Quantum Man: Richard Feynman’s Life in Science , Lawrence M. Krauss W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 2011. $24.95 (368 pp.). ISBN 978-0-393-06471-1
Richard Feynman was my friend and colleague for more than 20 years before he died on 15 February 1988. Knowing him was a thoroughly remarkable experience that informed and illuminated my days.
Nevertheless, the latest biography, Quantum Man: Richard Feynman’s Life in Science, by theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss, has greatly improved my understanding of what Feynman did before I met him in 1966. Unlike Krauss’s previous popularizations, notably The Physics of Star Trek (Basic Books, 2007), Quantum Man is about a physicist and for physicists. To be sure, Krauss nobly attempts to make the book accessible to a general audience by including essentially no equations. He says he prepared to write the book by reading all of Feynman’s scientific works and much of the...
