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Richard Feynman: Difference between revisions
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{{quote|''"If that's the world's smartest man, God help us."''|'''Lucille Feynman''', on ''[[Omni]]'' magazine naming her son the world's smartest man.}}
Drummer, lockpicker, artist, teacher, and raconteur... who also won a Nobel Prize for his work on quantum electrodynamics. [[Richard Feynman]] was considered one of the greatest scientific minds since [[Albert Einstein|Einstein]]. Even more than his contributions to science (which are numerous and varied), though, he is best remembered today as a ''personality,'' an irreverent, skeptical, iconoclastic embodiment of what a real scientist ought to be.
Born in Far Rockaway, New York in 1918, Feynman showed a passion for science at an early age. Much of his bedroom was taken up with electrical apparatus, and he often made pocket money by fixing radios. He attended MIT, and had nearly finished his postgraduate work at Princeton when he was recruited to work on the Manhattan Project.
As the youngest group leader at Los Alamos, he was often sought out by the older, more eminent scientists as a sounding board, because he was one of the few young physicists who wasn't too awestruck to disagree with them. During this time, he also became skilled at picking locks and breaking into safes, usually by guessing or stealing the combination. He would later brag that he had opened safes containing the greatest treasure of all time: the secrets of the atomic bomb.
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* [[Absent-Minded Professor]] - Mostly averted, although he did have trouble telling left from right.
** It's rather funny to think that he opposed for years the theory of [[wikipedia:Parity conservation#Parity violation|parity violation in weak interactions]] - which, simplifying ''very'' much, states that you can tell left from right at a subatomic level.
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* [[Sarcastic Confession]]: He perpetrated a [[Wacky Fratboy Hijinx|prank in his fraternity]], and to find out who did it, the fraternity president asked each member in turn to swear his innocence. When it was Feynman's turn to swear (after a bunch of other members swore their innocence), he admitted his guilt, but everyone chalked it up to sarcasm and it didn't occur to them that he never swore that he was innocent, or did anything but say the exact opposite.
* [[Sucky School]] - He hunted down a lot of the dumb gobbledygook displacing any real science from the education once it was brought to his attention. Wrote ''Lucky Numbers'', ''O Americana, Outra Vez!'', ''Judging Books by Their Covers''.
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* [[Red Oni, Blue Oni]]: Feynman was the Red to Julian Schwinger's Blue.
* [[The Rival]] - Many of his colleagues found him abrasive and unprofessional, but his two greatest rivals were Julian Schwinger (with whom he, along with Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, shared the above-noted Nobel,) and Murray Gell-Mann.
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{{reflist}}
[[Category:Richard Feynman]]
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