“My heart stopped, I have never had an experience like that as a biographer, before or since.” That is what James Gleick, the famed author, biographer, and former science reporter told Maria Popova of brainpicks.org about how he felt the first time he came into a certain letter while working on what would become Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman several months after Feynman’s death.
That letter, which I read for this episode, is written by Richard Feynman to Arline Greenbaum, his childhood sweetheart, his already departed wife.
Richard Phillips Feynman ( 11 May 1918 – 15 February 1988) was an American theoretical physicist, a Nobel Prize laureate, and one of the most famous figures in science, commonly acknowledged as a genius.
A scientist and a genius is not so often associated with romance, more so of being a hopeless romantic. Perhaps that is why I was extremely affected when I first read about Feynman and Arline. I never imagined someone who I only knew from lectures videos and science books to hold such heart-stopping love and vulnerability as made apparent through the letter.
My name is Yulyah and I hope you do enjoy the reading :)
