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Finding Feynman
April 6, 2010 at 23:04
I have enjoyed the stories, antics and brilliance of Dr. Richard Feynman since first reading “Surly You’re Joking Mr. Feynman” years ago. Feynman rose to prominence during the Manhattan Project, received a Nobel Prize in Physics for theories I will have to wait for another life to understand and nearly single-handedly discovered the cause of the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger accident. He is perhaps one of the most accomplished and equally well-known modern scientists. His reputation is due in part to his jovial attitude and ability to make complex theory accessible to the masses through his lectures given undergraduate students at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
That being said, I am in Pasadena this week for The California STEM Innovation Network Summit which is being hosted by Caltech. I thought that I should check out the book store here in hopes of finding a memento of my visit to Feynman’s campus. I eventually found, after some fumbling, searching online and circling campus in my car, the illustrious (or rather elusive) Caltech bookstore (picture on the left in a photo from Wikipedia as I didn’t bring my camera). I was surprised to find that the store contained little else than these few Feynman books and some “Caltech Dad” XXL T-shirts on a sale rack. The entire remaining “book department” was bare-shelved and empty and the adjacent computer store was a ghost town. I did found a couple Feynman books on this shelf that I hadn’t read, a Caltech logo hoodie on a back hanger behind a XXS Jet Propulsion Laboratory sweater and at the checkout counter I picked up the prank MIT newspaper that Caltech students distributed at MIT’s 2007 Campus Preview Weekend. While it wasn’t the shrine to Feynman that imagined it was a beautiful sunny campus.
