Brian Lear on WNC so back when I was in school.

Brian Lear on WNYC.

So back when I was in school, I took an organic chemistry class

and my professor for that class was named Richard Feinman.

And he started on day one by telling us that he was not the Richard

Feynman that his name was spelled differently and there was another

difference he had no Nobel Prizes to his name. Well I had had never heard of The Richard Feinman,

whoever he was.

I gathered from a chemistry professor

that The Richard Feinman was a physicist

and had a Nobel Prize.

So I thought, OK, fine, but I never thought about it much since.

Until, in the last couple of weeks, two things happened.

One, I finally saw the movie Oppenheimer, and Richard Feynman was portrayed in the film because he worked on developing the atomic bomb with Oppenheimer at Los Alamos.

And two, our friend Stephen Dubner, host of Freakonomics radio, popped up to see if I wanted

him to come on the show to discuss his latest Freakonomics series about Richard

Feinman. Now Dubman

usually explores the relationship between our ordinary lives and economics, right?

Our behavioral psychology around money, you might say.

So why has he been doing his podcast lately on a physicist

who died more than 35 years ago? The answer very simply put is that the

Richard Feynman wasn't just a scientist but also a voraciously curious

...