On Thu, Nov 25, 2010 at 01:53:29PM -0500, [email protected] wrote:
>
> That reminds me of a sad story.
>
> The much beloved first wife of Richard Fenyman, a gifted physicist who
> worked on the first atom bombs and later was head of Cal Tech, was ill and
> the doctors couldn't figure out what was wrong with her. Richard set about
> the task himself but the first diagnosis he came up with, a type of
> glandular tuberculosis, was so obvious he discarded it immediately thinking
> the doctors would have seen it right away. He began digging deeper for
> explainations but never found one.
>
> It took a long time for Arline Fenyman to die, but in the end it was
> glandular tuberculosis.
[Nod] I'd read about that; Richard Feynman is one of my heroes,
actually, so I'd read quite a bit about him. He was a brilliant, clever,
and kind man who always found new ways to look at the world - whether in
his CalTech intro physics lectures (designed to make physics interesting
and exciting - available on the Web as both recordings and text), his
"Six Easy Pieces" (a one-evening fun read that gives a really good intro
to classical physics), or his short demonstration with Vise-Grips and
icewater that stopped all the nonsense about the Morton-Thiokol seals
during the congressional hearings.
I'm not surprised that he had intuited that diagnosis, either; he relied
on his intuitive facility quite a lot, as did Albert Einstein.
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