No Ordinary Genius: The Illustrated Richard Feynman

Edited by Christopher Sykes.

W. W. Norton & Co., 272 p., $19.95 (paper).

The life of Richard Feynman has touched on some of the most interesting and important technologies of our times. He worked on the Manhattan Project. He invented a notation that allows physicists to calculate any problem in field theory more easily. He demonstrated to the public that O-rings were at fault in the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion.

But forget all that — this guy was fun. And this book is a great overview of his life and works. Compiled from interviews of Feynman and people close to him, and containing more than 100 photographs, letters and newspaper clippings, you learn to view Richard Feynman as his compatriots saw him — as a genius, a prankster and a man who loved a mystery.

His interests were varied. He agreed to trade weekly lessons in physics for weekly drawing lessons with an artist. He sent out a challenge in 1959 for someone to build "an operating electric motor... [that] is only one-sixty-fourth-inch cubed," because he thought it might be fun, possibly inventing nanotechnology in the process. (Surprisingly enough, someone sent him a working model within a year.) He played drums, sketched (often over his calculations), and regularly followed his interest of the moment until he understood how it worked.

Many of the anecdotes focus on his sense of humor. While at the Manhattan Project, he continued to practice his hobby of safecracking and wrote letters to his wife in code. During the investigation of the Challenger explosion, he signed a letter to the head of the Presidential Committee reviewing the accident, of which he was a member, with a list of his accomplishments: "Commissioner Feynman, Nobel Prize, Einstein Award, Oersted Medal, and utter ignoramus about politics."

Especially in his work on physics, he felt that "I have to disregard everybody else, and then I can do my own work."

— Robert Wisdom

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