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at work in radioactive decay; and a theory of partons, hypothetical hard particles inside the atom’s nucleus, that helped produce the modern understanding of quarks. His vision of particle interaction kept returning to the forefront of physics as younger scientists explored esoteric new domains. He continued to find new puzzles. He could not, or would not, distinguish between the prestigious problems of elementary particle physics and the apparently humbler everyday questions that seemed to belong to an earlier era. No other physicist since Einstein so ecumenically accepted the challenge of all nature’s riddles. Feynman studied friction on highly polished surfaces, hoping—and mostly failing—to understand how friction worked. He tried to make a theory of how wind makes ocean waves grow; as he said later, “We put our foot in a swamp and we pulled it up muddy.” He explored the connection between the forces of atoms and the elastic properties of the crystals they form. He assembled experimental data and theoretical ideas on the folding of strips of paper into peculiar shapes called flexagons. He made influential progress—but not enough to satisfy himself—on the quantum theory of gravitation that had eluded Einstein. He struggled for years, in vain, to penetrate the problem of turbulence in gases and liquids.

Feynman developed a stature among physicists that transcended any raw sum of his actual contributions to the field. Even in his twenties, when his published work amounted to no more than a doctoral thesis (profoundly original but little understood) and a few secret papers in the Los Alamos archives, his legend was growing. He was a master calculator: in a group of scientists he could create a dramatic impression by slashing his way through a difficult problem. Thus scientists—believing themselves to be unforgiving meritocrats—found quick opportunities to compare themselves unfavorably to Feynman. His mystique might have belonged to a gladiator or a champion arm-wrestler. His personality, unencumbered by dignity or decorum, seemed to announce: Here is an unconventional mind. The English writer C. P. Snow, observing the community of physicists, thought Feynman lacked the “gravitas” of his seniors. “A little bizarre … He would grin at himself if guilty of stately behaviour. He is a showman and enjoys it … rather as though Groucho Marx was suddenly standing in for a great scientist.” It made Snow think of Einstein, now so shaded and dignified that few remembered the “merry boy” he had been in his creative time. Perhaps Feynman, too, would grow into a stately personage. Perhaps not. Snow predicted, “It will be interesting for young men to meet Feynman in his later years.”

One team of physicists, assembled for the Manhattan Project, met him for the first time in Chicago, where he solved a problem that had baffled them for a month. It was “a shallow way to judge a superb mind,” one of them admitted later, but they had to be impressed, by the unprofessorial manner as much as the feat itself: “Feynman was patently not struck in the prewar mold of most young academics. He had the flowing, expressive postures of a dancer, the quick speech we thought of as Broadway, the pat phrases of the hustler and the conversational energy of a finger snapper.” Physicists quickly got to know his bounding theatrical style, his way of bobbing sidelong from one foot to the other when he lectured. They knew that he could never sit still for long and that when he did sit he would slouch comically before leaping up with a sharp question. To Europeans like Bohr his voice was as American as any they had heard, a sort of musical sandpaper; to the Americans it was raw, unregenerate New York. No matter. “We got the indelible impression of a star,” another young physicist noted. “He may have emitted light as well as words… . Isn’t areté the Greek word for that shining quality? He had it.”

Originality was his obsession. He had to create from first principles—a dangerous virtue that sometimes led to waste and failure. He had the cast of mind that often produces