It was intended apparantly as kind of a companion to Feynman Lectures on Computation , 1996. But it's quite a bit more than that. Both books nearly fell off the shelf at a Borders bookstore here, so I felt I had to pick at least one of them up. Right now I'm reading a section by Dr Richard Hughes of the Los Alamos National Laboratories on quantum computers. Part of his section which I found very interesting deals with the RSA problem and prime numbers, and Shor's factoring algorithm - the latter being the first known application of the quantum computer.
Intractability is no drag at all.
If you can view problems as opportunities then maybe the bigger the problem, the bigger the opportunity. Feynman has inspired many others as well. A parallel theme in the book is Feynman's fascination with making things very very small such as in the 1959 lecture Plenty of Room at the Bottom, creating tiny motors and writing the Encyclopedia Britanica on the head of a pin. Not only did this inspire scientists and engineers to actually do such things, the lecture, poised on the edge of the transistor age forshadows the development of large scale integration and microprocessors, just as today we are poised on the edged of nanotechnology. Like Sherlock Holmes, I have to believe that nothing is actually an accident.