Quantum Man

"Richard Feynman is a hero of every physicist. Until quite late in his life he was only known by physicists and wasn’t a public figure at all. That changed in the 1980s when he started writing popular books. He was a very fun and colourful character. Yes, he certainly did. There was very much this image of him as this straight-talking man from Queens who wasn’t interested in the fashions of science and would do his own thing in his own blunt way. I discovered from this book that his image of “I am a straightforward man” wasn’t that simple, because actually he did have quite a big ego. Also, there was this very interesting arc to his personal life. As a very young man, his wife, whom he was devoted to, died young. After that he went slightly off the rails and turned into this womaniser, chatting up inappropriate women at the bars of the various conferences he attended. So he became almost as notorious for his personal life as he was for science, and then he met another woman who straightened him out in the classic fashion. For the next part of his life he stopped being so unsettled and became this sort of folk hero, did all the bongo playing, and discovered the throat voice singers and all that kind of fun stuff that people know about. It is a lovely book, which I was very pleased by. Lawrence Krauss is quite a well-known populariser but I had never been very fond of his books. He had written a thing about the science of Star Trek and I thought it was a bit gimmicky. But this book isn’t like that. It is very straightforward and beautifully written. If you want to know what it is like inside the skull of a physicist it is a very good book to read."