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Feynman's Rainbow de Leonard Mlodinow

Feynman's Rainbow

Autor Leonard Mlodinow
en Limba Engleză Paperback – 29 noi 2011

Ne-a atras atenția modul în care Feynman's Rainbow reușește să dizolve granițele dintre fizica teoretică și filozofia existențială. Această lucrare nu este un simplu tratat de știință, ci o explorare interdisciplinară care pune sub semnul întrebării însăși natura creativității umane. Descoperim aici o incursiune în culisele California Institute of Technology din anii '80, unde Leonard Mlodinow își începe bursa postdoctorală sub îndrumarea legendarului Richard Feynman. Observăm cum discuțiile lor transcend ecuațiile matematice, atingând subiecte profunde precum arta, religia, dragostea și moștenirea intelectuală.

Cititorii familiarizați cu Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman vor aprecia modul în care acest volum aduce o perspectivă nouă, mai intimă și poate mai vulnerabilă asupra geniului de la Caltech. În timp ce memoriile lui Feynman sunt adesea centrate pe aventurile sale spectaculoase, Mlodinow ne oferă un portret melancolic al ultimilor săi ani de activitate, filtrat prin nesiguranțele și aspirațiile unui tânăr om de știință. Această dinamică de mentorat oferă o profunzime emoțională care completează imaginea publică a fizicianului.

Poziționată în contextul operei autorului, cartea reprezintă puntea de legătură între rigoarea științifică din The Grand Design și explorarea psihologică din lucrări precum Emotional sau Elastic. Dacă în colaborările cu Hawking, Leonard Mlodinow se concentrează pe structura universului, în Feynman's Rainbow el investighează structura minții și a spiritului uman. Este o lectură cu un ritm introspectiv, care transformă concepte abstracte în lecții de viață tangibile, păstrând totodată acuratețea științifică specifică unui cercetător de talia sa.

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Specificații

ISBN-13: 9780307946492
ISBN-10: 0307946495
Pagini: 171
Dimensiuni: 134 x 211 x 18 mm
Greutate: 0.2 kg
Editura: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

De ce să citești această carte

Această carte este recomandarea noastră pentru cei care doresc să înțeleagă procesul creativ din spatele marilor descoperiri științifice. Veți câștiga o perspectivă umană asupra lui Richard Feynman și veți descoperi cum nesiguranța profesională poate fi transformată în curiozitate constructivă. Este o lectură esențială pentru studenții la științe exacte, dar și pentru oricine caută să împace rigoarea logică cu sensibilitatea artistică și întrebările filozofice despre fericire.

Despre autor

Leonard Mlodinow este un fizician teoretician și scriitor american, recunoscut pentru capacitatea sa de a explica fenomene complexe pe înțelesul publicului larg. A activat la California Institute of Technology (Caltech) și la Institutul Max Planck pentru Fizică. Cariera sa este marcată de o versatilitate rară, fiind scenarist pentru serii celebre precum 'Star Trek: The Next Generation' și co-autor alături de Stephen Hawking pentru volumele 'The Grand Design' și 'A Briefer History of Time'. Lucrările sale explorează adesea intersecția dintre fizică, psihologie și neuroștiințe, aducând o contribuție majoră la popularizarea științei contemporane.

Descriere scurtă

Some of the brightest minds in science have passed through the halls of the California Institute of Technology. In the early 1980s, Leonard Mlodinow joined their ranks to begin a postdoctoral fellowship. Afraid he was not smart enough to be there, despite his groundbreaking Ph.D. thesis, he took his insecurities to Richard Feynman, Caltech’s intimidating resident genius and iconoclast. So began a pivotal year in a young man’s life. Though a series of fascinating exchanges, Mlodinow and Feynman delve into the nature of science, creativity, love mathematics, happiness, God, art, pleasures and ambition, producing a moving portrait of a friendship and an affecting account of Feynman’s final creative years.

Notă biografică

Leonard Mlodinow received his doctorate in theoretical physics from the University of California, Berkeley, was an Alexander von Humboldt fellow at the Max Planck Institute, and now teaches future scientists at Caltech. His previous books include War of the Worldviews (with Deepak Chopra); the two national bestsellers The Grand Design (with Stephen Hawking) and The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, which was also a New York Times Notable Book and was short-listed for the Royal Society General Prize; and Euclid’s Window: The Story of Geometry from Parallel Lines to Hyperspace. Along the way he also wrote for the television series MacGyver and Star Trek: The Next Generation.
 
www.its.caltech.edu/~len

Extras

IN A GRAY CEMENT building on the olive tree-lined Caltech campus on California Boulevard in Pasadena, a thin man with longish hair steps into his modest office. Some students, on this planet less than one-third as long as the professor has been, stop in the hallway and stare. No one would say a word if he didn't come to the office this day, but nothing could keep him away, especially not the surgery, the effects of which he would no longer allow to ruin his routine.
 
Outside, bright sun bathes the palm trees, but it is no longer the withering sun of the summer. The hills rise, brown now giving way to green, their vegetation reborn with the coming of the more hospitable winter season. The professor might have wondered how many more cycles of green and brown he would live to witness; he knew he had a disease that would kill him. He loved life, but he believed in natural law, and not in miracles. When his rare form of cancer was first discovered in the summer of 1978, he had searched the literature. Five-year survival rates were generally reported to be less than 10 percent. Virtually no one survived ten years. He was into his fourth.
 
