The American theoretical physicist who shared the 1965 Nobel Prize for quantum electrodynamics, invented the Feynman diagrams that became one of the standard languages of particle physics, worked on the Manhattan Project as a young man, and — through his lectures, his memoirs, and his televised diagnosis of the Challenger disaster — became the twentieth century's most famous example of science as joyous, skeptical play.
He cracked the safes that held the atomic bomb's secrets, for fun, and left taunting notes inside. He played bongo drums and told stories that made him a folk hero. He won a Nobel Prize for rebuilding the theory of how light and matter interact, then drew it as little pictures so simple that students still use them. And on live television in 1986, he dropped a rubber ring into a glass of ice water and made plain one key reason the space shuttle Challenger had failed: the cold had robbed its rubber O-ring seals of resilience. Richard Feynman made the deepest science look like the most fun anyone had ever had.