Feynman’s security badge photo from Los Alamos. He was only 24 and a newly minted Ph.D. when he began working on the bomb design project.
Gallery of Richard Feynman
Enrico Fermi consults with a colleague during a meeting at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project. J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Project, and Richard Feynman sit behind him.
Gallery of Richard Feynman
1963
Richard Feynman talking with a teaching assistant after the lecture on The Dependence of Amplitudes on Time, Robert Leighton, and Matthew Sands in background, April 29, 1963. Photographs by Tom Harvey.
Gallery of Richard Feynman
1964
1200 E California Blvd, Pasadena, CA 91125, United States
Richard Feynman educates and entertains his audience during a coffee hour at Caltech in 1964.
Gallery of Richard Feynman
1965
A group of Nobel prize winners after the presentation ceremony in Stockholm, (from left) Professor R B Woodward who won the prize for chemistry, Professor Julian Schwinger and Professor Richard Feynman, the winners of the prize for physics, Professor Francois Jacob, Professor Andre Lwoff, and Jacques Monod, the winners of the prize for medicine and the author Mikhail Sholokhov, the winner of the prize for literature.
Gallery of Richard Feynman
1986
Richard Feynman during the investigation of President's Commission on fatal explosion of Challenger.
Gallery of Richard Feynman
1986
Richard Feynman
Gallery of Richard Feynman
1986
1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC 20500, United States
Members of the Rogers Commission about to present the Challenger Accident Report to President Reagan in the Rose Garden.
Achievements
Membership
American Physical Society
American Association for the Advancement of Science
Richard Feynman talking with a teaching assistant after the lecture on The Dependence of Amplitudes on Time, Robert Leighton, and Matthew Sands in background, April 29, 1963. Photographs by Tom Harvey.
A group of Nobel prize winners after the presentation ceremony in Stockholm, (from left) Professor R B Woodward who won the prize for chemistry, Professor Julian Schwinger and Professor Richard Feynman, the winners of the prize for physics, Professor Francois Jacob, Professor Andre Lwoff, and Jacques Monod, the winners of the prize for medicine and the author Mikhail Sholokhov, the winner of the prize for literature.
Enrico Fermi consults with a colleague during a meeting at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project. J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Project, and Richard Feynman sit behind him.
(This book considers the basic ideas of quantum mechanics,...)
This book considers the basic ideas of quantum mechanics, treating the concept of amplitude and discusses relativity and the idea of anti-particles and explains quantum electrodynamics. It provides experienced researchers with an invaluable introduction to fundamental processes.
(This text material constitutes notes on the third of a th...)
This text material constitutes notes on the third of a three-semester course in quantum mechanics given at the California Institute of Technology in 1953, presenting the main results and calculational procedures of quantum electrodynamics.
(From astrophysics to condensed matter theory, nearly all ...)
From astrophysics to condensed matter theory, nearly all of the modern physics employs the path integral technique. In this presentation, the developer of path integrals and one of the best-known scientists of all time, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard P. Feynman, presents unique insights into this method and its applications.
(In these Messenger Lectures, originally delivered at Corn...)
In these Messenger Lectures, originally delivered at Cornell University and recorded for television by the BBC, Richard Feynman offers an overview of selected physical laws and gathers their common features into one broad principle of invariance.
(This classic graduate lecture note volume on statistical ...)
This classic graduate lecture note volume on statistical mechanics focuses on Physics, rather than mathematics. It provides a concise introduction to basic concepts and a clear presentation of difficult topics while challenging the student to reflect upon as yet unanswered questions.
(Celebrated for his brilliantly quirky insights into the p...)
Celebrated for his brilliantly quirky insights into the physical world, Nobel laureate Richard Feynman also possessed an extraordinary talent for explaining difficult concepts to the general public. Here Feynman provides a classic and definitive introduction to QED (namely, quantum electrodynamics), that part of quantum field theory describing the interactions of light with charged particles. Using everyday language, spatial concepts, visualizations, and his renowned "Feynman diagrams" instead of advanced mathematics, Feynman clearly and humorously communicates both the substance and spirit of QED to the layperson. A. Zee's introduction places Feynman’s book and his seminal contribution to QED in historical context and further highlights Feynman’s uniquely appealing and illuminating style.
