A lot of people ask how someone like Richard Feynman, who played the bongo drums, loved practical jokes, and was an amateur safecracker and a bon vivant, could also win a Nobel Prize in Physics. Actually, all of Feynman’s disparate characteristics are entirely in keeping with each other. In psychiatrist Carl Jung’s terms, Feynman was an extraverted (Jung’s spelling), intuitive type. These are people who can make leaps of understanding that seem to have no logical connection. These types seem rather off-the-wall in their personal, as well as their professional, lives.

Robert G. Chester
Tumwater, Wash.