Along with flowers , trees , Ronald Reagan and the singer Marian Anderson , correspondents and bill payers in the United States will soon be able to embellish their mail with four American scientists : Richard Feynman -LRB- 1918-1988 -RRB- , an iconoclastic Nobel Prize-winning physicist at the California Institute of Technology , who reinvented the methods of modern particle physics , helped build the atomic bomb , cracked safes , painted nudes and helped investigate the space shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986 .