"One does not, by knowing all the physical laws as we know them today, immediately obtain an understanding of anything much."
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Richard Feynman, an American theoretical physicist, attended M.I.T. in 1936 where he graduated with a B.S. degree in 1939. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1942 and during this time he married the girl of his dreams, Arlene Greenbaum. She later died of tuberculosis in 1945. At the age of 24 he was brought in to work on the top-secret Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico. From 1945 to 1950, he taught at Cornell University and became a professor of theoretical physics at t more...
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05/11/1918 Queens, New York, New York, Middle Atlantic States, Northeastern States, United States,
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Richard Feynman is the picture of arrogance--with all of the goodness (and badness) that entails. He is arrogant enough to know when a process is BS and needs to be undermined, and he is genuinely confident enough to know what he does not know and learn from others. (Often it is precisely those without confidence who won't admit what they don't know.) His arrogance does seem to prevent him, however, from growing into what he doesn't know he doesn't know. All in all, however, it's both inspiring to listen to Feynman's learning stories and amusing to listen to his destruction of various fatted calves.
