Richard Feynman was born on May 11, 1918, in New York City. Even as a child, he loved figuring out how things worked. By age eleven, he was fixing broken radios for neighbors. He would sit and think about the problem before touching anything. This surprised adults who expected him to start taking the radio apart right away. Feynman went on to study physics, the science of how matter and energy interact. During World War II, he worked on the Manhattan Project, a secret program to build the first atomic bomb. He was just twenty-four years old. After the war, Feynman made breakthroughs in a field called quantum electrodynamics, or QED. This area of physics explains how light and matter behave at the smallest scale. His work earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965. Feynman was also a gifted teacher. He believed that if you could not explain something simply, you did not truly understand it. His college lectures became famous books that students still read today. He once said, "I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned."