Surely you must be joking!

GilRuiz1: Surely you must be joking!

He's not joking, and don't call him Shirley.

/yes, I know what you're referring to

We need some tuvan throat singers to provide a tribute to him

I still have my copies of his lectures. Good stuff.

Science Channel and the BBC are making a movie about that disaster and investigation, with William Hurt cast as Feynman. It's slated to air this fall.

Unfortunately too late to cast Jack Klugman.  If any actor had the voice nailed, he had it.

I hear he played bongos.

For those of you who don't know why people love and respect Feynman, I recommend you start with this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bq02Bga174U

It's Feynman himself telling an incredibly amusing and enlightening bunch of stories about working on the atomic bomb in his 20's.  It's in about 8 parts.

JolobinSmokin: Also, I still content he is America's only scientist that can be listed with the greatest of the greats.

No love for Jonas Salk?

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman was a damn fine read.

JolobinSmokin: "The world is a dynamic mess of jiggling things"

Wonders if he came up with this at the strip club?

It's not out of the question.

http://www.cracked.com/funny-6611-richard-feynman/

[Feynman]  frequented strip clubs quite often, and he even enjoyed the atmosphere to scrawl his ground-breaking physics on napkins.

When Los Angeles decided to outlaw strip clubs a while back, one such club sent out pleas among its regular patrons to testify before a court of law to keep the strip club in business. Nearly everyone who was contacted denied association or refused to testify at the trial, except Richard Feynman. His argument? That people often need a place to escape to, even to do their work.

But I don't want to be smashed into other dead people at insanely high speeds after I die!

/sounds like an awesome fellow, shame he's dead.

A guy in my dorm my freshman year in college was his next door neighbor.

/csb

rufus-t-firefly: JolobinSmokin: "The world is a dynamic mess of jiggling things"

Wonders if he came up with this at the strip club?

It's not out of the question.

http://www.cracked.com/funny-6611-richard-feynman/

[Feynman]  frequented strip clubs quite often, and he even enjoyed the atmosphere to scrawl his ground-breaking physics on napkins.

When Los Angeles decided to outlaw strip clubs a while back, one such club sent out pleas among its regular patrons to testify before a court of law to keep the strip club in business. Nearly everyone who was contacted denied association or refused to testify at the trial, except Richard Feynman. His argument? That people often need a place to escape to, even to do their work.

From what I've read, he had ideas about oscillators and other jiggling things during his time at Princeton's IAS and expanded on it later.  He probably expanded and perfected his work while at the strip clubs on oscillating dynamic bodies.

If you ever have a chance, read

"Surely, You're Joking, Mr. Feynmann!"
"The Pleasure of Finding Things Out"
"What Do You Care About What Other People Think?"

And for those not familiar with the physics discipline: "Six Easy Pieces", followed by "Six No-So-Easy Pieces"

Some of the most entertaining and insightful books I've ever read.  If you really like them, "Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track" is a collection of personal letters.  Not as entertaining, but a great view into his mind and his relationships.

Yeah, I stole the door.

His band was pretty good.

ComicBookGuy: A guy in my dorm my freshman year in college was his next door neighbor.

/csb

So what does that make us?

maverickzy: ComicBookGuy: A guy in my dorm my freshman year in college was his next door neighbor.

/csb

So what does that make us?

Nothing!  Absolutely nothing!

Tuva or bust!

JolobinSmokin: "The world is a dynamic mess of jiggling things"
Wonders if he came up with this at the strip club?

Well, he did invent boobs.

kryptoknightmare: For those of you who don't know why people love and respect Feynman, I recommend you start with this: [...] It's Feynman himself telling an incredibly amusing and enlightening bunch of stories about working on the atomic bomb in his 20's.  It's in about 8 parts.

Transcript for those who'd prefer to read.

Video of Feynman on fundamental laws, getting frustrated with the idea that everything in physics can be reduced to an intuitive analogy.

