Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

by James Gleick

The number-two man, Paul Olum, threw away the paper. Olum had considered himself the best undergraduate mathematician at Harvard. He arrived at Princeton in 1940 to be Wheeler’s second research assistant. Wheeler introduced him to Feynman, and within a few weeks he was devastated. What’s happening here? he thought. Is this the way physicists are, and I missed it? No physicist at Harvard was like this. Feynman, a cheerful, boyish presence spinning across the campus on his bicycle, scornful of the formalisms of modern advanced mathematics, was running mental circles around him. It wasn’t that he was a brilliant calculator; Olum knew the tricks of that game. It was as if he were a man from Mars. Olum could not track his thinking. He had never known anyone so intuitively at ease with nature—and with nature’s seemingly least accessible manifestations. He suspected that when Feynman wanted to know what an electron would do under given circumstances he merely asked himself, “If I were an electron, what would I do?”