Manhattan Project to the Santa Fe Institute: The Memoirs of George A. Cowan

The telephone lay in pieces on George Cowan's office desk in the basement of Princeton's physics building. It was his first day as a graduate student in the fall of 1941. Down the hall, on the door of the cyclotron control room, a sign warned, Don't let Dick Feynman in. He takes tools. On that day, the future Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman needed a piece from his new office mate's phone, so he borrowed it without even introducing himself.

Cowan's memoir is an engaging eyewitness account ...