I was in Los Angeles this spring on the day Richard Feynman died. The next morning I saw a banner lowered from the top of the tower block which stands in the middle of the Caltech campus. It read: 'WE LOVE YOU DICK.' The obituary of Feynman in the LA Times was awed and affectionate. It listed his achievements - his work in physics, the Nobel Prize it earned him and his work on the nuclear bomb. It also recalled his reputation as a womaniser, a drummer and a teacher, and the broadcast hearings of the inquiry into the Challenger disaster, and how Feynman demonstrated what might have gone wrong: he called for a glass of ice water, dunked in it for a few minutes a piece of the rubber used to seal the joints between the rocket stages, and showed how it had lost all its resilience. This example of practical science caught the imagination of the country in the same way that his lectures caught the imagination of students at Caltech. Here was the Sane Scientist - the heir of Benjamin Franklin. Feynman appears several times in Ed Regis's wonderful book about the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton (the members of which often appear in the Mad Scientist mode) as an advocate of worldly engagement. His words head an epilogue which asks difficult questions about the productivity of ivory towers:

LRB 4 August 1988 | PDF Download