Most Interesting: The Best of the QI App as Chosen by Users by John Lloyd & John Mitchinson & Lloyd Mitchinson

Author:John Lloyd & John Mitchinson & Lloyd Mitchinson [Lloyd, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2015-07-03T16:00:00+00:00

Richard Feynman

One person who would have appreciated Mary’s last wish was the great twentieth-century physicist Richard Feynman (1918–88). Tall, handsome and funny, he was also an eccentric prankster with a huge appetite for the preposterous. His own last words were in the same spirit: ‘I’d hate to die twice. It’s so boring.’ For Feynman, to be bored, in life, work or death, was the ultimate sin.

He was born into a tight-knit New York Jewish family and didn’t talk until he was well past three years old. Not long afterwards, his father, somewhat optimistically, bought him the entire Encyclopedia Britannica. But the young Feynman devoured it: it was his constant companion throughout his childhood and by his early teens he had read it cover to cover. His father, Melville, a Byelorussian car-polish salesman, stretched him in other ways, too. He taught him to predict mathematical patterns using building blocks and took him on long walks where he showed him how to pay close attention to nature. It was his father, Feynman always said, who taught him the difference between ‘knowing the name of something and knowing something’. Years later he would write:

You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing – that’s what counts.

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