late night reading material...

Just finished reading this book, It's the biography of Richard Feynman a physicist who is most famous for his work on the first Nuclear Bomb project although he also could have claimed to have come up with the concept of nano-technology and to have discovered why the Challenger shuttle blew up. As physicists go he was an interesting character, an accomplished Bongo player, somewhat of a raconteur and, unlike the traditional view of scientists, a bit of a ladies man (although not always a gentleman towards the opposite sex...). However this book doesn't really dwell on those sides of his personality instead it gets to grips with his scientific mind and his unique way of studying problems in a simple elegant and unique way that marked him out as someone who could be described with the term 'genius'.



I picked this book out as I read a book on Chaos Theory by the same author a few years ago that I really enjoyed, I have to confess though that now I'm old and slow much of the physics described in this book do go over my head. Still, it's a good read, and actually engages a few braincells unlike most of the tabloid-esque biographies you find in bookshops nowadays



The next book (not counting comics books) on my reading list is markedly different to this one; it's a collection of short stories written in the first half of the century. Here's a taste:



Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous.



Cheery eh?! It's from the grand-daddy of horror, Mr H.P. Lovecraft. Since many of the comic books in my collection (Hellboy springs to mind immediately) are apparently heavily influenced by his work I thought it was about time I gave in and read some of his stories...