(FORTUNE Magazine) – Richard Feynman helped create the atomic bomb at Los Alamos and later won the Nobel Prize for his work in quantum physics. He also studied how to pick locks - and pick up women at bars, floated in sensory deprivation tanks to induce out- of-body hallucinations, played the bongos, talked gambling with Nick the Greek, smoked pot, and tried LSD. Such are the pursuits of a relentlessly curious mind.

Long a legend among scientists, the brilliant, iconoclastic, practical- joking Caltech professor emerged as something of a popular hero in his final years. (He died in 1988 after a decade-long struggle with cancer.) Feynman made the evening news in 1986 when he uncovered the cause of the Challenger space shuttle explosion and demonstrated his findings at a public hearing by plunging a piece of a rubber O-ring into a glass of ice water to show how it lost resilience in the cold. Now his tale is retold in Genius (Pantheon Books, $27.50), by James Gleick, a former New York Times science reporter. Genius is guaranteed to attract a large audience among techies such as software programmers and bioengineers, and the people who manage them. Many of these types already consider Feynman a sort of patron saint. Before Feynman's death, Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, for instance, hoped to market a series of videotapes of his physics lectures. For the general reader, what's most valuable in Genius is the depiction not of what Feynman thought but how he went about thinking. For one thing, Feynman refused to read books by other scientists. ''He chided graduate students who would begin work on a problem in the normal way, by checking what had already been done,'' Gleick writes. ''That way, he told them, they would give up the chance of finding something original.'' Gleick sets out to demystify a man who inspired and actively nurtured his own legend by crafting stories that cast himself as a joyful, clownish gadfly. Feynman's ''own view of himself worked less to illuminate than to hide the nature of his genius,'' writes Gleick, who had access to Feynman's personal papers and also did prodigious reporting. He reveals that the physicist, usually so supremely rational, wrote a wrenchingly moving love letter to his first wife, Arline, two years after her death from tuberculosis. This side of Feynman never made its way into the iconography: ''The Feynman who could be wracked by strong emotions, the man stung by shyness, insecurity, anger, worry, or grief -- no one got close enough anymore to see him.'' Unfortunately, Gleick rarely gets close enough either. In this biography, subtitled The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, there's not enough of the * subject's inspiring life and too much of the arcane aspects of his science. His spirit and passion often fade in the background behind overly detailed descriptions of the tortuous development of theoretical physics. This stuff -- quantum electrodynamics and such -- gets pretty sticky. Not that Gleick, whose previous book on chaos theory was widely hailed, isn't a good writer -- he's top-notch. Possibly no one is better at translating complex scientific ideas into vivid prose. The problem is that postwar physics is, well, really hard to explain. After slowly making my way through Genius, I went back to reread Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Bantam, $12), a collection of Feynman's anecdotes, in which he presents himself as a mischievous spirit who irreverently cut through the bull that pervades most worlds, be they scientific, academic, political, or corporate. Now in paperback, this book surprised its publisher by becoming a best-seller when it debuted in 1985. Then I devoured What Do You Care What Other People Think? (Bantam, $11.50), a posthumous gathering of Feynman's stories and letters. Alas, my favorite passages from Gleick's biography -- how Feynman learned to pick locks and crack safes, how he used shortcuts to achieve impressive feats of mental math, how he led Army psychiatrists to think he was nuts and give him 4-F status, how he coped with the pretentiousness of winning a Nobel Prize -- seemingly all the tales of clever adventure were right there in the earlier books, in greater detail and told in Feynman's own clear, wonderfully entertaining voice. I reread Surely in a great rush, nonstop, into the wee hours, unaware of the time, laughing out loud. Which only shows that thoughtful, careful, responsible biography is no match for great inventive storytelling.

BOX:

EXCERPT: ''((Feynman)) has the cast of mind that often produces . . . misfits: a willingness . . . to consider silly ideas and plunge down wrong alleys.''