A photo of an impish Richard Feynman playing the bongos appears in Ray Monk’s biography of Oppenheimer. It is accompanied by the caption “Richard Feynman, Julian Schwinger’s main rival for the title of greatest American physicist in history”. That got me thinking; who is the greatest American physicist in history? What would your choice be? [...]

Why are we drawn to tragic heroes much more then to conventional ones? Perhaps because tragic heroes, because of the flaws and ambiguity inherent in their nature, continue to intrigue us long after we have finished admiring the essentially simple and good character of conventional heroes. Hamlet catches hold of our imagination much more than [...]

There it was, completely nondescript. Nobody could ever tell what the room was used for more than half a century ago. But then I thought that that sounded apt; after all, nobody was supposed to know in the first place what went on in there. To that extent it perfectly served its intended purpose. An [...]

A couple of days ago I wrote a post discussing chemists who did significant work after receiving a Nobel Prize. The examples are few but noteworthy; accomplishing one significant piece of scientific work is hard enough, so if you manage more than one you should definitely be recognized. A commenter pointed out that there’s likely [...]