New York Times Bestseller: This life story of the quirky physicist is "a thorough and masterful portrait of one of the great minds of the century" (The New York Review of Books). Raised in Depression-era Rockaway Beach, physicist Richard Feynman was irreverent, eccentric, and childishly enthusiastic-a new kind of scientist in a field that was in its infancy. His quick mastery of quantum mechanics earned him a place at Los Alamos working on the Manhattan Project under J. Robert Oppenheimer, where the giddy young man held his own among the nation's greatest minds. There, Feynman turned theory into practice, culminating in the Trinity test, on July 16, 1945, when the Atomic Age was born. He was only twenty-seven. And he was just getting started. In this sweeping biography, James Gleick captures the forceful personality of a great man, integrating Feynman's work and life in a way that is accessible to laymen and fascinating for the scientists who follow in his footsteps.

Born in New York City in 1954, James Gleick is one of the nation's preeminent science writers. Upon graduating from Harvard in 1976, he founded Metropolis, a weekly Minneapolis newspaper, and spent the next decade working at the New York Times. Gleick's prominent works include Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, Isaac Newton, and Chaos: Making a New Science, all of which were shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize. His latest book, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood,was published in March 2011. He lives and works in New York.

• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Prologue
• Far Rockaway
  • Neither Country nor City
  • A Birth and a Death
  • It's Worth It
  • At School
  • All Things Are Made of Atoms
  • A Century of Progress
  • Richard and Julian
• MIT
  • The Best Path
  • Socializing the Engineer
  • The Newest Physics
  • Shop Men
  • Feynman of Course Is Jewish
  • Forces in Molecules
  • Is He Good Enough?
• Princeton
  • A Quaint Ceremonious Village
  • Folds and Rhythms
  • Forward or Backward?
  • The Reasonable Man
  • Mr. X and the Nature of Time
  • Least Action in Quantum Mechanics
  • The Aura
  • The White Plague
  • Preparing for War
  • The Manhattan Project
  • Finishing Up
• Los Alamos
  • The Man Comes In with His Briefcase
  • Chain Reactions
  • The Battleship and the Mosquito Boat
  • Diffusion
  • Computing by Brain
  • Computing by Machine
  • Fenced In
  • The Last Springtime
  • False Hopes
  • Nuclear Fear
  • I Will Bide My Time
  • We Scientists Are Clever
• Cornell
  • The University at Peace
  • Phenomena Complex--Laws Simple
  • They All Seem Ashes
  • Around a Mental Block
  • Shrinking the Infinities
  • Dyson
  • A Half-Assedly Thought-Out Pictorial Semi-Vision Thing
  • Schwinger's Glory
  • My Machines Came from Too Far Away
  • There Was Also Presented (by Feynman) ...
  • Cross-Country with Freeman Dyson
  • Oppenheimer's Surrender
  • Dyson Graphs, Feynman Diagrams
  • Away to a Fabulous Land
• Caltech
  • Faker from Copacabana
  • Alas, the Love of Women!
  • Onward with Physics
  • A Quantum Liquid
  • New Particles, New Language
  • Murray
  • In Search of Genius
  • Weak Interactions
  • Toward a Domestic Life
  • From QED to Genetics
  • Ghosts and Worms
  • Room at the Bottom
  • All His Knowledge
  • The Explorers and the Tourists
  • The Swedish Prize
  • Quarks and Partons
  • Teaching the Young
  • Do You Think You Can Last On Forever?
  • Surely You're Joking!
  • A Disaster of Technology
• Epilogue
• Image Gallery
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• A Feynman Bibliography
• Bibliography
• Index
  • A
  • B
  • C
  • D
  • E
  • F
  • G
  • H
  • I
  • J
  • K
  • L
  • M
  • N
  • O
  • P
  • Q
  • R
  • S
  • T
  • U
  • V
  • W
  • X
  • Y
  • Z
• Illustration Credits