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Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman ::
Oh, genius. Itës an idea thatës been batted around, thatës been over-used, that has been beaten to death. I sometimes wonder if it even has any meaning any more. When I was in college, it seemed that every book that I was to read was a work of genius, that the authors were incomprehensible geniuses, that their understanding of the nature of our existence was so complex, so definitive that I would never be able to fully grasp what they were trying to say. The best I could do would be to sometimes discover a fleeting glimpse of one of their ideas. Then, if I was lucky, and I worked hard enough, I would write an essay on that idea and receive a respectable grade. Not being a genius myself, it was a frustrating existence, finding that there was an impossible gap between me and those writers, thinkers, mathematicians, and scientists I so admired, that I spent so much time thinking about. They were perfect in so many ways that I was not, they were divine and it was my duty to try, in vain, to understand them and report on what I saw.
It was exciting read this book, now that Iëve gotten some distance between myself and that closed-in, undergraduate existence I suffered through nearly four years ago. Because no matter how stingy you are with the idea of genius, Richard Feynman will make you want to pass the word out like pennies. He helped bring forth nuclear fission. He understood not only the impossible concepts of quantum mechanics, but also the mathematics on which the system of thought was founded. He cracked safes. He sensed people by their scent and their body heat. He taught himself the bongos. He even once was able to calculate, without the aid of any pencil, paper or computer, the trajectory of one of NASAës earliest rockets (apparently, he told the NASA scientist, much to their dismay, that their experiment had crashed into the ocean). And, though much of Feynmanës strengths were made clear in Genius, all of his shortcomings were, as well. He has little ability in, and even less tolerance for, what seemed to be all other areas of academia. He had perpetually troublesome relationships with people, especially women, and he treated almost everyone poorly.
So, though much of his mental ability proves to this day to be untouchable, Feynman was also not divine, not fundamentally any better than anyone else. I think on some level he was aware of that, which was what made him such a damn fine scientist, if not, in fact, a genius as well.
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