Richard Feynman (1918–1988) was a Nobel-winning American physicist, safe-cracker, bongo player and world-class prankster who somehow made quantum mechanics feel like the most fun anyone could have. He worked on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos as a young man, later rewrote how we understand light and matter, and became one of the greatest science explainers who ever lived.
Feynman won his Nobel Prize for quantum electrodynamics — the theory of how light and
electrons interact — and his secret weapon was a picture. His "Feynman diagrams" turned
nightmarish equations into simple doodles of particles meeting and parting, and physicists
have used them ever since. At the heart of it all sits the deep quantum strangeness of
Feynman couldn't resist a puzzle. At Los Alamos he taught himself to crack the safes holding atomic secrets, just to prove the security was rubbish. Decades later, live on television during the Challenger disaster inquiry, he dunked a bit of the shuttle's rubber seal into a glass of ice water to show it went stiff in the cold — pinpointing the cause in a single, unforgettable demonstration. His motto might as well have been: never trust a fancy explanation when a simple test will do.