QI The Book of the Dead

and didn’t talk until he was well past three years old. Not long afterwards, his father, somewhat optimistically, bought him the entire Encyclopedia Britannica . But the young Feynman devoured it: it was his constant companion throughout his childhood and by his early teens he had read it cover to cover. His father, Melville, a Byelorussian car-polish salesman, stretched him in other ways, too. He taught him to predict mathematical patterns using building blocks and took him on long walks where he showed him how to pay close attention to nature. It was his father, Feynman always said, who taught him the difference between ‘knowing the name of something and knowing something’. Years later he would write:
    You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing – that’s what counts .
     
    Melville also had a wonderful knack of turning abstract scientific ideas into stories, something his son would inherit and make his trademark:
    For example, when I was playing with my electric trains, he told me that there is a great wheel being turned by water which is connected by filaments of copper, which spread out and spread out and spread out in all directions; and then there are little wheels, and all those little wheels turn when the big wheel turns. The relation between them is only that there is copper and iron, nothing else – no moving parts. You turn one wheel here, and all the little wheels all over the place turn, and your train is one of them. It was a wonderful world my father told me about .
     
    As a result, science and fun were indistinguishable for the young Feynman. He accumulated tubes, springs, batteries, anything mechanical he could get his hands on, and performed experiments. He paid his younger sister Joan (who also became a physicist) four cents a week to act as his lab assistant. Part of her role was to agree to be electrocuted (mildly) in front of Dick’s friends. He also created a rudimentary burglar alarm for the house and an electric motor that would rock his sister’s cot. He was known in the neighbourhood as ‘the boy who could fix radios by thinking’.
    He hated school, of course – except for the Maths Team, where he reigned supreme. In the school yearbook, he was given the soubriquet ‘Mad Genius’, which he did his best to live up to. Studying for his bachelor’s degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, his maths and physics results were off the scale, and later, in the entrance exam for Princeton, he achieved a perfect score in both subjects – a feat never achieved before or since. Feynman’s happiest times at university were spent playing in his room, trying to figure out how ants communicated or the physics required to explain how a jelly set. Nevertheless, his doctoral thesis caused a sensation. In it, he created an entirely fresh approach to quantum mechanics – unlike anything anyone had done before – and applied it with spectacular success to describe the interactions of electrons and photons. Rather as Oliver Heaviside (q.v.) had done with Maxwell’s equations for electromagnetism, the twenty-three-year-old Feynman had comeup with a simpler, more elegant solution than anyone had thought possible. He later claimed that he had a synaesthetic gift: he could see the underlying patterns in a sequence of equations marked out in different colours.
    This unconventional brilliance earned him a junior role in the Manhattan Project, helping to develop the atomic bomb at Los Alamos in New Mexico. Glamorous though this sounded, he soon got bored: ‘There wasn’t anything to do there,’ he complained. To while away the time, he taught himself to pick the combination locks on the security complex’s top-secret filing cabinets, or disappeared out into the desert to chant and drum in Native American style, gaining himself the nickname ‘Injun Joe’. Despite his initial euphoria at the success of the tests (typically, he was the only one to see the bomb explode without protective glasses, reasoning – correctly – that a car windscreen was sufficient to screen out the harmful alpha radiation), he later regretted his involvement, likening it to tickling the tail of a sleeping dragon.
    In 1948 he won the Nobel Prize for Physics. He was only thirty. As with his graduate thesis, the prize was awarded for improving