The 5 Most Popular Nautilus Feature Articles in 2019

What Impossible Meant to Feynman

When you are a young physics professor at Caltech, giving a lecture about a new type of matter you have discovered, and your idol, Richard Feynman, sitting in the front row, belts out, after your talk, “Impossible!” you are going to be rattled. And Paul J. Steinhardt was. But Steinhardt, today the Albert Einstein Professor in Science at Princeton University, knew Feynman meant something other than Steinhardt’s theory was wrong or contrary to natural laws. Just what Feynman meant is the, Steinhardt writes, “I felt like my skull had been pried open and my brain rewired.” Steinhardt’s article delves into the predictable bounces of Super Balls, the orderly atomic arrangement of quasicrystals, and most of all the brilliance of the physicist with the “disarming, devilish smile.”