DATE: Thursday, August 14, 1997             TAG: 9708130043

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E7   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY TEMPLE WEST 

                                            LENGTH:   76 lines

FEYNMAN BIOGRAPHY MISSES TARGET

SOME PEOPLE have careers, but Richard Feynman had a destiny - a destiny in the mythological sense of someone who enters realms unknown to most of us, like Isis, who insisted on knowing the secret name of the god, Ra, in order to fulfill her desire to leave human spheres.

Gifted with the same kind of impatient desire to know truths underlying mere names, Feynman, in his unusually long career, accessed perhaps more of the secrets of the universe than any other scientist before him.

It is a tribute to his essence as a man, his passion and his humor, and his essence as a physicist, his magical genius and his clarity, that yet another biography has been written - this time by the husband-and-wife team of John Gribbin, an astrophysicist, and Mary Gribbin.

Feynman (pronounced, appropriately, `fine man') was born in 1918 and grew up in Far Rockaway, N.Y. Legend has it that when Richard's father, Melville, heard of his wife's pregnancy, he commented: ``If it's a boy, he'll be a scientist.'' Not only was he to be a scientist, ``with the best mind since Einstein,'' but a brilliant teacher and storyteller as well. His contributions to physics were primarily in quantum electrodynamics: ``QED explains everything that isn't explained by gravity.''

Quantum theories had, of course, been conceived before Feynman began his work (by Erwin Schrodinger, Werner Heisenberg and Paul Dirac), but his extraordinary insights advanced knowledge of physical reality by incalculable dimensions. He literally saw the world, even mathematics, in pictures. In his own book, ``What Do You Care What Other People Think?'' he explained: ``When I see equations, I see the letters in colors - I don't know why.'' Feynman, though, was best known to the public for his work on the Manhattan Project (he was ``the only person to watch the first nuclear explosion on Earth with his naked eyes,'' write the Gribbins) and his televised explanation of the O-Ring failure that caused the Challenger explosion.

The Gribbins discuss, sometimes in agonizing detail, not only all of Feynman's theories, but much of the work in physics that preceded him as well. It might have been better if they had used Feynman's own words to explain his work since he was known for his ability to make the complex understandable and locate theory in identifiable reality. His famous undergraduate lectures at Cal Tech were pure theater, and he was the performer, as responsible for drama as for information.

Feynman's approach to physics was not as a ``cold-blooded logician,'' but as a ``fun-loving, adventurous character.'' To him, physics was fun. He allowed audiences to come ``into contact with nature in ways that they could not achieve on their own.''

And physics was practical. One of his favorite sayings was, ``If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong.'' He took immense pleasure in discovering things for himself, even if someone had done it before.

The Gribbins must be among the busiest of writers. John Gribbin has published many titles himself, and he and his wife have collaborated on more than 40 books. They have written this biography, they explain pretentiously, because no one else has captured Feynman as the ``best-loved scientist of all times.''

Ironically, neither one of the Gribbins knew Feynman personally and they rely heavily on secondary sources and previously published biographies and interviews for their interesting, if not penetrating or particularly insightful, appraisal. But if their portrayal makes available, one more time, the work and stories of Richard Feynman, then it is successful.

Shortly before he died of cancer on Feb. 15, 1988, Feynman said, ``I feel like I've told enough stories to other people, and enough of me is inside their minds. I've kind of spread me around all over the place. So I'm probably not going to go away completely when I'm dead!'' If we should lose his story, we would indeed lose much of our own rich mythology. MEMO: Temple West is a student in the M.F.A. creative writing program at

Old Dominion University. ILLUSTRATION: Graphic

BOOK REVIEW

``Richard Feynman: A Life in Science''

Author: John and Mary Gribbin

Publisher: Dutton. 301 pp.

Price: $24.95

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