Scientists are, in the popular mind, the crowned royalty of nerddom.
One-dimensional dweebs with thick glasses, mossy teeth, and bad complexions about as lively as inert gas. Regarded by many colleagues as the greatest scientific mind since World War II for his groundbreaking work in particle physics, Feynman, who died of cancer in 1988, was not only a Nobel laureate, but also musician and talented artist as well as a shameless extrovert, notorious heterosexual, gleeful prankster, and all-around wiseass who partied down in global fun spots from Rio to Las Vegas. Instead, let's just say that, in this Jewish-American son of a New York uniform salesman, we find a remarkable marriage of transcendental intellect, hubris, and frat house debauchery. But also a genius. Feynman was a magician.