/farking magnets, how do they work?

Richard Feynman
Benjamin Franklin
Leonardo Da Vinci

My heroes...

rogue49: Richard Feynman
Benjamin Franklin
Leonardo Da Vinci

My heroes...

whar newton, whar?!

Here's some audio of him at the Challenger disaster Inquiry.

Interesting how he manages to pack so much contempt for the stupidity and criminal arrogance that led to seven deaths into a... short pause.

When visiting with my uncle in San Francisco this past October, I found out he knew Feynman personally...unfortunatley I didn't grasp the magnitude of that at the time enough to ask any interesting questions...

/Was busy gawking at my uncle's collection of flourescent rocks:

(not his, but is similar)

my_cats_breath_smells_like_cat_food: When visiting with my uncle in San Francisco this past October, I found out he knew Feynman personally...unfortunatley I didn't grasp the magnitude of that at the time enough to ask any interesting questions...

/Was busy gawking at my uncle's collection of flourescent rocks:

(not his, but is similar)
[1.bp.blogspot.com image 850x637]

1) You HAVEN'T phoned your uncle since then to ask him about Feynman? Fark you man
2) Your uncle's rocks glow in the dark? I don't want to know anymore about this ya perv.

The Feynman Lectures are up on Bittorrent. I highly recommend giving them a listen, they are the actual audio recordings of his classes and contain a lot more of his personality than the transcripts.

/Was busy gawking at my uncle's collection of flourescent rocks:

(not his, but is similar)
[1.bp.blogspot.com image 850x637]

That looks like the Sterling Hill mine display. If your uncle has a collection like that, my hat's off to him. That's a lot of collecting. Unless you're at the mine.

I've never read the Feynman books, but I own a couple of them. I need to get to them. My physics is rusty.

Captain_Sunshine: /Was busy gawking at my uncle's collection of flourescent rocks:

(not his, but is similar)
[1.bp.blogspot.com image 850x637]

That looks like the Sterling Hill mine display. If your uncle has a collection like that, my hat's off to him. That's a lot of collecting. Unless you're at the mine.

I've never read the Feynman books, but I own a couple of them. I need to get to them. My physics is rusty.

He has an insane rock collection, this was just one particularly neat part.  He also has a slab of raw jade about 16" x 10" x 2" (not a perfect rectangle at all), and big samples of lots of other semi-rare stuff.  A lot of it he inherited from my Grandmother.  The flourescent rocks are from New Jersey, I know that...I forget the name of the mine.  I think there are only 3 places in the world they naturally occur though.

He is a retired ambassador, and has had a lot of opportunity to travel and collect stuff.  His house was like a museum, but not stuffy, he didn't care if you wanted to pick and and look at anything.  Except for some type of rock he had just sitting on a coffee table...I think it was a rare type of jade or something.  He specifically said "you can touch anything but those"

Feynman was a great man because he understood that to become good at something you needed to focus completely on it to the exclusion of everything else, and when you take up something new, you still need that focus applied to the new thing. You can't assume that because you were expert at the first thing, that you suddenly have an opinion worth hearing on every subject.

His art work is finally in the googles.

I had a lot of his books at one time.  It was time to pare down the library and I had already read them.  The bookstore buys used books so I took a load down there.  I was getting $4.00 or $5.00 a book til one of his came up.  $22.00 for  a skinny used book.  I didn't know what I had.

my_cats_breath_smells_like_cat_food: The flourescent rocks are from New Jersey, I know that...I forget the name of the mine. I think there are only 3 places in the world they naturally occur though.

That's the Sterling Hill mine, then. It holds the world record for the highest number of different fluorescent minerals in one place - 68 or 70, I think. I wanted them to leave me in the gallery room with all of those minerals in it so I could take some pictures, but they said No. I only have a couple.

I would really like to see a piece of jade that big. That would be cool. And I want a house like a museum when I get older. Looks like I'll have to get more cool stuff.