Feynman Born: Physics Gets Its Greatest Communicator
He played bongo drums, chased women across three continents, and in between assembled some of the most elegant explanations of quantum physics ever put on paper. Richard Feynman was born in Far Rockaway, Queens, in 1918 and won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 for his work on quantum electrodynamics. He also helped design the atomic bomb at Los Alamos and later explained the Challenger disaster to a congressional committee by dipping a rubber O-ring into a glass of ice water. It failed immediately. He'd made his point.
May 11, 1918
108 years ago
What Else Happened on May 11
Max Hödel fired two shots at Kaiser Wilhelm I on the streets of Berlin, missing the monarch entirely. This failed assassination attempt provided Chancellor Otto…
Constantine picked a fishing town where Europe meets Asia and spent the treasury building churches. Forty thousand workers had six years to turn Byzantium into …
Constantine the Great inaugurated his rebuilt city of Byzantium as New Rome, shifting the imperial center of gravity from the Tiber to the Bosphorus. By establi…
The monk Wang Jie paid for the printing out of his own pocket, commissioning woodblock carvers to cut the entire Buddhist text in reverse — 16 feet of paper, ev…
The woodblocks took months to carve, each character cut in reverse by hand. Wang Jie paid for the whole thing—a 16-foot scroll of Buddhist scripture—as a gift f…
The new Byzantine Emperor was seven years old. Alexander had spent his entire childhood as co-emperor alongside his older brother Leo VI, never expecting to ru…
Talk to History
Have a conversation with historical figures who witnessed this era. Ask questions, explore perspectives, and bring history to life.