Джеймс Глик - Genius - The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

Здесь есть возможность читать онлайн «Джеймс Глик - Genius - The Life and Science of Richard Feynman» весь текст электронной книги совершенно бесплатно (целиком полную версию без сокращений). В некоторых случаях можно слушать аудио, скачать через торрент в формате fb2 и присутствует краткое содержание. Год выпуска: 2011, Издательство: Kindle Edition, Жанр: Историческая проза, Физика, на английском языке. Описание произведения, (предисловие) а так же отзывы посетителей доступны на портале библиотеки ЛибКат.

Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

Предлагаем к чтению аннотацию, описание, краткое содержание или предисловие (зависит от того, что написал сам автор книги «Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman»). Если вы не нашли необходимую информацию о книге — напишите в комментариях, мы постараемся отыскать её.

New York Times Bestseller: This life story of the quirky physicist is “a thorough and masterful portrait of one of the great minds of the century” (The New York Review of Books). Raised in Depression-era Rockaway Beach, physicist Richard Feynman was irreverent, eccentric, and childishly enthusiastic—a new kind of scientist in a field that was in its infancy. His quick mastery of quantum mechanics earned him a place at Los Alamos working on the Manhattan Project under J. Robert Oppenheimer, where the giddy young man held his own among the nation’s greatest minds. There, Feynman turned theory into practice, culminating in the Trinity test, on July 16, 1945, when the Atomic Age was born. He was only twenty-seven. And he was just getting started. In this sweeping biography, James Gleick captures the forceful personality of a great man, integrating Feynman’s work and life in a way that is accessible to laymen and fascinating for the scientists who follow in his footsteps. To his colleagues, Richard Feynman was not so much a genius as he was a full-blown magician: someone who “does things that nobody else could do and that seem completely unexpected.” The path he cleared for twentieth-century physics led from the making of the atomic bomb to a Nobel Prize-winning theory of quantam electrodynamics to his devastating exposé of the Challenger space shuttle disaster. At the same time, the ebullient Feynman established a reputation as an eccentric showman, a master safe cracker and bongo player, and a wizard of seduction.
Now James Gleick, author of the bestselling Chaos, unravels teh dense skein of Feynman‘s thought as well as the paradoxes of his character in a biography—which was nominated for a National Book Award—of outstanding lucidity and compassion.

Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman — читать онлайн бесплатно полную книгу (весь текст) целиком

Ниже представлен текст книги, разбитый по страницам. Система сохранения места последней прочитанной страницы, позволяет с удобством читать онлайн бесплатно книгу «Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman», без необходимости каждый раз заново искать на чём Вы остановились. Поставьте закладку, и сможете в любой момент перейти на страницу, на которой закончили чтение.

Тёмная тема
Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

Genius

The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

James Gleick

For my mother and father, Beth and Donen

I was born not knowing

and have only had a little time to change that here and there.

—Richard Feynman

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

FAR ROCKAWAY

Neither Country nor CityA Birth and a Death

It’s Worth ItAt SchoolAll Things Are Made of AtomsA Century of ProgressRichard and Julian MIT

The Best PathSocializing the EngineerThe Newest PhysicsShop MenFeynman of Course Is JewishForces in MoleculesI s He Good Enough?

PRINCETON

A Quaint Ceremonious VillageFolds and RhythmsForward or Backward?The Reasonable ManMr. X and the Nature of TimeLeast Action in Quantum MechanicsThe AuraThe White Plague

Preparing for WarThe Manhattan Project

Finishing Up

LOS ALAMOS

The Man Comes In with His BriefcaseChain

ReactionsThe Battleship and the Mosquito Boat

DiffusionComputing by BrainComputing by MachineFenced InThe Last SpringtimeFalse HopesNuclear FearI Will Bide My TimeWe Scientists Are Clever

CORNELL

The University at PeacePhenomena Complex

—Laws SimpleThey All Seem AshesAround a Mental BlockShrinking the InfinitiesDysonA Half-Assedly Thought-Out Pictorial Semi-Vision ThingSchwinger’s GloryMy Machines Came from Too Far AwayThere Was Also Presented (by Feynman) …Cross-Country with Freeman Dyson

Oppenheimer’s SurrenderDyson Graphs, Feynman DiagramsAway to a Fabulous Land CALTECH

Faker from CopacabanaAlas, the Love of Women!Onward with PhysicsA Quantum Liquid

New Particles, New LanguageMurrayIn Search of GeniusWeak InteractionsToward a Domestic Life

From QED to GeneticsGhosts and Worms

Room at the BottomAll His KnowledgeThe Explorers and the TouristsThe Swedish Prize

Quarks and PartonsTeaching the YoungDo You

Think You Can Last On Forever?Surely You’re Joking!A Disaster of Technology EPILOGUE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTES

A FEYNMAN BIBLIOGRAPHY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

PROLOGUE

Nothing is certain. This hopeful message went to an Albuquerque sanatorium from the secret world at Los Alamos. We lead a charmed life.

