Colin Hughes

(New York: Saint Martins Press) Over the last decade, at least nine books have appeared with the name ‘J. Robert Oppenheimer’ in the title, and no doubt the trend will continue. Some are biographies, covering Oppenheimer’s life as family man, as physicist, as ‘father of the atomic bomb’, as victim of a witch hunt during…

Paul Dirac and Richard Feynman were legends in their lifetimes and remain so to this day. Their peers thought of them as unconventional, eccentric, magical geniuses. As theoretical physicists, they had much in common – an ability to focus on difficult problems and pursue them, if necessary, for months on end. Their personalities were, however,…