Science

Richard Feynman

Fixed radios 'by thinking' as a boy; cracked safes at Los Alamos and explained the Challenger with ice water.

Born: 1918 · Far Rockaway, Queens, New York, US
Roots: Jewish American; Russian and Polish immigrant grandparents
Family: Middle class; His uniform-salesman father taught him to distrust titles — knowing a bird's name, he said, tells you nothing about the bird.
Education: MIT → Princeton (PhD)
Started with: A home radio lab; Repaired neighbors' radios as a boy; one customer marveled that he fixed them by thinking.
Affiliations & societies: None documented.; Information only — claims like these are often unverifiable and may be wrong.

The pathway

1943 · age 24
Los Alamos
Among the youngest group leaders on the Manhattan Project; picks colleagues' document safes and leaves notes as a hobby.
1945 · age 27
Arline dies
His first wife succumbs to tuberculosis weeks before the Trinity test.
1948 · age 30
QED reformulated
Path integrals and the diagrams that now carry his name.
1965 · age 47
Nobel Prize in Physics
Shared with Schwinger and Tomonaga.
1985 · age 67
Surely You're Joking
The anecdote collection makes a physicist a bestseller list regular.
1986 · age 67
The O-ring demonstration
On live TV, drops a clamped ring into ice water to show why Challenger failed.

Sources

Compiled from these references and contemporaneous press reporting. Figures are approximate; verify before relying on them.