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November 08, 2007

The Feynman-Tufte-Vantastic Principle

Thanks to an email from Chris and David...I was drawn to Richard Feynman's Van:






Finally! A link between three of my passions: information design, quantum physics I don't pretend understand in the least, and vans.

"Richard Feynman, the late Caltech physicist, is famous for working on the atomic bomb, winning a Nobel Prize in Physics, cracking safes, playing drums and driving a 1975 Dodge Maxivan adorned with squiggly lines on the side panels. Most people who saw it gazed in puzzlement, but once in a while someone would ask the driver why he had Feynman diagrams all over his van, only to be told, "Because I'm Richard Feynman!"

...which leads to:

[Edward Tufte] meets the master of clear and precise seeing in what I call the Feynman-Tufte Principle: a visual display of data should be simple enough to fit on the side of a van."

From Scientific American

Clampants | November 8, 2007 08:49 PM