For at least a few years, my copy of Gleik's biography of Richard Feynman has been sitting on my bookshelf, unread. I'm not sure when I bought the book, but I'm certain that I never actually sat down and read it.

I went over to Rob's place and found him in the midst of his obsession, working with locks. His entire bed and desk were covered with cylinders, cores, springs, pins, keys, blanks, frobs, files, sidebars, and all manner of ameateur locksmith tools. Inspired, I returned home and examined my meager collection of lock goodies - which happen to be on the shelf just above the Feynman book.

With my one-track mind currently on the locksmithing track, the red spine of the Feynman book led to the following train of thought: Genius -> Feynman -> Safe Cracking. Richard Feynman was fanatical about locks. In particular, he liked to open high-security safes just to mess with people's heads. I picked up the book and looked up safe cracking in the index.

The short passage was mostly common Feynman knowledge, but the next passage caught my eye. It was his description of driving down the mesa from Los Alamos towards Santa Fe. It occurred to me that there are a number of odd similarities between my life and Feynman (ignore for the moment that, in comparison, I am a complete and total ignoramus). We both were students at MIT, we both hold degrees in physics, we both are into locksmithing, we both tinkered with tube radios as kids, and we both worked for Los Alamos in the weapons division. Granted, he plays the bongos, has a Nobel Prize, is a genius, and is basically... better at everything. But aside from that...

I found his description of the view driving out of Los Alamos to be remarkably similar to my own:

"Across the desert spotted with pale green bristles, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains rose like luminous cutouts thirty miles to the east, as bright as if they were a few city blocks away. The air was clearer than any Feynman had seen. The scenery left emotional fingerprints on many of the Easterners and Europeans who lived in its spell for two years. When it snowed, the shades of whiteness seemed impossibly rich. Feynman reveled in the clouds skimming low across the valley, the mountains visible above and below the clouds at once, the velvet glow of cloud-diffused moonlight. The sight stirred something within the most rational of minds."

Maybe that doesn't seem so profound to people that haven't been there. But for the same reasons that Feynman was tickled about having developed "an aesthetic sense" as a result of having lived there, I have come to realize that the southwest is the most intrinsicly beautiful region I've ever been to.