- Krauss, Lawrence.
Quantum Man.
New York: W. W. Norton, 2011.
ISBN 978-0-393-34065-5.
-
A great deal has been written about the life, career, and antics
of
Richard Feynman,
but until the present book there was not a proper scientific
biography of his work in physics and its significance in the
field and consequences for subsequent research. Lawrence Krauss
has masterfully remedied this lacuna with this work, which
provides, at a level comprehensible to the intelligent layman,
both a survey of Feynman's work, both successful and not, and
also a sense of how Feynman achieved what he did and
what ultimately motivated him in his often lonely quest to
understand.
One often-neglected contributor to Feynman's success is
discussed at length: his extraordinary skill in
mathematical computation, intuitive sense of the best way
to proceed toward a solution (he would often skip several
intermediate steps and only fill them in when preparing work
for publication), and tireless perseverance in performing
daunting calculations which occupied page after page of
forbidding equations. This talent was quickly recognised
by those with whom he worked, and as one of the most junior
physicists on the project, he was placed in charge of all
computation at Los Alamos during the final phases of the
Manhattan Project.
Eugene Wigner
said of Feynman, “He's
another
Dirac.
Only this time human.”
Feynman's intuition and computational prowess was best demonstrated
by his work on
quantum electrodynamics,
for which he shared a Nobel prize in 1965. (Initially Feynman didn't think
too much of this work—he considered it mathematical mumbo-jumbo
which swept the infinities which had plagued earlier attempts at a
relativistic quantum theory of light and matter under the carpet. Only
later did it become apparent that Feynman's work had laid the foundation
upon which a comprehensive quantum field theory of the strong and
electroweak interactions could be built.) His invention of
Feynman diagrams
defined the language now universally used by particle physicists to
describe events in which particles interact.
Feynman was driven to understand things, and to him understanding meant
being able to derive a phenomenon from first principles. Often he
ignored the work of others and proceeded on his own, reinventing as
he went. In numerous cases, he created new techniques and provided
alternative ways of looking at a problem which provided a deeper
insight into its fundamentals. A monumental illustration of Feynman's
ability to do this is
The Feynman Lectures on Physics,
based on an undergraduate course in physics Feynman taught at Caltech
in 1961–1964. Few physicists would have had the audacity to
reformulate all of basic physics, from vectors and statics to
quantum mechanics from scratch, and probably only Feynman could have
pulled it off, which he did magnificently. As undergraduate pedagogy,
the course was less than successful, but the transcribed lectures have
remained in print ever since, and working physicists (and even humble
engineers like me) are astounded at the insights to be had in
reading and re-reading Feynman's work.
Even when Feynman failed, he failed gloriously and left behind work
that continues to inspire. His
unsuccessful attempt
to find a quantum theory of gravitation showed that Einstein's
geometric theory was completely equivalent to a field
theory developed from first principles and knowledge of the
properties of gravity. Feynman's foray into computation produced the
Feynman Lectures On Computation,
one of the first comprehensive expositions of the theory of
quantum computation.
A chapter is devoted to the predictions of Feynman's 1959 lecture,
“Plenty
of Room at the Bottom”, which is rightly viewed as the
founding document of molecular nanotechnology, but, as Krauss
describes, also contained the seeds of genomic biotechnology, ultra-dense
data storage, and quantum material engineering. Work resulting in more
than fifteen subsequent Nobel prizes is suggested in this blueprint
for research. Although Feynman would go on to win his own Nobel
for other work, one gets the sense he couldn't care less that others
pursued the lines of investigation he sketched and were rewarded for
doing so. Feynman was in the game to understand, and
often didn't seem to care whether what he was pursuing was of
great importance or mundane, or whether the problem he was working
on from his own unique point of departure had already been solved
by others long before.
Feynman was such a curious character that his larger than life
personality often obscures his greatness as a scientist. This
book does an excellent job of restoring that balance and showing
how much his work contributed to the edifice of science in the
20th century and beyond.
April 2013 