Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd (Audiobook, MP3)
Why trying to be the best competing like crazy makes you mediocre. Every few years a book through a combination of the authors unique voice, storytelling ability, wit, and insight simply breaks the mold. Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods is one example. Richard Feynman's Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! is another. Now comes Youngme Moons Different, a book for people who don't read business books. Actually, it's more like a personal conversation with a friend who has thought deeply about how the world works and who gets you to see that world in a completely new light.
Described by his peers as the finest physicist of his generation, Richard Feynman defied scientist stereotypes. This brash New York-born American physicist startled the more conservative giants of European physics with his endless ability to improvise. Indeed, later in life, Feynman became an accomplished bongo player. Feynman's legacy to physics was his ability to simplify complex equations and clarify fundamental principles through the use of graphs.
In a detailed reconstruction of the genesis of Feynman diagrams the author reveals that their development was constantly driven by the attempt to resolve fundamental problems concerning the uninterpretable infinities that arose in quantum as well as classical theories of electrodynamic phenomena. Accordingly, as a comparison with the graphical representations that were in use before Feynman diagrams shows, the resulting theory of quantum electrodynamics, featuring Feynman diagrams, differed significantly from earlier versions of the theory in the way in which the relevant phenomena were conceptualized and modelled.
One of the most dazzling and flamboyant scientists of the 20th century
To his scientific colleagues, Richard Feynman was a magician of the highest caliber. Architect of quantum theories, enfant terrible of the atomic bomb project, caustic critic of the space shuttle commission, Nobel Prize winner for work that gave physicists a new way of describing and calculating the interactions of subatomic particles, Richard Feynman left his mark on virtually every area of modern physics.
When historian Charles Weiner found pages of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman's notes, he saw it as a "record" of Feynman's work. Feynman himself, however, insisted that the notes were not a record but the work itself. In Supersizing the Mind, Andy Clark argues that our thinking doesn't happen only in our heads but that "certain forms of human cognizing include inextricable tangles of feedback, feed-forward and feed-around loops: loops that promiscuously criss-cross the boundaries of brain, body and world."