(With his characteristic eyebrow-raising behavior, Richard...)
With his characteristic eyebrow-raising behavior, Richard P. Feynman once provoked the wife of a Princeton dean to remark, "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman!" But the many scientific and personal achievements of this Nobel Prize-winning physicist are no laughing matter. In addition to solving the mystery of liquid helium, Feynman has been commissioned to paint a naked female toreador and asked to crack the uncrackable safes guarding the atomic bomb's most critical secrets. He has traded ideas with Einstein and Bohr, discussed gambling odds with Nick the Greek, and accompanied a ballet on the bongo drums. Here, woven with his scintillating views on modern science, Feynman relates the defining moments of his accomplished life.
(Perhaps the two most important conceptual breakthroughs i...)
Perhaps the two most important conceptual breakthroughs in twentieth-century physics are relativity and quantum mechanics. Developing a theory that combines the two seamlessly is a difficult and ongoing challenge. This accessible book contains intriguing explorations of this theme by the distinguished physicists Richard Feynman and Steven Weinberg. Richard Feynman's contribution examines the nature of antiparticles and in particular the relationship between quantum spin and statistics. In his essay, Steven Weinberg speculates on how Einstein's theory of gravitation might be reconciled with quantum theory in the final laws of physics. Both these Nobel laureates have made huge contributions to fundamental research in physics, as well as to the popularization of science.
(The New York Times best-selling sequel to "Surely You’re ...)
The New York Times best-selling sequel to "Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!" One of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century, Richard Feynman possessed an unquenchable thirst for adventure and an unparalleled ability to tell the stories of his life. "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" is Feynman’s last literary legacy, prepared with his friend and fellow drummer, Ralph Leighton. Among its many tales - some funny, others intensely moving - we meet Feynman’s first wife, Arlene, who taught him of love’s irreducible mystery as she lay dying in a hospital bed while he worked nearby on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos. We are also given a fascinating narrative of the investigation of the space shuttle Challenger’s explosion in 1986, and we relive the moment when Feynman revealed the disaster’s cause by an elegant experiment: dropping a ring of rubber into a glass of cold water and pulling it out, misshapen.
Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher
(Learn from a Nobel Peace Prize winner in this entertainin...)
Learn from a Nobel Peace Prize winner in this entertaining and educational guide to physics, written for the enjoyment of curious beginners and aspiring scientists alike. It was Richard Feynman's outrageous and scintillating method of teaching that earned him legendary status among students and professors of physics.
Six Not-So-Easy Pieces: Einstein's Relativity, Symmetry, and Space-Time
(Six lectures, all regarding the most revolutionary discov...)
Six lectures, all regarding the most revolutionary discovery in twentieth-century physics: Einstein's Theory of Relativity. No one - not even Einstein himself - explained these difficult, anti-intuitive concepts more clearly, or with more verve and gusto, than Feynman.
Feynman's Lost Lecture: The Motion of Planets Around the Sun
(This breathtaking lecture - "The Motion of the Planets Ar...)
This breathtaking lecture - "The Motion of the Planets Around the Sun" - uses nothing more advanced than high-school geometry to explain why the planets orbit the sun elliptically rather than in perfect circles and conclusively demonstrates the astonishing fact that has mystified and intrigued thinkers since Newton: Nature obeys mathematics. David and Judith Goodstein give us a beautifully written short memoir of life with Feynman, provide meticulous commentary on the lecture itself, and relate the exciting story of their effort to chase down one of Feynman's most original and scintillating lectures.
The Meaning of it All: Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist
(This wonderful book, based on a previously unpublished th...)
This wonderful book, based on a previously unpublished three-part public lecture, shows us another side of Richard P. Feynman, as he expounds on the world around us.
(The Pleasure of Finding Things Out is a magnificent treas...)
The Pleasure of Finding Things Out is a magnificent treasury of the best short works of Richard P. Feynman, from interviews and speeches to lectures and printed articles. A sweeping, wide-ranging collection, it presents an intimate and fascinating view of a life in science - a life like no other. From his ruminations on science in our culture to his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, this book will delight anyone interested in the world of ideas.
