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Richard Phillips Feynman, 39, whose father was a sales manager for a uniform company, was born in Manhattan, is professor of theoretical physics at California's Institute of Technology, won the Albert Einstein Award (1954) for his "Feynman diagrams," a complex system of simplified calculations in quantum electrodynamics. After M.I.T. and Princeton (Ph.D., 1942), he worked at Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project, at Cornell (nuclear studies), joined CalTech in 1950. Curly-haired and handsome, he shuns neckties and coats, is an enormously valuable and dedicated adventurer in his field, harvests most of his brilliant ideas at the blackboard. A teetotaler ("I got potted in a Buffalo bar one night and wound up with a lulu of a black eye"), , he became fascinated with samba rhythms while on a lecturing appointment in Brazil, became proficient on the "frying pan" (a Brazilian percussion instrument). Other entertainments: playing bongo drums, breaking codes, picking locks. (He drove Los Alamos security officers to nervous exhaustion by easily opening locked desks and combination locks on safes.) Currently engrossed in the study of "weak couplings" (one of the four forces—with gravitation, electromagnetism and strong couplings—of all matter), Feynman admits that he has found nothing of immediate significance yet. But, he adds, "it's just another step toward trying to understand the fundamental nature of all matter."
Murray Gell-Mann, 28, professor of theoretical physics at CalTech, comes from Manhattan, the son of a language-school proprietor who infected his son with his own hobbies: mathematics, astronomy and archaeology. "I did poorly in physics in high school," he says. "It was terribly boring. At Yale it got more interesting." At 21 he took his Ph.D. at M.I.T., studied at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, became, at 26, an assistant professor in physics at the University of Chicago. A specialist in quantum mechanics, in 1952 he formulated the "Strangeness Theory," i.e., assigned physical meanings to the behavior of newly discovered particles. At CalTech Gell-Mann works closely with Feynman on weak couplings. At the blackboard the two explode with ideas like sparks flying from a grindstone, alternately slap their foreheads at each other's simplifications, quibble over the niceties of wall-length equations, charge their creative batteries by flipping paper clips at distant targets. Says Gell-Mann, of the future: "You might say there is a sort of truce between Nature and our understanding of her. But Nature is not obligated; she has made us no promises."