us. This must be one of the most incisive biographies ever written.

Not only was Feynman a genius - I suspect Gleick is as well.