Some forty years earlier, when he was almost as young as the students currently around him, he had sent a series of papers to the prestigious journal Physical Review. The papers contained odd little diagrams, which constituted a new way of thinking about quantum mechanics, less formal than the standard mathematical language of physics. Though few seemed convinced of his new approach, he thought how amusing it would be if some day that journal would be full of his diagrams. As it turned out, the method they reflected proved to be not only correct and useful, but revolutionary, and on that day late in 1981, in the Physical Review, his diagrams were ubiquitous. They were about as famous as diagrams get. And he was about as famous, at least in the world of science, as scientists get.
 
The professor has been working on a new problem the past couple of years. The method he worked out in his student days had been wildly successful when applied to a theory called quantum electrodynamics. That is the theory of the electromagnetic force that governs, among other things, the behavior of the electrons that orbit the nucleus of the atom. These electrons impart to atoms their chemical properties and their spectral properties (the colors of light they emit and absorb). Hence the study of these particular electrons and their behavior is called atomic physics. But since the professor's student days physicists had made great progress in a new field called nuclear physics. Nuclear physics looks beyond the electronic structure of atoms to the potentially much more violent interactions of the protons and neutrons within the nucleus. Though protons are subject to the same electromagnetic force that governs the behavior of the atomic electrons, these interactions are dominated by a new force, a force that is far stronger than the electromagnetic force. It is called, fittingly, the U strong force."
 
To describe the strong force a grand new theory had been invented. The new theory had some mathematical similarities to quantum electrodynamics, and it was given a name that reflected these similarities quantum chromodynamics (despite the root, chromo, it has nothing to do with color as we know it). In principle quantum chromodynamics provided a precise quantitative description of protons, neutrons, and related particles and how they interact--how they might bind to each other, or behave in collisions. But how do we extract descriptions of these processes from the theory? The professor's approach applied in principle to this new theory but practical complications arose. Though quantum chromodynamics had had certain triumphs, for many situations neither the professor nor anyone else knew how to use his diagrams--or any other method--to extract accurate numerical predictions from the theory. Theorists couldn't even calculate the mass of the proton--a very basic quantity that had long ago been accurately measured by the experimentalists.
 
The professor thinks, perhaps, that with the months or years he has left on earth he'll play around with the problem of quantum chromodynamics, considered one of the most important of its day. To create the energy and will he needs for his effort, he tells himself that everyone else who had for so many years unsuccessfully attacked this problem lacked certain qualities that he possesses. What they are he, Richard Feynman, isn't sure: an oddball approach, perhaps. Whatever those qualities are, they had served him well--he had one Nobel Prize, but might arguably have deserved two or three when you considered all the wide-ranging and important breakthroughs he had made in his career.
 
Meanwhile, in 1980, several hundred miles north in Berkeley, a much younger man had sent off a couple papers with his own new approach to solving some of the old mysteries of atomic physics. His method offered answers to some difficult problems, but there was a catch. The world he explored in his imagination was one in which space has an infinite number of dimensions. It is a world with not just up/down, right/left, and forward/backward, but also a countless array of other directions. Could you really say anything useful about our three-dimensional existence by studying a universe like that? And could the method be extended to other areas of study, such as the more modern field of nuclear physics? It would turn out that it is promising enough that this student received a beginning faculty appointment at Caltech, and an office down the hall from Feynman.
 
The night after receiving that offer of employment, I remembered lying in my bed half my life earlier, wondering what it would belike the next day, my first day in junior high. More than anything else, as I recall, I was worried about gym and showering in front of all those other boys. What I was really worried about was ridicule. I would be exposed, too, at Caltech. In Pasadena there would be no faculty advisor, no mentor, just my own answers to the hardest problems the best physicists could think of to me, a physicist who didn't produce brilliant ideas was one of the living dead. At a place like Caltech, he would also be shunned, and soon unemployed.
 
Did I have it or didn't I? Or was I asking the wrong question? I started talking to the thin, dying professor with long hair in an office down the hall. What the old man told me is the subject of this book.

Recenzii

“An accessible portrait of a brilliant man.” —Stephen Hawking, author of A Brief History of Time

“A very unusual memoir of a very unusual author’s revealing encounters with a very human legend.” —The Dallas Morning News

“This is a sweetly entertaining book about the weird, but engaging, world of physics. . . . Young scientists will find solace and perhaps inspiration here.” —American Scientist
 
“Mlodinow’s tribute to the man is set against an amusing, nicely drawn backdrop of campus life, and fleshed out with a very readable account of string theory, which developed into the most promising breakthrough of the century in theoretical physics.” —The Independent (London)
 
“Mlodinow’s accessible style manages to convey Feynman’s cantankerous appeal as well as some of the weirdness of theoretical physics without overtaxing lay readers, while his deft, funny, novelistic portraits of its practitioners . . . bring this seemingly gray sub-culture to vivid life.” —Publishers Weekly
 
“An exhilarating book . . . one that reflects the radiance of its subject and so warms as it instructs.” —David Berlinski, author of One, Two, Three: Absolutely Elementary Mathematics
 
“Mlodinow thinks in equations but explains in anecdote, simile, and occasional bursts of neon. . . . The results are mind-bending.” —Fortune