Neodesha, The Atomic Bomb, and The Space Shuttle
Probably
one of the greatest physicists to ever exist was Richard P. Feynman. He began
repairing radios at home at the age of 8, reasoning out the faulty part. He was
born in 1918 and soon found himself at CalTech (California Institute of
Technology).
Following the death of his childhood sweetheart, he met and married Neodesha native Mary Louise Bell in 1952. They divorced in 1956. One source reports his colleagues frowned on the fact that she tended to wear high heels to the picnics. It was a cold and consuming marriage and neither of them really benefited from it.
He was recruited to work on the first atomic bomb
as a member of the Oppenheimer Project, although he was very bored with the
entire thing. Here is his method for solving a problem:
1. Write down the problem.
2. Think very hard.
3. Write down the answer.
In 1965 he received the Nobel Prize for Physics, one of many awards in his lifetime. Then in 1986, he was introduced to many Americans when he explained how the seal on the space shuttle failed by using a glass of ice water and a piece of the seal.
The US Postal Service issued a Richard Feynman
stamp in 2005.
He eventually died of cancer in 1988. You can read some of the hundreds of articles about him, buy one of his many books, or order his tapes. Here is the Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_feynman
