Everything of course. Feynman is the young American professor, half genius and half buffoon, who keeps all physicists and their children amused with his effervescent vitality. He has, however, as I have recently learned, a great deal more to him than that, and you may be interested in his story. The part of it with which I am concerned began when he arrived at Los Alamos; there he found and fell in love with a brilliant and beautiful girl, who was tubercular and had been exiled to New Mexico in the hope of stopping the disease. When Feynman arrived, things had got so bad that the doctors gave her only a year to live, but he determined to marry her and marry her he did; and for a year and a half, while working at full pressure on the Project, he nursed her and made her days cheerful. She died just before the end of the war. Freeman Dyson, in letter to his parents on 8 March 1948, as published in From Eros to Gaia (1992), p. 325 In 1988 he revised his statement and declared that: A truer description would have said that Feynman was all genius and all buffoon. The deep thinking and the joyful clowning were not separate parts of a split personality. He did not do his thinking on Monday and his clowning on Tuesday. He was thinking and clowning simultaneously. Freeman Dyson, 1988 remark, as published in From Eros to Gaia (1992), p. 314
I’ve been feeling philosophical myself lately. Perhaps musical ability should be a requirement for a leadership position. Thinking… The Clash, Rock the Casbah. Or at least our leaders remember the finer things in life when they were younger. Thinking… Chaka Kahn and Rufus, Tell Me Something Good. US has been steadily losing its superpower status for years. Soon we will be a peer among many. Not Biden’s fault. It was inevitable, although Biden may have sped things up a bit with his approach to Saudi Arabia. My concern is the establishment may feel compelled to try to maintain US Exceptionalism, perhaps at any risk. I see Ecuador finally has a new President. Three candidate assassinations later. Poland has elected a Ukraine friendly leader. Bad Soviet Union memories still resonate with voters, at least the older ones, it seems. Life goes on. For some, anyway. At this point, hoping life goes on for at least some… hopefully more. Edit: Thank you for your great posts on Israel and Hamas.