document: Richard Feynman , the Thinker In the heyday of the physicist Richard P. Feynman , which ensued after his death in 1988 , a publishing entrepreneur might have been tempted to start a book club of works by and about him . Offered as main selections would be Feynman 's autobiographical rambles -LRB- as told to Ralph Leighton -RRB- , `` ` Surely You 're Joking , Mr. Feynman ! ' '' and `` ` What Do You Care What Other People Think ? ' '' For alternate selections , readers could choose from his more serious works , like `` QED : The Strange Theory of Light and Matter '' -- a spirited account of the counterintuitive behavior of the quantum world -- and the legendary `` Feynman Lectures on Physics . '' Whatever the man said had swagger . For those who would rather listen , there are recordings of the lectures and of Feynman playing his bongos . He was an irresistible subject for biographers and , as he called himself in two of his subtitles , a curious character indeed . The best biography , James Gleick 's `` Genius , '' captured the ebullience -- sometimes winning , sometimes exasperating -- and gave lucid explanations of some hard physics . Those seeking a more mathematical treatment could turn to Jagdish Mehra 's thick book `` The Beat of a Different Drum , '' while for a lighter touch there was Christopher Sykes 's `` No Ordinary Genius : The Illustrated Richard Feynman . '' It is hard to imagine that the world needs another Feynman biography , but here it is . In `` Quantum Man : Richard Feynman 's Life in Science , '' Lawrence M. Krauss , director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University , makes his own way through the subject and emerges with an enlightening addition to the field . Krauss -- like Feynman a physicist as well as an author -- has written seven books , including `` The Physics of Star Trek . '' Though he could n't resist recycling some well-worn Feynman anecdotes -LRB- and providing a couple of his own -RRB- , he concentrates on Feynman the thinker , and on the contributions that merited his fame . It is not something easily summarized . Einstein discovered relativity . Murray Gell-Mann discovered the quark . And Feynman ? Well , there was that thing he did on TV with the O-ring and the ice water , showing why the Challenger had disintegrated . But to physicists he is famous for something more obscure : cleaning up the mathematical mess known as quantum electrodynamics -- an ambitious attempt to explain light and matter using two great theories , quantum mechanics and special relativity . In 1965 , he shared a Nobel Prize with two colleagues -LRB- Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga -RRB- , who solved the problem in different ways . But Feynman 's `` sum over paths '' approach , expressed in the lines and squiggles of what became known as Feynman diagrams , opened up a more intuitive understanding of the subatomic realm . It was , as Krauss puts it , `` a beautiful pictorial way of thinking about quantum mechanics . '' Other good books give a feel for this and Feynman 's later accomplishments . But I understood it all better after watching over the shoulder of Krauss the physicist as he worked his way through the Feynman oeuvre -- not the stories of fast times in Rio , but the scientific papers . In popular lore , Feynman often comes off as the wild man of physics , throwing out one crazy idea after another in a frenzied search for truth . In `` Quantum Man '' -- part of the `` Great Discoveries '' series , for which I have also written a book -- we see more of his other side : a master mathematician who could concentrate on a problem for hours and then recast it in a surprising new manner . In following the chain of ideas that led to Feynman 's Nobel , Krauss begins with a familiar phenomenon -- the way a light ray takes a sudden bend when it enters a pool of water . The angle can be calculated using a staple of high school physics called Snell 's law , but in the 17th century Pierre de Fermat provided a deeper explanation : the light beam acts as though it were trying to minimize its total travel time . Light moves more slowly in water than in air , so it adjusts its course , ensuring that it spends no longer than necessary in the denser medium . The idea is not that the light beam is thinking ahead but that the universe is somehow structured so it appears that way . During the next century , mathematicians showed that Newton 's laws of motion could be rewritten in a similar vein : an orbiting planet or a hurtling cannonball moves as though it were trying to minimize a more abstract quantity called `` action . '' Krauss gives readers a feel for what that means and shows how Feynman retooled the idea to solve some nagging problems in subatomic physics . One of science 's great puzzles -LRB- still only partly solved -RRB- is how to reconcile the regularities of classical physics -- like the bending light beam -- with the probabilistic laws of quantum mechanics . Light , after all , consists of photons , which are capable of doing all kinds of strange things . In moving from A to B , a photon may take any number of different paths , even ones that seem absurd -- spiraling in curlicues , changing speeds in midair . With Feynman 's method , these acrobatics can be added together , the weirdest ones canceling one another out , to yield the motion we observe in the familiar world . This triumph came early in his career . His later thinking -LRB- about solid-state physics , for example , or quantum cosmology -RRB- was just as original . Maybe sometimes too original , Krauss suggests . Science usually proceeds by building on what came before . The maverick in Feynman kept him from accepting even the most established ideas until he had torn them apart and reassembled the pieces . That led to a deeper understanding , but his time might have been better spent at the cutting edge . `` He continued to push physics forward as few modern scientists have , '' Krauss writes , `` but he tended to lead from the rear or , at best , from a side flank . '' Like those quantum particles , he seemed eager to try every path -- even the crazy ones . That was true in his life as well as in his physics . George Johnson is the author of eight books , including '' `` Strange Beauty : Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics . '' ''
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