So a little scrap of paper in my dad's writing had a weird way of working.

So a little scrap of paper and my dad's writing 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 Feinman. Her father is the late Richard Feinman, 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.

Fineman 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 the Challenger from Cape Canaveral, Florida on a cold January day in 1986. It was in the air only 73

seconds before it exploded on live TV. All seven crew members were killed, including a school teacher named Krista McAuliffe.

I remember being in history and we didn't take our test and they said that a terrible thing had happened.

And then I came home and my parents who rarely had the television on were in front of the television. They seemed pretty distraught by the whole thing and then I guess he got a call inviting him to be part of the Commission.

This Commission was ordered by President Ronald Reagan.

Fineman's wife, Gweneth, urged her husband to accept the invitation.

He was disinclined.

Physics, he loved.

Solving theoretical mysteries. He loved. It was the politics he hated.

Feynman was now 67 years old and he'd been sick for a while with cancer. Sometimes he was

surprised he was still alive and grateful but the idea of spending months in

Washington seemed worse than death. President Reagan had asked former Secretary of State William

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