The work that made its faltering appearance at Pocono tied together in an experimentally perfect package all the varied phenomena at work in light, radio, magnetism, and electricity. It won Feynman a Nobel Prize. At least three of his later achievements might also have done so: a theory of superfluidity, the strange, frictionless behavior of liquid helium; a theory of weak interactions, the force at work in radioactive decay; and a theory of partons, hypothetical hard particles inside the atom’s nucleus, that helped produce the modern understanding of quarks.
