One of my favorites: Dick acted as a consultant for a company in Switzerland, which took him there every summer. About 1982 or so, I had business in Europe, an

One of my favorites: Dick acted as a consultant for a company in Switzerland, which took him there every summer. About 1982 or so, I had business in Europe, and I met Dick in Geneva. We decided to kick around for several days. We did the shops and the countryside on the first day, and on the second day, he asked what I'd like to do. I said, "Well, if it isn't too much like a postman's holiday, I'd like to go over to CERN," which is the European particle accellerator, where so much particle physics is done, and where Dick used to work a number of years before. He said, "Sure." So we went over there, and Dick couldn't find his way around because the buildings had changed. We finally found our way in, and looked into a room where there were some physicists doing work on the blackboard. One of them spotted Feynman, and pretty soon there was a crowd gathered, and the director came in. He decided they'd take us on a tour. We went into a 007, James Bond cave underneath the ground, with all this wonderful high-technology equipment. There was a giant machine that was going to be rolled into the line of the particle accelerator. The machine was maybe the size of a two-story building, on tracks, with lights and bulbs and dials and scaffolds all around, with men climbing all over it. Feynman said, "What experiment is this?" The director said, "Why this is an experiment to test the change-change something-or-other under such-and-such circumstances." But he stopped suddenly, and he said, "I forgot! This is your theory of change-change, Dr. Feynman! This is an experiment to demonstrate, if we can, your theory of fifteen years ago, called so-and-so." He was a little embarrassed at having forgotten it. Feynman looked at this big machine, and he said, "How much does this cost?" The man said, "Thirty-seven million dollars," or whatever it was. And Feynman said, "You don't trust me?" -- excerpted from "No Ordinary Genius" by Christopher Sykes