Srinagar, March 12 -- When we speak of death, we usually resort to the language of biology-the stopping of a heart, the ceasing of breath. Or we turn to the language of poetry and grief. However, there is a third language that offers a profoundly different perspective: the language of Physics. Through the eyes of Richard Feynman, one of the 20th century's most brilliant minds, the universe is not a collection of separate objects, but a continuous, interlocking dance of matter and energy. In this view, death is not a "deletion" from the cosmic hard drive; it is a "reformatting."

Feynman's most famous premise was that if all scientific knowledge were to be lost and only one sentence could be passed to the next generation, it should be: "Al...