He gets in a rented Ford Pinto and drives back toward the airport, leaving behind no new theory, no published paper, just a slightly less annoying hum in Building 009 and a handful of students who will never again walk past a heating vent without smiling.

Feynman, Nobel laureate, bongo player, safecracker, and the most brilliant showman in physics, has decided this is the most interesting problem in America.

Feynman grins—that famous, impish, world-is-a-toy-store grin. He points at the Music & Speech Building, then at the physics lab across the quad.

The students expect a lecture. They pack the hall. Engineering majors sit next to flute performance majors. The local paper sends a photographer. The dean clears his throat and approaches the podium, but Feynman isn’t there. He’s in the basement, wearing a leather jacket over a rumpled shirt, crouched next to a steam pipe with a stethoscope and a rubber band.

“Dr. Feynman, what’s the most important thing you learned today?”

Richard Feynman is coming to BGSU.

It’s 1982. The cornfields of northwest Ohio stretch flat and patient under a wide Midwestern sky. Inside the Overdrive Hall at Bowling Green State University, a physics professor is pacing. He’s just hung up the phone. His hand is shaking, but not from fear—from the kind of adrenaline that only arrives when the impossible calls collect.