Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Quote of the Day

As a graduate student at Princeton...[Richard] Feynman would spend long afternoons leading ants to a box of sugar suspended by a string, in an attempt to learn how ants communicate. When Feynman noticed that his Ph.D. thesis adviser, John Wheeler, pointedly placed his pocket watch down on a table during their first meeting, Feynman came to their second meeting with a cheap pocket watch of his own and placed it on the table next to Wheeler's. At Los Alamos, the young Feynman continually alarmed other scientists and the military brass by cracking their safes, which were filled with atomic secrets.

- Alan Lightman, A Sense of the Mysterious

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