(When, in 1984-86, Richard P. Feynman gave his famous cour...)
When, in 1984-86, Richard P. Feynman gave his famous course on computation at the California Institute of Technology, he asked Tony Hey to adapt his lecture notes into a book. Although led by Feynman, the course also featured, as occasional guest speakers, some of the most brilliant men in science at that time, including Marvin Minsky, Charles Bennett, and John Hopfield.
(The Feynman Lectures on Gravitation are based on notes pr...)
The Feynman Lectures on Gravitation are based on notes prepared during a course on gravitational physics that Richard Feynman taught at Caltech during the 1962-63 academic year. For several years prior to these lectures, Feynman thought long and hard about the fundamental problems in gravitational physics, yet he published very little. These lectures represent a useful record of his viewpoints and some of his insights into gravity and its application to cosmology, superstars, wormholes, and gravitational waves at that particular time. The lectures also contain a number of fascinating digressions and asides on the foundations of physics and other issues. Characteristically, Feynman took an untraditional non-geometric approach to gravitation and general relativity based on the underlying quantum aspects of gravity. Hence, these lectures contain a unique pedagogical account of the development of Einstein's general theory of relativity as the inevitable result of the demand for a self-consistent theory of a massless spin-2 field (the graviton) coupled to the energy-momentum tensor of matter. This approach also demonstrates the intimate and fundamental connection between gauge invariance and the principle of equivalence.
(Richard Feynman teaching, dancing, joking, having fun wit...)
Richard Feynman teaching, dancing, joking, having fun with quantum mechanics. This was the first of four workshops that Faustin Bray coordinated for Richard Feynman; held at Esalen Institute in 1983.
Tiny Machines: The Feynman Lecture on Nanotechnology
(Tiny Machines is the defining lecture on designing and en...)
Tiny Machines is the defining lecture on designing and engineering at the molecular scale. Richard Feynman describes computer chips, tiny tools, sound waves, and the known laws of physics. He teaches about the science behind nanotechnology and how tiny machines and tools can be constructed atom-by-atom.
(For four consecutive years, from 1983 to 1986 Faustin Bra...)
For four consecutive years, from 1983 to 1986 Faustin Bray produced workshops for Richard Feynman at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. In 1984 and 1985 they held the Idiosyncratic Thinking Workshop. Sit in on the weeklong events, experience the insight spoken during the two five-day workshops. Both the video and audio are exceptional, Richard Feynman expresses himself on human issues, he steps outside the box called science.
(The iconoclastic Nobel prize-winner playing congas and ot...)
The iconoclastic Nobel prize-winner playing congas and other rhythm instruments, dancing, conducting idiosyncratic workshops, participating in the Challenger hearings, explaining the "Feynman Diagrams" and much more.
Richard Feynman was an American scientist, one of the most creative and influential physicists of the twentieth century. Feynman revolutionized the field of quantum mechanics and formulated the theory of quantum electrodynamics. He won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1965. He was also involved in the Manhattan Project, a research that produced the first atomic bombs.
Background
Richard Feynman was born on May 11, 1918, in the Far Rockaway section of New York City. He was the descendant of Russian and Polish Jewish parents who had immigrated to the United States late in the 19th century. His father, Melville, who harbored an interest in science, helped inspire young Richard with trips to museums, nature walks, the purchase of an Encyclopedia Britannica, and more. Melville was in the garment business - he sold uniforms to police officers, postal workers, and the like - and he taught Richard never to take formal authority too seriously; he had, after all, seen the important figures before they acquired their fancy uniforms. Melville never taught facts so much as questions. He encouraged young Richard to identify not what he knew, but rather what he did not know. This is the essence of Richard Feynman’s style of understanding. By absolutely asking what his ignorance consisted of, he freed himself from the tyranny of conventional wisdom. He learned that it’s entirely possible, and even likely, for a person to live not knowing the answers to important questions. What’s most important for knowledge is the well-asked question.