Afterward demons afflicted the bomb makers. J. Robert Oppenheimer made speeches about his shadowed soul, and other physicists began to feel his uneasiness at having handed humanity the power of self-destruction. Richard Feynman, younger and not so responsible, suffered a more private grief. He felt he possessed knowledge that set him alone and apart. It gnawed at him that ordinary people were living their ordinary lives oblivious to the nuclear doom that science had prepared for them. Why build roads and bridges meant to last a century? If only they knew what he knew, they surely would not bother. The war was over, a new era of science was beginning, and he was not at ease.

For a while he could hardly work—by day a boyish and excitable professor at Cornel University, by night wild in love, veering from freshman mixers (where women sidled away from this rubber-legged dancer claiming to be a scientist who had made the atomic bomb) to bars and brothels. Meanwhile new col eagues, young physicists and mathematicians of his own age, were seeing him for the first time and forming their quick impressions. “Half genius and half buffoon,” Freeman Dyson, himself a rising prodigy,

wrote his parents back in England. Feynman struck him as uproariously American—unbuttoned and burning with physical energy. It took him a while to realize how obsessively his new friend was tunneling into the very bedrock of modern science.

In the spring of 1948, stil in the shadow of the bomb they had made, twenty-seven physicists assembled at a resort hotel in the Pocono Mountains of northern Pennsylvania to confront a crisis in their understanding of the atom. With Oppenheimer’s help (he was now more than ever their spiritual leader) they had scraped together the thousand-odd dol ars needed to cover their rooms and train fare, along with a smal outlay for liquor. In the annals of science it was the last time but one that such men would meet in such circumstances, without ceremony or publicity. They were indulging a fantasy, that their work could remain a smal , personal, academic enterprise, invisible to most of the public, as it had been a decade before, when a modest building in Copenhagen served as the hub of their science.

They were not yet conscious of how effectively they had persuaded the public and the military to make physics a mission of high technology and expense. This meeting was closed to al but the few invited participants, the elite of physics. No transcript was kept. Next year most of these men would meet once more, hauling their two blackboards and

eighty-two

cocktail

and

brandy

glasses

in

Oppenheimer’s station wagon, but by then the modern era of physics had begun in earnest, science conducted on a scale the world had not seen, and never again would its

chiefs come together privately, just to work.

The bomb had shown the aptness of physics. The scientists had found enough sinew behind their penciled abstractions to change history. Yet in the cooler days after the war’s end, they realized how fragile their theory was.

They thought that quantum mechanics gave a crude, perhaps temporary, but at least workable way to make calculations about light and matter. When pressed, however, the theory gave wrong results. And not merely wrong—they were senseless. Who could love a theory that worked so neatly at first approximation and then, when a scientist tried to make the results more exact, broke down so grotesquely? The Europeans who had invented quantum physics had tried everything they could imagine to shore up the theory, without success.

How were these men to know anything? The mass of the electron? Up for grabs: a quick glance gave a reasonable number, a hard look gave infinity—nonsense. The very idea of mass was unsettled: mass was not exactly stuff, but not exactly energy, either. Feynman toyed with an extreme view. On the last page of his tiny olive-green dime-store address book, mostly for phone numbers of women (annotated dancer beauty or call when her nose is not red), he scrawled a near haiku.

Principles

Читать дальше
Тёмная тема
Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

Похожие книги на «Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman»

Представляем Вашему вниманию похожие книги на «Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman» списком для выбора. Мы отобрали схожую по названию и смыслу литературу в надежде предоставить читателям больше вариантов отыскать новые, интересные, ещё непрочитанные произведения.


Отзывы о книге «Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman»

Обсуждение, отзывы о книге «Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman» и просто собственные мнения читателей. Оставьте ваши комментарии, напишите, что Вы думаете о произведении, его смысле или главных героях. Укажите что конкретно понравилось, а что нет, и почему Вы так считаете.

x