Word: feynman
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...Shortly after Hiroshima, wrote physicist Richard Feynman in his memoirs, "I would go along and I would see people building a bridge ... and I thought, they're crazy, they just don't understand, they don't understand. Why are they making new things? It's so useless." Useless because doomed. Futile because humanity had no future. That's what happens to a man who worked on the Manhattan Project and saw with his own eyes at Alamogordo intimations of the apocalypse. Feynman had firsthand knowledge of what man had wrought - and a first-class mind deeply skeptical of the ability...
...Wicket looks a beauty,” observes the announcer. Despite the beautiful wicket, a member of the Indian team makes a slip-up on the field. However, a group of physics concentrators in the corner downplay the fumble, noting that “Even [Nobel Prize winner Richard] Feynman made mistakes...
...does test is the ability to solve very challenging problems in a fixed period of time. Students who do well are mathematically gifted, very quick and highly creative." The past winners aren't exactly household names--unless you live in an extremely enlightened household--but they include Richard Feynman and Kenneth Wilson, two Nobel prizewinners. Three Putnam winners have won the Fields Medal, the highest honor a mathematician can receive...
Although the society is new, physicians and scholars have known about the condition for centuries. History, in fact, teems with brilliant synesthetes--including such luminaries as novelist Vladimir Nabokov, composer Franz Liszt and physicist Richard Feynman. Synesthesia enjoyed a certain spiritual currency in the late 19th century, especially among the European avant-garde. Many artists, most notably abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky, were famed for their synesthetic pretensions. "I saw all my colors," wrote Kandinsky, recalling his experience of a Wagner opera. "Wild lines verging on the insane formed drawings before my very eyes...
Such revelations are not surprising. When synesthetes are asked to link letters and words to their corresponding hues, the responses tend to be precise. (The n Feynman read in his physics equations wasn't just violet; it was "mildly violet-bluish.") Tested a year later, synesthetes report the same colors 9 times out of 10; control groups repeat them just a third of the time...