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The 11yo child makes up a plan, a completely unlikely kid's plan, the kind of plan that no adult would ever think could work.

And then the kid sticks with that plan into his 20s, into his 30s, into his 40s, into his 50s. The plan is so complicated, that to fully understand his solution you would need to master the following disciplines: ordinary calculus, multi-variable calculus, differential equations, partial differential equations, vector analysis, vector calculus, matrix analysis, tensor calculus, group theory and Green's functions.

Right, and that's just the math. You also need to know physics, theoretical mechanics, electrodynamics, quantum mechanics, and general relativity. If you know all of these things, you'd be able to get what he's done. Which is to take the first baby step in maybe getting to see his father again.

Part of Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International program "This American Life" 1/26/07
:: Episode 324 Description :: Stream audio :: Download (27MB MP3) ::

I highly recommend the the segment (which starts 35 minutes into the show). For a pseudo-prologue, you may want to watch "Quantum physics made relatively simple", three lectures by Hans Bethe. For a pseudo-epilogue, Richard Feynman's "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out"