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.

Richard Feynman is coming to BGSU.

BGSU never became a physics Mecca. No building was renamed. But for one perfect, improbable day, a corner of Bowling Green, Ohio, was the center of Feynman’s universe—because somewhere, a pipe was playing a flat G, and only he thought to ask why .