![]() ![]() ![]() His books are full of brainy pranks and skirt-chasing honed to a science of its own. ![]() This “noetic Casanova,” as Gleick calls him, put science next to sex, where it belongs in alphabetical order. While Watson admitted that scientists have egos, Feynman confessed that they also have ids. Not since James Watson’s “Double Helix”-a book greatly admired by Feynman-had a scientist exposed himself so brazenly to the public. It was followed after Feynman’s death by another grab bag of stories titled “What Do You Care What Other People Think?,” which also became a bestseller. Feynman!” Assembled by the son of one of his colleagues, this as-told-to book became a bestseller. The Feynman myth began expanding outward to become part of our national heritage in 1985, when he published a collection of autobiographical squibs called “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman-or actually Feynman and his collaborators, since he never really wrote any of the books that bear his name-did a brilliant job of bringing his raucous Broadway patter to the page. The book is ambitious and thorough, but Gleick has a tough assignment when he follows Feynman in retelling stories that the scientist himself had already narrated. He has performed a monumental task of sifting through Feynman’s papers and interviewing many of the important figures in his life. It is Gleick’s aspiration to use Feynman’s life as a window into the history of modern physics, our “modern secular religion,” as Gleick calls it. ![]()
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