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own work was always sure to be interesting and real. Some of Feynman’s colleagues were already beginning to think that he had drifted away from the mainstream of particle physics, but it did not seem that way to Gell-Mann. On the contrary, he knew from their few conversations that Feynman was thinking about all the outstanding problems, all the time. Feynman responded in a friendly way. Gell-Mann visited Caltech to give a talk on his current work. The two men met privately and spoke for hours. Gell-Mann described work he had done extending Feynman’s quantum electrodynamics at short distances. Feynman said he knew of the work and admired it enormously—that in fact it was the only such work he had seen that he had not already done himself. He had pursued Gell-Mann’s line of thinking and generalized it further—he showed what he meant—and Gell-Mann said he thought that was wonderful.

Playing the bongos: “On the infrequent occasions when I have been called upon in a formal place to play the bongo drums, the introducer never seems to find it necessary to mention that I also do theoretical physics.”

Talking with a student as Murray Cell-Mann looks on: “Murray’s mask was a man ofgreat culture… Dick’s mask was Mr. Natural—just a little boy from the country that could see through things the city slickers can’t.”

With his hero, Paul A. M. Dirac, in Warsaw, 1962.

With Carl Feynman, three years old, facing photographers on the morning of the Nobel Prize: “Listen, buddy, if I could tell you in a minute what I did, it wouldn’t be worth the NobelPrize.”

Celebrating the Nobel Prize in Stockholm, 1965, with Gweneth Feynman (above) and a princess (below).

With Schwinger: “I thought you would be happy that I beat Schwinger out at last,” Feynman wrote his mother after winning one award, “but it turns out he got the thing 3 yrs ago.Of course, he only got 112 a medal, so 1guess you'll be happy. You always compareme with Schwinger.”

Shin’ichirō Tomonaga, whose work in an isolated Japan paralleled the new th eories of Feynman and Schwinger: “Why isn’t nature clearer and more directly comprehensible?”

With Carl and Michelle (right), and on a desert camping trip.

Standing at a Cal tech blackboard and playing a chieftain in a student production of South Pacific.

At the February 10, 1986, hearing of the presidential commission on the space shuttle accident: “I took this stuff that I got out of your sealand I put it in ice water,and I discovered that when you put some pressure on it fora while and then undo it it doesn't stretch back. It stays the same dimension. In other words, for a few seconds at least and moreseconds than that, there is no resilience in this particular material when it is at a temperature of 32 degrees. I believe that has somesignificance for our problem.”

By the beginning of the new year Caltech had made Gell-Mann an offer and Gell-Mann had accepted. He moved into an office just upstairs from Feynman’s. Caltech had now placed together in one building the two leading minds of their generation. To the close-knit, international community of physicists—a small world, no matter how rapidly it was growing—the collaborations and the rivalries between these men gained an epic quality. They were together, working or feuding, leaving their imprint on every area they cared to touch, for the rest of Feynman’s life. They gave their colleagues a long time to muse on how strikingly different were the ways in which a giant intellect might choose to reveal itself, even in the person of a modern theoretical physicist.

In Search of Genius

In the spring of 1955 the man most plainly and universally identified with the word genius died at Princeton Hospital. Most of his body was cremated, the ashes scattered, but not the brain. The hospital’s pathologist, Dr. Thomas S. Harvey, removed this last remnant to a jar of formaldehyde.

Harvey weighed it. A mediocre two and two-thirds pounds. One more negative datum to sabotage the notion that the brain’s size might account for the difference between