Feynman's Rainbow: A Search for Beauty in Physics and in Life

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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.

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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