Richard Feynman

There is a particular kind of mind that refuses to accept an explanation it cannot rebuild for itself. Richard Feynman had that mind in its purest modern form. He distrusted authority, distrusted jargon, distrusted his own cleverness most of all, and he held to a single discipline above every other: that knowing the name of a thing is not the same as understanding it, and that the easiest person in the world to fool is yourself. His blackboard at Caltech carried a line at his death that has become one of the most quoted sentences in science: “What I cannot create, I do not understand.” We chose him for this cycle because the arrival of artificial intelligence has made those distinctions urgent again. We now have machines that can name everything and may understand nothing, machines that produce the surface of competence at a scale no human ever could, and the question