The Life & Work of Richard Feynman Explored in a Three-Part Freakonomics Radio Miniseries

Here at Open Cul­ture, Richard Feyn­man is nev­er far from our minds. Though he dis­tin­guished him­self with his work on the devel­op­ment of the atom­ic bomb and his Nobel Prize-win­ning research on quan­tum elec­tro­dy­nam­ics, you need no spe­cial inter­est in either World War II or the­o­ret­i­cal physics to look to him as an intel­lec­tu­al mod­el. In the years after his death in 1988, his leg­end grew as not just a sci­en­tif­ic mind but even more so as a ver­i­ta­ble per­son­i­fi­ca­tion of curios­i­ty, sur­round­ed by sto­ries (delib­er­ate­ly cul­ti­vat­ed by him in his life­time) of safe-crack­ing, bon­go-play­ing, and nude mod­el-draw­ing, to the point that Feyn­man the man became some­what hard to dis­cern.

In the view of Freako­nom­ics Radio host Stephen Dub­n­er, Feyn­man’s pub­lic pro­file has late­ly fall­en into an unfor­tu­nate desue­tude. It seems that peo­ple just don’t talk about him the way they used to, hard though that is to imag­ine for any of us who grew up read­ing col­lec­tions of anec­dotes like Sure­ly You’re Jok­ing, Mr. Feyn­man!.

Oper­at­ing on the sup­po­si­tion that we could all use more Feyn­man in our lives, Freako­nom­ics Radio has, over the past month, put out a three-part series cov­er­ing his life and work, from his recruit­ment to the Man­hat­tan Project and lat­er pub­lic analy­sis of the Chal­lenger dis­as­ter to his years teach­ing at Cal­tech to his late-in-life exper­i­men­ta­tion with psy­che­del­ic sub­stances (fur­ther explored in a fourth, bonus episode).

“The Curi­ous, Bril­liant, Van­ish­ing Mr. Feyn­man” (also avail­able on Apple and Spo­ti­fy) includes a vari­ety of inter­views with its sub­jec­t’s friends, rel­a­tives, col­lab­o­ra­tors, and suc­ces­sors. All speak high­ly of him, though some com­pli­cate the leg­end by look­ing at the down­sides of his idio­syn­crat­ic atti­tudes toward both sci­ence and the social world: his insis­tence on under­stand­ing every­thing by fig­ur­ing it out him­self from scratch may have led to him mak­ing few­er dis­cov­er­ies than he would have, had he made more use of the research of oth­ers, and his enthu­si­asm for wom­ankind, shall we say, man­i­fest­ed in ways that would prob­a­bly gen­er­ate calls for “can­cel­la­tion” today. But just as Feyn­man eschewed the label of “genius,” he nev­er claimed to be a per­fect human being. And besides, it isn’t his social incli­na­tions or even his bon­go skills we should admire, but his ded­i­ca­tion to defeat­ing “lousy ideas” — which, as he no doubt expect­ed, have only pro­lif­er­at­ed since he left us.

Relat­ed con­tent:

What Made Richard Feyn­man One of the Most Admired Edu­ca­tors in the World

The Feyn­man Lec­tures on Physics, The Most Pop­u­lar Physics Book Ever Writ­ten, Is Now Com­plete­ly Online

How Richard Feynman’s Dia­grams Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Physics

Watch a New Ani­ma­tion of Richard Feynman’s Ode to the Won­der of Life, with Music by Yo-Yo Ma

The “Feyn­man Tech­nique” for Study­ing Effec­tive­ly: An Ani­mat­ed Primer

“The Char­ac­ter of Phys­i­cal Law”: Richard Feynman’s Leg­endary Course Pre­sent­ed at Cor­nell, 1964

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.