Author: Tom Siegfried / Source: Science News
Richard Feynman was a curious character.
He advertised as much in the subtitle of his autobiography, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! : Adventures of a Curious Character. Everybody knew that, in many respects, Feynman was an oddball.
But he was curious in every other sense of the word as well. His curiosity about nature, about how the world works, led to a Nobel Prize in physics and a legendary reputation, both among physicists and the public at large.
Feynman was born 100 years ago May 11. It’s an anniversary inspiring much celebration in the physics world. Feynman was one of the last great physicist celebrities, universally acknowledged as a genius who stood out even from other geniuses.
In 1997 I interviewed Nobel laureate Hans Bethe, a Cornell University physicist who worked with Feynman during World War II on the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos (and later on the Cornell faculty). “Normal” geniuses, Bethe said, did things much better than other people but you could figure out how they did it. And then there were magicians. “Feynman was a magician. I could not imagine how he got his ideas,” Bethe told me. “He was a phenomenon. Feynman certainly was the most original physicist I have seen in my life, and I have seen lots of them.”
Apart from his brilliance as a physicist, Feynman was also known for his skill at playing the bongo drums and cracking safes. Public acclaim came after he served on the presidential commission investigating the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. In a dramatic moment during a hearing about that disaster, he dipped material from an O-ring (a crucial seal on the shuttle’s rockets) into icy water, demonstrating that an O-ring would not have remained flexible at the launch-time temperature.
His autobiography had already become a best seller, so Feynman was well-known when he died in February 1988.
When I heard of Feynman’s death, I called John Wheeler, Feynman’s doctoral adviser at Princeton University before World War II.
“I felt very lucky to have him as…
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