There’s a scene in Oppenheimer where the bomb drops, silently at first, and we hear Cillian Murphy quote a passage from the Bhagavad-Gita, something about becoming “death, the destroyer of worlds.” Suddenly, the sound of the blast hits, and - if you see it in a theater - you’ll swear you can feel the flames.

Thirty seconds later, the sun is rising, and everyone’s in celebration mode. Spoiler alert: the test is a success. We then get a shot of Richard Feynman - sporting perhaps the only grin you’ll see in the entire movie - beating a pair of bongos on the hood of a Volkswagen Beetle. If you’re familiar with Feynman, this is just the kind of capacity you’d expect him to appear in, not reciting lines from Hindu scripture or staring blankly into a puddle, ruminating over the philosophical implications of the bomb. It’s one of the only times he’s featured in the movie’s more than three-hour runtime, which is a shame, because honestly, I think his life story could’ve made just as interesting a movie.

Feynman was recruited into the Manhattan project at the ripe old age of 23, plucked straight from Princeton by Oppenheimer himself. One of the conditions of his scholarship was that he could never marry, that he instead devote his life to science and the quantum realm. But that didn’t stop him from bringing his highschool sweetheart Arline - who was dying of tuberculosis at the time - to Los Alamos with him. Eventually, they said “fuck it” and got married, Princeton can screw itself.

After her passing, Feynman went on to win the Nobel prize for his work in quantum electrodynamics. During his tenure as a professor at Caltech, he also invented a few of his own sciences, among those quantum computing. Later, he served as the head of Reagan’s Challenger Incident Investigatory Committee, where he had one of the all-time mic-drop moments of the physics world, stunning the entire room by demonstrating the mission’s failure with nothing more than a glass of cold water and a rubber band.

I hope I’m not coming across as some sort of quantum fanboy; let me be the first to admit that I haven’t opened a physics textbook since high school. But I did just finish the audiobook version of Feynman’s memoir, What Do You Care What Other People Think? and loved every minute it. It’s a poignant, hilarious, and moving portrait of the Einstein-level genius as a human being, chock full of dark humor and witty aphorisms that translate even into the most unscientific of lifestyles, mine included. Read it below. —Jackson Todd