At twenty-three he was a few years shy of the time when his vision would sweep hawklike across the breadth of physics, but there may now have been no physicist on earth who could match his exuberant command over the native materials of theoretical science. It was not just a facility at mathematics (though it had become clear to the senior physicists at Princeton that the mathematical machinery emerging in the Wheeler-Feynman collaboration was beyond Wheeler’s own ability). Feynman seemed to possess a frightening ease with the substance behind the equations, like Einstein at the same age, like
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