Front cover image for The beat of a different drum : the life and science of Richard Feynman

The beat of a different drum : the life and science of Richard Feynman

This definitive book deals with the life and scientific work of arguably the greatest American-born theoretical physicist of the twentieth century. He was a great teacher, a born showman, bongo drummer, buffoon, and iconoclast; a scientific magician capable of transcendental leaps of the imagination. During his career he was drawn into research on the atomic bomb before working out his path-integral formulation of quantum mechanics and quantum electro-dynamics. Subsequently he developed the diagrammatic technique, as a result of which Feynman diagrams became ubiquitous in quantum field theory, elementary particle physics, and statistical mechanics. From 1950 he was based at the California Institute of Technology, where he worked on the superfluidity of liquid helium, the theory of polarons, the theory of weak interactions, the quantum theory of gravitation, partons, quark jets, and the limits of computation

Print Book, English, 1994
Clarendon Press ; Oxford University Press, Oxford [England], New York, 1994