At the Trinity test in 1945, Richard Feynman was the only observer who refused dark glasses, reasoning that a truck windshield would block the harmful ultraviolet light. That trust in physical truth over social convention defined the life of one of the twentieth century’s most unorthodox physicists.

This episode follows Feynman from his childhood in Queens and his radio repair work to MIT, Princeton, and the Manhattan Project, where he ran computations on IBM punch card machines while his wife Arlene was dying of tuberculosis. We explore his postwar burnout, the wobbling cafeteria plate that led to Feynman diagrams, his time in Brazil, his move to Caltech, his nanotechnology lecture, and the Challenger O-ring demonstration.

• How his father taught him the difference between naming something and understanding it
• Why he invented his own mathematical notation as a teenager
• How he warned Oak Ridge officials about the risk of a criticality accident
• How playing with the math of a spinning plate helped him escape burnout
• His 1959 lecture There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom and the idea of nanotechnology