Word: feynman
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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More important, he serves as a symbol of all the scientists--such as Heisenberg, Bohr, Richard Feynman and Stephen Hawking, even the ones he disagreed with--who built upon his work to decipher and harness the forces of the cosmos. As James Gleick wrote earlier this year in the TIME 100 series, "The scientific touchstones of our age--the Bomb, space travel, electronics--all bear his fingerprints." Or, to quote a TIME cover story from 1946 (produced by Whittaker Chambers): "Among 20th-Century men, he blends to an extraordinary degree those highly distilled powers of intellect, intuition and imagination which...
Even now scientists marvel at the daring of general relativity ("I still can't see how he thought of it," said the late Richard Feynman, no slouch himself). But the great physicist was also engagingly simple, trading ties and socks for mothy sweaters and sweatshirts. He tossed off pithy aphorisms ("Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it") and playful doggerel as easily as equations. Viewing the hoopla over him with humorous detachment, he variously referred to himself as the Jewish saint or artist's model. He was a cartoonist...
...Harvard students protest--not everyone has a sweet financial consulting job waiting on the corner of 43rd and Broadway next year. Christian R. Lorentzen '99 concurs. Proselytizing last Thursday by the T elevator bearing Richard Feynman, he stated, "Being a typical Harvard student, I can think of 14 reasons why, on a typical day, it would never occur to me to walk any farther than from my abode to Sever Hall...
They were kindred minds as well as spirits. On a vacation to Brazil, he took James Watson's 1,100-page textbook, Molecular Biology of the Gene, and they studied bioengineering together. On another vacation, to a Santa Barbara, California, ranch, she took tapes of Richard Feynman's lectures at Cornell, and they studied physics. And on a larger excursion with friends to central Africa, which ended at some beach cottages on an island off Zanzibar, among their companions was anthropologist Donald Johanson, known for his work on the human ancestor Lucy, who helped teach them about human evolution...
Relying in part on sources never before made available to the public, Gleick explains with crystal clarity the paradoxes of quantum physics -- a subject that Feynman himself said nobody understands -- just as he laid bare the arcana of higher mathematics in his 1987 best seller, Chaos. Gleick also uncovers some of the forces that created a man who could devotedly nurse his first wife as she lay dying of tuberculosis in a sanatorium a few miles from the wartime Manhattan Project, where he worked, yet later in life could make a sport out of picking women up in bars...