When I was very young, I thought my father knew everything. Indeed, a prominent magazine once declared him “The Smartest Man in the World.” Upon hearing this, his mother threw up her hands and exclaimed, “If Richard is the smartest man in the world, God help the world!” My father was the first one to laugh.
As I grew older, I began to see only what my father didn’t know, and came to think I was the one with all the answers. He would ask me questions whose answers I found to be painfully obvious, such as, “Hey, Michelle, where do we keep the spoons around here?” I discovered the real truth in my late teens. My father was a wise man with a tremendous appetite for life, an insatiable curiosity about how the world works, and a great aptitude for teaching.
Here are the basic facts of his life: Richard Phillips Feynman was born in New York City in 1918 and grew up in Far Rockaway, Queens. He attended MIT and Princeton University. In 1942 he married his high-school sweetheart, Arline Greenbaum, even though she was ill with tuberculosis, and joined the Manhattan Project, where he became a group leader. Arline died in 1945. In 1950 he joined the faculty of Caltech and spent the remainder of his career there. He was an adventurer who made a hobby of cracking safes, who played bongo drums for a San Francisco ballet, and who decided to learn to draw in his forties—and became remarkably good at it. He married my mother, Gweneth Howarth, in 1960. My brother, Carl, was born in 1962, and I was adopted in 1968.
