I just watched half of an interview of Richard Feynman on Google Video. I had never heard him talk before, and I was surprised to hear his New York accent–something I don’t usually associate with nobel laureates.
The most interesting part of the section I watched was his discussion of his role in the development of the atomic bomb, and the reaction in Los Alamos on the day it went off over Hiroshima. I can’t think of a better example of good men, some of the finest minds in the world and likable people no less, knowingly creating something incredibly and undeniably evil.
And Feynman really was a good man. Even though he was the most famous physicist of his generation, he was affable and self-effacing. I wonder if some of his obvious satisfaction came from, as he called his book, the pleasure of finding things out. That is one pleasure which is presumably felt more often in the hard sciences than the social sciences.