His mother, Lucille, instilled into Richard a quality that, although less obvious, was nevertheless of equal importance to his future success as an explorer. That critical quality was a powerful sense of humor. Not to be dismissed or taken lightly, it was Lucille’s brand of humor that "empowered" him. While Melville provided Richard the tools to do choose his own path, Lucille taught him how to laugh out loud at self-importance, giving him the all-important courage to, "step onto the path." Both of his parents were a formidable combination to guide him his whole life.
Melville and Lucille raised their two children (Richard and his younger sister, Joan) in the tradition of reformed Judaism, although religion never played a large role in Richard Feynman’s life.
Education
Feynman raced through New York City’s public schools, teaching himself algebra and soon calculus, even inventing his own idiosyncratic notation to streamline his calculations. He entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1935 to begin his undergraduate studies. By his sophomore year, Feynman was already enrolling in graduate-level courses in theoretical physics. He soon fell in with an equally precocious friend and study partner, Theodore (Ted) Welton. Together, Feynman and Welton dived into quantum mechanics, physicists’ bizarre yet successful description of the atomic domain, and general relativity, Albert Einstein’s notoriously difficult theory of gravitation. While still an undergraduate, Feynman published a brief letter to the editor of Physical Review with one of his professors, Manuel Vallarta, on the scattering of cosmic rays by interstellar magnetic fields. He also worked on a senior thesis with the renowned solid-state theorist John Clarke Slater, which resulted in an article of Feynman’s own, "Forces in Molecules," published in Physical Review in 1939. This work treated the problem of molecular forces from a thoroughly quantum-mechanical point of view, arriving at a simple means of calculating the energy of a molecular system that continues to guide quantum chemists. Richard graduated from MIT in 1939 as a Bachelor of Science and was named Putnam Fellow that same year.
Feynman received his doctorate at Princeton University in 1942. At Princeton, with his adviser, John Archibald Wheeler, he developed an approach to quantum mechanics governed by the principle of least action. This approach replaced the wave-oriented electromagnetic picture developed by James Clerk Maxwell with one based entirely on particle interactions mapped in space and time. In effect, Feynman’s method calculated the probabilities of all the possible paths a particle could take in going from one point to another.
War was clearly on the horizon as Feynman finished his undergraduate studies in 1939; just three months after he graduated from MIT, Germany invaded Poland and World War II broke out in Europe. During World War II Feynman was recruited to serve as a staff member of the United States atomic bomb project at Princeton University (1941–42) and then at the new secret laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico (1943–45).
Feynman arrived at Los Alamos early in 1943, while the laboratory was still under construction. He joined the theoretical physics division, or T-division, led by Hans Bethe. Feynman’s job now was to figure out some way to calculate how neutrons would behave in various bomb configurations. In principle, the task seemed straightforward: a single starter neutron, if injected into a critical mass of fissionable material (such as uranium enriched with additional U-235), could trigger a chain reaction. The initiator neutron would split one uranium nucleus; among the detritus would be, on average, about two new neutrons released when the original nucleus split apart. Each of these newly released neutrons could split additional uranium nuclei, releasing more neutrons, and so on. Every time a nucleus split, it released energy as well as more neutrons (as Meitner and Frisch had first worked out). Simple in principle, the real mechanisms of neutron scattering, absorption, fission, and release proved remarkably difficult to calculate for any realistic design.
Richard Feynman quickly impressed both the lab’s scientific director, theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, and the T-division leader, Bethe. By early 1944 Feynman had been promoted to be a group leader within T-division, making him the youngest group leader in all of Los Alamos.
Feynman’s other main task during the war was to serve as a safety inspector for Oak Ridge. Engineers and architects at Oak Ridge had designed storage facilities for the enriched uranium. Oppenheimer deputized Feynman to inspect the Oak Ridge facilities and determine whether or not they were safe. This task, like his main job back at Los Alamos, ultimately came down to understanding how neutrons would behave in and around fissionable material. The original Oak Ridge plans looked safe until Feynman realized that any accident - a tub of enriched uranium spilling near other containers, or worse yet, a flood in one of the containment rooms, which would slow down any itinerant neutrons and make them more likely to induce fission - could lead to disastrous explosions and deadly levels of radioactivity. Although skeptical at first, the leadership at Oak Ridge heeded Feynman’s warnings and redesigned their storage facilities.
