Word: feynman
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...tight little world of U.S. science, Caltech's Richard P. Feynman, 42, is almost as famed for far-out humor as for his professional accomplishments. One of the nation's most gifted teachers and researchers in the field of quantum mechanics. Feynman is also one of the most gifted safecrackers currently at large: during World War II he whiled away dull hours at Los Alamos by opening his colleagues' safes and emptying them of their top-secret contents. Accustomed as they were to such Feynman showstoppers as proving that his sense of smell is as good...
Addressing a meeting of the American Physical Society on his latest scientific passion-submicrominiaturization-Feynman took off from the fact that tiny human cells perform a variety of complex functions. He reasoned that human beings could theoretically manipulate mechanical devices on the same tiny scale. Arguing that the technical applications of such research would be "enormous"-it would be convenient, he noted, to be able to store all the world's basic knowledge in the equivalent of a pocket-sized pamphlet-Feynman then and there impetuously offered two $1,000 prizes. One was to go to the first person...
...quite a year later, staring down the barrel of a microscope, Feynman saw magnified 40 times a turntable motor that easily met his specifications. Devised by William H. McLellan, a 35-year-old engineer for a Pasadena research firm, the motor was fifteen thousandths of an inch square (smaller than a pencil dot), weighed 250 micrograms, and was powered by one thousandth of a watt. Working for two months in his spare time, Caltech Graduate McLellan used sharpened toothpicks, a watchmaker's lathe and a micro-drill press to fashion his flyspeck engine, which operates on the same "synchronous...
Julian Seymour Schwinger, 39, son of a Manhattan dress manufacturer, became a full professor of physics at Harvard when he was 29, is now rated, with Richard Phillips Feynman (see above), as among the top theoreticians in the U.S. Science-fiction pulp magazines infected him with the science bug. "I soon discovered," he explains, "that it was scientific fact that I was interested in, and not fiction." He won a fellowship at Columbia, took his Ph.D. there at 21. In 1951 he won the Albert Einstein Award for achievement in the natural sciences for his work on the interaction...
...control, bounced down a steep embankment, crashed into a truck and a cement mixer at the bottom, was uninjured but had to return her husband to the hospital for treatment of lacerations, explained: "I was driving to relieve him of any physical strain." Intermezzo. In Los Angeles, Mrs. Mary Feynman won a divorce after testifying that her physicist husband's Congo drums were the only things that could take his mind off mathematics, told the court: "He begins working calculus problems in his head as soon as he awakens. He did calculus while driving his car and lying...