Maria Konnikova provides background on the star of Sunday's MHB:
Richard P. Feynman was the physicist who could, it seems, also be anything else he chose to be: a musician (who played the frigideira in a Brazilian samba group and even performed during Carnaval), a composer (who co-wrote and performed music to an award-winning modern ballet), an artist (who, as Ofey, had a one-man show), a specialist on Mayan hieroglyphics (who lectured on the codexes of the ancients and could spot a fake before the experts themselves)—and most of all, always, a profound thinker, who wondered not only about the world around him but about the him the world was around. Who not only wondered why, but then immediately, why he wondered why, and then, why he wondered that. How did his mind work? How did it get to wherever it traveled, and could he find a way to trace it?
Just in case your own self-esteem wasn't a little wobbly already. A reader echoes Feynman's wonderment:
In Judeo-Christian religions the belief is that God provides some form of stopping point, where the questions end. When I was a five-year old, I learned that you could ask the question “Why” to the answer to any query that you posed your parents. After several layers of “Why,” my mother would answer, “Because God said so,” implying the end of the conversation.
But ultimately, my father gave the wisest answer: “I don’t know but go look it up.” If I couldn’t find the answer in a book (this is long before Google), he responded: “Then you’ll have to find the answer yourself. And that answer will create more questions. And you will have to be happy in that search.”
The Dish 