As the war was ending and Allied victory looked more and more secure, physics departments across the country began jockeying to hire Feynman. In the end, he turned down several attractive offers and followed his wartime boss, Bethe, back to Bethe’s home department at Cornell University in upstate New York. At Cornell, Feynman perfected his approach to quantum theory, melding several of his prewar insights with the more pragmatic, numbers-driven approach he had honed during the war.
One of his first tasks was to publish a long article, based on his dissertation, that presented a brand-new approach to quantum mechanics. Published in 1948 under the title, "Space-Time Approach to Non-relativistic Quantum Mechanics" in the journal Reviews of Modern Physics, his lengthy article focused on the "Lagrangian" function for a particle, a particular combination of kinetic and potential energy familiar from classical mechanics.
His greatest success came on the heels of this path-integral approach. He returned to the problems of quantum electrodynamics (QED), physicists’ quantum-mechanical description of electric and magnetic forces. QED had been developed during the late 1920s and the 1930s by many of the discipline’s greatest theorists - Paul Dirac, Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, Pascual Jordan, and many others. Yet as these greats had discovered, the equations of QED suffered from a dramatic sickness. When pushed beyond the lowest approximation, they routinely broke down, yielding infinity rather than any finite predictions. After the war, Feynman tackled the problem diagrammatically. He began doodling simple space-time pictures to help keep track of the morass of separate algebraic terms that littered any given QED calculation. With a more effective accounting scheme, Feynman hoped, it would be easier to assess precisely where the equations broke down and the infinities sneaked in.
Over the next two decades, Feynman’s diagrammatic approach revolutionized nearly every branch of theoretical physics, from QED to nuclear and particle physics, solid-state theory, and even gravitation. He won the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics for this work (sharing the award with Julian Schwinger and Shin’ichiro Tomonaga). Of all Feynman’s many contributions, his diagrams have remained his greatest scientific legacy, changing the way most physicists think about the microworld.
Soon after Feynman had perfected his diagrammatic approach, the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena lured Feynman away from Cornell. He moved to Caltech in 1950 and remained there for the rest of his career.
More and more during this period, the problems that Feynman worked on came from solid-state theory. He became especially interested in liquid helium. By the mid-1950s, Feynman’s interests had returned to his original passion: high-energy physics. Since his triumph with QED, the field had moved on to a series of new conundrums. Among them loomed the nature of nuclear forces.
Throughout his career, Feynman was a tremendously popular lecturer. Famously animated, he often acted out how electrons, photons, or protons would behave. During the late 1950s, he was invited to teach Caltech’s large introductory physics course. In one sense, the course was a flop - even Feynman admitted that he had pitched his material at too advanced a level for the incoming undergraduates. Graduate and postdoctoral students, and even his fellow faculty, on the other hand, found his "elementary" course inspiring. With the aid of two Caltech colleagues, who transcribed his lectures for publication, his "flop" turned into one of the most renowned physics textbooks of all time, The Feynman Lectures on Physics. In later years, Feynman frequently gave informal lectures at nearby industrial laboratories, such as Hughes Aircraft. He also offered a popular class titled "Physics X," open to anyone with questions about science.
Soon after The Feynman Lectures, Feynman began to publish a series of successful textbooks and popular books. The Character of Physical Law (1965), Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals, with Albert R. Hibbs (1965), Photon-Hadron Interactions (1972), and QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (1985). Each began as The Feynman Lectures had, with talks by Feynman as transcribed by colleagues.
In January 1986 the space shuttle Challenger was ripped to pieces about seventy seconds after takeoff. President Ronald Reagan convened a blue-ribbon panel to investigate the disaster, and Feynman reluctantly agreed to join. Frustrated by what he considered the bureaucratic red tape and political niceties that he thought would stymie the commission, Feynman grabbed the spotlight during televised hearings in February 1986. He had been tipped off by an insider that the accident might have stemmed from the effects of cold weather on some O-rings (rubber seals inside the shuttle’s solid-rocket boosters). Waiting for just the right moment when the television cameras were focusing on him, Feynman dipped a piece of O-ring in a glass of ice water and demonstrated how quickly it lost its elasticity. Though the investigation lumbered on for several months, the O-ring explanation finally emerged as the most probable cause. Feynman’s dramatic demonstration fixed him in much of the public’s mind as just the kind of straight-talking, iconoclastic character whom he had described in his autobiographical sketches.
