麻豆传媒

I have been reading Surely You鈥檙e Joking, Mr. Feynman!, a bite-size collection of anecdotes from the brilliant and eccentric physicist Richard Feynman (pictured). I was reminded of it while watching Oppenheimer, as he was also part of the Manhattan Project.

Stuck in a desert with not enough to occupy his amazing mind, Feynman took to cracking safes full of nuclear secrets. He would snaffle classified reports and return them later, or leave cheeky notes inside. Security must have loved him. But his compulsion to understand absolutely everything is infectious.

I am also enjoying , a YouTube channel where a hobbyist engineer uses only tools available to the ancient Greeks to build a replica of the Antikythera mechanism. This 鈥渃omputer鈥� could predict the movements of the sun, moon and planets. It is fun to speculate what its makers might have gone on to achieve 鈥� and why they didn鈥檛.

Matthew Sparkes

Reporter

London