Richard Feynman

"If we were evolved a little further so we could see 10 times more sensitively, we wouldn't have to have this discussion," Richard Feynman explains in the first series of Alix G. Mauntner Memorial lectures delivered at UCLA. Feynman, a Nobel Prize winner in physics, has spent much of his scientific life making sense of the interactions between very small particles that none of us can see, such as electrons and photons, which are the substructure of the universe.

Alan Alda is perched on the edge of a couch, getting fired up about photons. "A photon, a particle of light, bounces off a mirror and goes to your eye; it's clearly going from the lamp to the mirror to your eye," he says, gesticulating with sweater-clad arms flying, blue eyes flashing with puckish delight, as he pokes at several random points in space, including one perilously close to a reporter's eye.

The Mark Taper Forum has announced a 2000-01 season that will feature a wide range of contemporary work. August Wilson's latest play, "King Hedley II" (Sept. 14-Oct. 22), will follow in the wake of his first play, "Jitney," which closed at the Taper last weekend. Part of Wilson's series of plays set in different decades, "King Hedley II" is set in 1985 in the same Pittsburgh neighborhood where "Jitney" took place.

When she was a teenager, Michelle Feynman remembers playing a very Hollywood game--casting the story of her life. She picked Alan Alda to play her father. Alda is doing just that in the world premiere of Peter Parnell's "QED" at the Mark Taper Forum. Michelle's father, Richard Feynman, wasn't an ordinary man--he had worked on the Manhattan Project and was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 1965 for his research in quantum electrodynamics, or QED.

When Richard P. Feynman, the late, world-renowned physicist with a passion for puzzle-solving and for making mischief, received the call at 4 in the morning telling him that he had won the 1965 Nobel Prize for physics, his reaction was to say, "Yeah, but I'm sleeping !" By the fifth or sixth call he told the reporter from Time magazine, "I don't know how to get out of this thing. Maybe I won't accept the prize." But the combustible curmudgeon eventually relented. In "Surely You're Joking," Feynman tells stories of his childhood in Far Rockaway, of his studies at MIT and Princeton, of his experience on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, of his work as professor at Cornell and Caltech and of his research in theoretical physics.

A lot of money has been made from the literary estate of Richard P. Feynman, the Caltech physicist, Nobel laureate and performance artist, who stumbled into bestsellerdom in 1985 with a collection of anecdotes, transcribed from tape recordings, called "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" Three years later came a posthumous sequel, "What Do You Care What Other People Think?"

The announcement of Richard Feynman's death in February startled many of us who had known the Nobel Laureate at Caltech, even as we acknowledged that the cancer that killed him could not be fended off indefinitely. He called himself "a curious character." Certainly he achieved that status: self-created eccentric, would-be 20th-Century Leonardo, all-around genius with the added fillip of a sense of humor. He was a great physicist who looked on nature afresh each day.

How strong is gravity? For the record, here is the widely accepted estimate for the Newtonian constant of gravitation, often called G: .0000000000667259 meters cubed per kilogram second squared. Let's put it another way. Roughly speaking, if a 150-pound person stood a couple of feet away from a 200-pound person, the gravitational attraction between them would be about 100 times smaller than the weight of a postage stamp, physicist Jim Faller says.

Kerry J. Vahala, assistant professor of applied physics at Caltech, has been named the first recipient of the new Richard P. Feynman-Hughes Fellowship, which will provide $30,000 for research and may be renewed annually up to a maximum of three years. The fellowship, sponsored by Hughes Aircraft Co., will be awarded annually to a young faculty member in Caltech's division of Engineering and Applied Science. It was established to honor the memory of Richard P.