Don't You Have Time to Think ?

Biographie de Michelle Feynman

Richard P Feynman (1918-88) was one of the twentieth century's most brilliant physicists and most original thinkers. Raised in Queens, New York, he received his PhD from Princeton in 1942. He taught at both Cornell and the California Institute of Technology and all but rebuilt the theory of quantum electrodynamics, for which he shared the Nobel Prize in 1965. Most people first learned of him in the 1986 presidential commission investigating the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, when his simple experiment - broadcast on live TV - involving a rubber ring and a glass of iced water proved exactly what had caused the disaster. Feynman had an extraordinary ability to communicate to audiences at all levels, and was responsible for many books including Six Easy Pieces, Six Not-So-Easy Pieces, the selection of anecdotes Surely You're joking, Mr Feynman! and the bestselling collections of talks and lectures The Meaning of it All and The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. He died in 1988 alter a long illness. The New York Times called him "the most brilliant, iconoclastic and influential of the postwar generation of theoretical physicists', while the Guardian described him as `probably the coolest scientist who ever lived'.