I miss RPF. I was in his house a few years ago, now inhabited by his daughter Michelle. It was for a chamber music concert. I seemed to be the only person there who recognized Dick in a portrait, a fairly good oil painting.
One of the truly brilliant guys. I missed meeting him in 1965 when I was one of 30 repellently nerdy adolescent brainiacs at the Summer Science Program in Ojai. He had been a guest speaker a couple of times before, but was called at the last minute to Washington.
A previous year, one of the students said "Could you tell us about the theory that the positron is an electron travelling backwards in time?" RPF said "Well yeah! That's my theory!"
At the '65 session, Jesse Greenstein, a respected astrophysicist, substituted for Feynman at the last minute. He had had the misfortune of not figuring out that a bunch of strange spectral emission lines in an apparently stellar object (i.e., what appeared to be a point source with even the largest telescopes---Greeenstein worked at the 200" a lot) were in fact massively red-shifted lines of familiar elements. The man who did get it was Maarten Schmidt, who was also a guest lecturer that year in Ojai. That got Schmidt on the cover of Time, among other honors, for uncovering the likely true distance to, and hence the enormous energetics of, Quasi Stellar Objects.
Greenstein just wrote a paper about this peculiar star in which he fitted the data to obscure things like quadruply-ionized gadolinium and the like.
When Greenstein started to lecture, one of the more egregiously rude students, one David Lewin, who spent a lot of time bitching about how he should have gone to a summer math program instead, piped up after Greenstein said how happy he was to address us.
"Well, we wanted Feynman, but you'll have to do".
I reminded a professor of that incident, which although about which he had chewed us all out the next day, had forgotten.
"Hmmm---so that explains why Greenstein never accepted another invitation from SSP!"