His contribution to the Challenger investigation proved to be his last major work. Two years later he died from kidney failure, a complication arising from his long battle with cancer.
Richard Feynman achieved a growing popular fame after his death, in part because of two autobiographical collections of anecdotes published in the years around his passing, "Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character (1985) and "What Do You Care What Other People Think?": Further Adventures of a Curious Character (1988), which irritated some of his colleagues by emphasizing his bongo playing and his patronage of a topless bar more than his technical accomplishments.
Richard Feynman went down in history as one of the most influential theoretical physicists. A veteran of the Manhattan Project of World War II and a 1965 Nobel laureate in physics, Richard contributed greatly across many domains, from electrodynamics and quantum theory to nuclear and particle physics, solid-state physics, and gravitation.
He was also an influential member of the Rogers Commission, whose mission was to investigate the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster during its 10th mission. It was Feynmann who correctly suggested that the material used in the shuttle's O-rings became less resilient in cold weather by compressing a sample of the material in a clamp and immersing it in ice-cold water.
Richard Feynmann also became a famous public persona and an outstanding science popularizer. Several of his popular books - including two collections of autobiographical stories, telling of his lifelong love of playing bongo drums, puzzling through scientific mysteries, and distrusting authority figures - became runaway bestsellers.
His life was celebrated in an opera, Feynman, by Jack Vees, a graphic novel, Feynman, by Jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick, and a play, QED, by Peter Parnell, the latter of which was commissioned by and starred Alan Alda.
(Richard Feynman teaching, dancing, joking, having fun wit...)
1983
Religion
Richard Feynman grew up in a Jewish family, but his parents were not religious, and from little up, Richard became an atheist. He once expressed his opinion on religion as follows: "A young man brought up in a religious family, studies a science, and as a result he comes to doubt - and perhaps later to disbelieve in - his father's God. Now, this is not an isolated example; it happens time and time again. Although I have no statistics on this, I believe that many scientists - in fact, I actually believe that more than half of the scientists - really disbelieve in their father's God; that is, they don't believe in a God in a conventional sense."
Politics
Even as his fame grew, Feynman shunned in the kinds of worldly, political affairs in which so many of his colleagues engaged. While many of his fellow Los Alamos veterans joined the Federation of Atomic Scientists (later renamed Federation of American Scientists) soon after the war, or the Union of Concerned Scientists twenty-five years later, Feynman famously avoided such groups. Feynman even made a bet with fellow physicist Victor Weisskopf that he would forfeit ten dollars if he ever allowed himself to become saddled with any sort of professional responsibility whatsoever.
Despite Feynman’s desire to stay away from politics, he was a subject to scrutiny by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, as it sought to uncover communist sympathizers during the 1950s. The FBI began keeping an eye on Feynman after other members of the Manhattan Project, which built the first atomic bomb, turned out to be Soviet spies, including Klaus Fuchs, the project's primary physicist.
In an interview after interview with the FBI, Feynman’s friends and colleagues cited him as brilliant, loyal, and an excellent fit for government service. But Feynman’s past and present associations dogged him, particularly as questions swirled around the loyalty of his friend and colleague Robert Oppenheimer because of his own left-wing ties.
The concerns about communist sympathies were further inflamed by public statements Feynman made dismissing religion (the FBI files include several newspaper clippings of such talks) as well as his openly liberal politics.
Even his high school extracurricular activities came back to haunt his FBI files: Feynman’s brief association with the Young People’s Socialist League makes numerous appearances in his files. The group was described by one unnamed individual as a militant group of students dedicated to "rabble-rousing in every respect."
Feynman registered as a Republican voter in 1956.
