Physicist Richard Feynman's forgotten notes on 'the restaurant problem' finally deciphered after 50 years - Live Science

Richard Feynman could turn almost anything into physics and math. Even lunch. One day in the late 1970s, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist sat in a Thai restaurant in Glendale, California, with his friend Ralph Leighton, who faced a familiar decision paralysis: order his regular beloved ginger chicken, or risk disappointment on something new that he had never tried but might turn out to be better.

For physicist Reina Maruyama, the 2026 Nobel Prize in physics brought back warm memories of cold moments. The prize, awarded earlier this week, went to Francis Halzen of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the principal investigator for the groundbreaking neutrino experiment IceCube, which is based at the South Pole. Launched officially in 1999 with an ambitious experiment proposal, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, located deep beneath an ice sheet near the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica, would go on to discover high-energy neutrinos that originate in deep space and travel unimpeded through the universe. The experiment grew to include more than 450 researchers from 58 institutions in 14 countries. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory was completed in December 2010, ahead of schedule. Physicist Reina Maruyama, a member of the collaboration, is shown helping to hold the celebration banner.

Tech billionaires attempting to live for ever are, quite literally, wasting their time, a leading physicist has said. While some normal people are turning to unregulated peptide injections, cold plunges and supplements in an effort to defy ageing, the ultra-rich are aiming for immortality with even more drastic interventions: the tech chief executive Bryan Johnson has even tried injecting plasma from his 17-year-old son – although he later said he saw no benefit from it. Bryan Johnson (and son Talmage) is the world's most measured human. Photograph: Magdalena WosinskaProf Jim Al-Khalili, who will be giving this year’s Royal Institution Christmas lectures on the topic of time, has said people expending their energy on trying to live for ever may be missing out on the here and now. “We have a finite interval of time in which we exist in the universe. And the more I study the nature of time, the more I think about it, the more I realise that I just want to make the most of the time that I have,” he said. “We’re [here for] a blink of an eye compared with the age of the universe.