Richard Feynman, the most jovial of all the great scientists of the 20th century, once said that his drive to develop something for which he later won a Nobel Prize came quite easily: he simply liked physics.

Bill Gates’ favourite story about Richard Feynman is the one about the young scientist’s first visit to Oak Ridge National Laboratory in connection with the Manhattan Project. “A group of military guys asked him to identify weak spots from a blueprint of the lab, but Feynman didn’t know how to read blueprints,” writes Gates in his introduction to the book Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character. “He pointed at a box with an X in it and asked what would happen if a valve gets stuck, hoping that someone would correct him and reveal what the symbol really meant. Feynman was as lucky as he was brilliant, because not only did that symbol represent a valve but it was also a problem area that needed fixing. His colleagues marvelled at his genius and asked how he did it. His answer was, as always, honest and straight to the point: ‘You try to find out whether it’s a valve or not.’”

Physicists and the samba

My favourite anecdote about the Nobel Laureate is a memory recalled by the physicist Marek Demiański, author of the introduction to the Polish edition of Surely You’re Joking, revealingly entitled The Rascal Genius. Well, in July 1962, the 4th International Conference on Gravitational Theory took place at Jabłonna outside Warsaw. Famous names such as Paul Dirac, John Wheeler and Hermann Bondi took part, as well as Richard Feynman. Demiański, with his freshly-minted Master’s degree (he wrote his theses under Professor Leopold Infeld, the main organizer of the event), listened to the speeches and at the end of the day returned by coach to Warsaw together with some of the conference participants who were staying