Views
Feynman's primary contribution to physics was in the field of quantum electrodynamics, which is the study of the interactions of electromagnetic radiation with atoms and with fundamental particles, such as electrons. Because the equations that compose it are applicable to atomic physics, chemistry, and electromagnetism, quantum electrodynamics is one of the most useful tools in understanding physical phenomena. The field initially grew out of work done by P. Dirac, W. Heisenberg, W. Pauli, and E. Fermi in the late 1920s.
The original theory was constructed by integrating quantum mechanics into classical electrodynamics. It provided a reasonable explanation of the dual wave-particle nature of light by explaining how it was possible for light to behave like a wave under certain conditions and like a particle (a "photon") on other occasions. Dirac, in particular, introduced a theory that described the behavior of an electron in accordance with both relativity and quantum mechanics. His theory brought together almost everything that was known about particle physics in the 1920s. However, when the principles behind electromagnetic interactions were brought into Dirac's equation, numerous mathematical problems arose: meaningless or infinite answers were obtained when the theory was applied to certain experimental data.
Feynman found a way to bypass, though not solve, these problems. Be redefining the existing value of the charge and the mass of the electron (a process known as "renormalization"), he managed to make the "divergent integrals" irrelevant - these were the terms in the theory which had previously led to meaningless answers. Thus, while some divergent terms still exist in quantum electrodynamics, they no longer enter the calculations of measurable quantities from theory.
The significance of Feynman's contribution is enormous. He gave the theory of quantum electrodynamics a true physical meaning as well as experimental use. The renormalized values for the electron's charge and mass provide finite, accurate means of measuring electron properties such as magnetic moment. This theory has also made a detailed description of the fine structure of the hydrogen atom possible. It also presents a precise picture of the collisions of electrons, positrons (anti-electrons), and photons in matter.
Feynman was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work in quantum electrodynamics in 1965, together with fellow American Julian Schwinger and Shinichiro Tomonaga of Japan, both of whom had separately developed similar theories, but using different mathematical methods. Feynman's theory was especially distinct from the other two in its use of graphic models to describe the intermediate states that a changing electrodynamic system passes through. These models are known as "Feynman diagrams" and are widely used in the analysis of problems involving pair production, Compton scattering, and many other quantum-electrodynamic problems.
Feynman was fond of using visual techniques to solve problems. In addition to his Feynman diagrams, he developed a method of analyzing MASER (microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation) devices that relies heavily on creating accurate pictorial representations of the interactions involved. A MASER device is one that uses the natural oscillations of molecules to generate or amplify signals in the microwave region of the electromagnetic spectrum; they are used in radios and amplifiers, among other things. Feynman's method for analyzing these devices greatly simplified and shortened the solutions, as well as brought out the important features of the device much more rapidly.
In the early 1950s, Feynman provided a quantum-mechanical explanation for the Soviet physicist Lev D. Landau’s theory of superfluidity - i.e., the strange, frictionless behavior of liquid helium at temperatures near absolute zero. In 1958 he and the American physicist Murray Gell-Mann devised a theory that accounted for most of the phenomena associated with the weak force, which is the force at work in radioactive decay. Their theory, which turns on the asymmetrical "handedness" of particle spin, proved particularly fruitful in modern particle physics.
Richard Feynman did work in many other areas of physics, including important work on the theory of Beta-decay, a process whereby the nucleus of a radioactive atom emits an electron, thereby transforming into a different atom with a different atomic number. His interest in the weak nuclear force - which is the force that makes the process of radioactive decay possible - led Feynman and American physicist Murray Gell-Mann to the supposition that the emission of beta-particles from radioactive nuclei acts as the chief agitator in the decay process. As James Gleick explained in Genius, Feynman also contributed to a "theory of partons, hypothetical hard particles inside the atom's nucleus, that helped produce the modern understanding of quarks."
Feynman had an absolute, unvarying pursuit of rationality and truth. The Feynman method of thought was developed by a man who refused conventional wisdom at all turns and who sought to build his mental computer from the ground up, starting with an understanding of mathematics at a very young age. (Feynman’s early notebooks are records of him deriving algebra, calculus, trigonometry, and various higher maths on his own, with original results and notation.)
