Float and Sink (Simple Science) Book

I recently finished reading Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, by James Gleick. I’m a big fan of Gleick’s. His book on Isaac Newton was brilliant. And in this bio of Feynman, who was one of the midwives of the atomic bomb, Gleick illustrates just how important Feynman’s thinking has been to our modern understanding of physics, and therefore, of energy. Feynman grappled with the big questions about matter, science, and the quest for human knowledge and understanding. One of my favorite parts of Gleick’s book comes early on, when he talks about Feynman’s effort to distill human understanding of science into as short a passage as possible. Feynman posed himself this question: what if all scientific knowledge were lost in a cataclysm? What statement would convey the most knowledge in the fewest words to the next generations? Feynman proposed this: “All things are made of atoms – little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another….In that one little sentence , you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied.”

Gleick is brilliant. For me, he’s a little like Mark Twain in that when I read his stuff, it whispers to me that I should perhaps quit what I’m doing because I’ll just never be that good.