K N O W NF O R :

W E I R D N E S S E S :
Feynman was a practical joker, a painter, a bongo player, and always a showman. He liked to work out his equations while sitting in strip clubs.

T R U ET A L E S :
At Los Alamos, the most heavily guarded military installation in the USA, Feynman learned to pick locks, and would often leave safes and filing cabinets open to show that they were no good. He also enjoyed sneaking out a hole in the fence and then going around to the front of the compound and surprising the guards.
When Los Alamos had an early IBM computer delivered, Feynman put it together by hand.
While watching "Trinity," the first atomic bomb test, in 1945, Feynman decided no one really knew if the explosion would be bright enough to damage the eye, so he watched it directly through the windshield of his truck.
During a live televised briefing on the Challenger investigation, he demonstrated the problem with o-rings by dipping one in his glass of ice water.
Late in his life, he and his friend Ralph Leighton decided to travel to a place called Tannu Tuva, a small country in the exact geographical center of Asia, a remote place where throat-singers sang with two voices at once, and reineers and camels roamed free. For years they negotiated with the Soviet government to let them travel there. Meanwhile they studied the language, wrote letters to Tuvans, and practiced throat-singing. They even set up an exhibition of Tuvan art at the LA County Museum of Natural History, hoping to travel back to Tuva with the art. The Soviets were slow at best, and uncooperative at worst. And Feynman's health was deteriorating. A couple weeks after Feynman's death in 1988, his wife received an invitation from the USSR Academy of Sciences to visit Tuva.

Q U O T E S :
"I think I've got the right idea, to do crazy things -- what other people would consider crazy things. There's so much fun to be had."
"The idea that (technology) takes away mystery or awe or wonder in nature is wrong. It's quite the opposite. It's much more wonderful to know what something's really like than to sit there and just simply, in ignorance, say, "Oooh, isn't it wonderful?"
When a TV reporter asked him if he could explain in three minutes what he won the Nobel Prize for:"If I could explain it in three minutes, it wouldn't be worth the Nobel Prize!"

M O R EI N F O :
Books:
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman
by Richard Feynman,
Genius by James Gleick,
No Ordinary Genius by Christopher Sykes,
Tuva or Bust! by Ralph Leighton
The Feynman Lectures on Physics by Richard Feynman

Websites:
Feynman Online
Feynman's comments on the shuttle disaster.
Get a bunch of cool Feynman STUFF here [Sound Photosynthesis].
Friends of Tuva home page.
Several Feynman quotes
"Cargo Cult Science" by Feynman.
"There's plenty of room at the bottom": A lecture
Pictures of Feynman