The physicist Richard Feynman once explained where fire comes from.

And the light and heat that's coming out, that's the light and heat of the sun that went in.

So it's sort of stored sun that's coming out when you burn it a log.

The wildfires that hit Los Angeles last year

burned down the house where Feynman and his family lived in Altadena.

It was near the Caltech campus where he had taught for decades.

Fire also destroyed Zorthian Ranch up in the hills

where Feynman loved to spend time.

Those losses are regrettable, but they were just property.

Feynman left a mark on the world that runs much deeper than mere property. In 2024, we made

a three-part series called The Curious, Brilliant, Vanishing Mr. Feynman, and I thought now might be a

good time to replay that series for you.

Today, part one, the curious, Mr. Feynman. I hope you enjoy.

So a little scrap of paper in my dad's writing.

He had a weird way of working where he would just write on like, if he ran out of paper

or something, he would grab a Kleenex box or write on the corners of junk mail or wherever there was clear space.

That is Michelle Feynman. Her father is the late Richard Feynman, a theoretical physicist who taught

for decades at Caltech, the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. And that's where we are today in a climate-controlled underground

archive going through her father's files. Feynman led an unusual and unusually eventful life. While he

was still in graduate school, he was recruited to join the Manhattan Project, the U.S. military's

secret program to build an atomic bomb. Toward the end of his life, he was asked to join a presidential

commission to investigate the explosion of the Challenger Space Shuttle. NASA had launched

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