Word: feynman
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Richard P. Feynman, 66, is a Nobel-prizewinning physicist who talks like a New York City cabby, plays the bongo drums and, to judge from his uninhibited autobiography, thinks as much of his ability to crack safes as he does of his genius for breaking cosmic codes. As part of the brain trust that made the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, Feynman amused himself during quiet desert nights by entering colleagues' offices and picking the locks meant to guard nature's most destructive secrets. Since 1951 he has opened thousands of young minds as a professor at the California Institute...
...Feynman that leaps directly off the page is impish and aggressively unpretentious. One of his favorite words is "stuff." He rattles off his adventures in physics, biology, art and music (he once played a sort of frying pan in a Brazilian samba band) and has the nerve to describe himself as "a one-sided guy." He talks offhandedly of his associations with Einstein, Bohr and Oppenheimer and enthusiastically about discussing gambling odds with Nick the Greek. His life has been full of unforgettable characters, including his father, a salesman in the uniform business...
...Alamos is a majestic ivory mesa artificially painted onto the national landscape by men named Oppenheimer, Fermi, Bohr, Feynman, Kistiakowsky, Szilard and Fuchs. "At great expense, we have gathered on this mesa the largest collection of crackpots ever seen," General Leslie R. Groves told his assembled officers at the remote outpost in the New Mexico wilderness during the darkest days of World War II. "And it's your job to keep them happy...
Notwithstanding Caltech's emphasis on theory?epitomized by Nobel-Prize-winning Physicist Richard Feynman's abstruse calculations involving quantum electrodynamics?faculty members are eagerly sought out for advice by business and government. Faculty members are permitted up to 52 days annually of outside consulting work, which supplements salaries averaging $28,100. Caltech's past president, Harold Brown, was so well known as a top nuclear-weapons specialist that Jimmy Carter whisked him from Pasadena to become Secretary of Defense. Large high-technology companies, such as Beckman Instruments and TRW, both founded by Caltech alumni, value their close ties...
...traditionalists but quite a few serious students of government. It seems unduly cumbersome in some respects and naive in others-particularly in the assumption that political and philosophical ideas dating from the time of Newton (or Archimedes, for that matter) are necessarily invalid in the days of Bethe and Feynman. But the document is also full of fascinating ideas and just criticisms of the present Constitution. The fellows know that their draft will never be adopted, but they hope that its ideas will be considered. Says Wheeler: "We want to stimulate thought, get people to realize the Constitution...