This was how Feynman approached all knowledge: What can I know for sure, and how can I come to know it? It resulted in his famous quote, "You must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool." Feynman believed it and practiced it in all of his intellectual work.
Feynman was no mystic, and he despised all kinds of fake learning, particularly pseudo-science. In that category he placed a good part of modern psychology, calling it ''cargo cult science.'' Certain Pacific islanders, he explained, wanted the cargo planes to keep returning after World War II was over. So they made runways, stationed a man with wooden headphones and bamboo for antennas, lighted some fires, and waited for the planes to land. It is the same, he said, with cargo cult scientists. ''They follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential because the planes don't land.''
Quotations:
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool."
"I think for lesson number one, to learn a mystic formula for answering questions is very bad."
"In this age of specialization men who thoroughly know one field are often incompetent to discuss another. The great problems of the relations between one and another aspect of human activity have for this reason been discussed less and less in public."
"It doesn’t seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil - which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama."
"I don’t like honors…I’ve already got the prize: the prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out, the kick in the discovery, the observation that other people use it. Those are the real things."
"The only way to have real success in science, the field I’m familiar with, is to describe the evidence very carefully without regard to the way you feel it should be. If you have a theory, you must try to explain what’s good and what’s bad about it equally. In science, you learn a kind of standard integrity and honesty."
Membership
American Physical Society
,
United States
American Association for the Advancement of Science
,
United States
National Academy of Science
,
United States
Royal Society
,
United Kingdom
Pi Lambda Phi
Personality
Feynman was never one to settle for knowing the description of things or the accepted truths of things. Instead, he really wanted to know, and it was that burning curiosity that led him to his greatest work. He disliked pomposity and frequently made fun of pretentious and self-important people. He was always direct, forthright, and skeptical.
Working at Los Alamos, Feynman often chafed at the laboratory’s military supervision. He delighted in sending coded messages back and forth with his wife, who was staying in a sanatorium for tuberculosis patients near Los Alamos, to taunt the laboratory’s censors. (Arline died in July 1945, a few days before the first test detonation of a fission bomb in the so-called Trinity test.) He also learned how to crack safes, surreptitiously testing codes to a given safe’s combination lock while its owner was distracted. Both activities provided Feynman a way to rebuff what he regarded as stifling military discipline at the laboratory.
Feynman’s love of jokes and pranks was often infectious. Gell-Mann fondly recalled helping Feynman sneak a peacock into a friend’s bedroom as a birthday gift.
At Cornell University in the 1940s and then in a long career at the California Institute of Technology, Dr. Feynman developed a lecture style that kept him at the center of attention, the impossible combination of theoretical physicist and circus barker, all body motion and sound effects.
Feynman’s stature among physicists transcended the sum of even his sizable contributions to the field. His bold and colorful personality, unencumbered by false dignity or notions of excessive self-importance, seemed to announce: "Here is an unconventional mind." He was a master calculator who could create a dramatic impression in a group of scientists by slashing through a difficult numerical problem. His purely intellectual reputation became a part of the scenery of modern science.
Feynman was a multifaceted man with a wide range of hobbies. He taught himself how to fix radios, pick locks, draw nudes, speak Portuguese, play the bongos, and decipher Mayan hieroglyphics. He pursued knowledge without prejudice, studying the tracking ability of ants in his bathtub, and learning enough biology to study the mutation of bacteriophages.
In the 1960s, Feynman participated in the experiments of his friend John Lilly on sensory deprivation. In the book "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" he describes many vivid experiences of hallucinations in a special chamber with salt water isolated from external influences. During the experiments, Feynman even smoked marijuana and took ketamine, but he refused to experiment with LSD for fear of damaging his brain.
Quotes from others about the person
''Richard Feynman was the most original mind of his generation.'' - Freeman Dyson
"When Feynman faces a problem, he’s unusually good at going back to being like a child, ignoring what everyone else thinks… He was so unstuck - if something didn’t work, he’d look at it another way." - Marvin Minsky
In science, as well as in other fields of human endeavor, there are two kinds of geniuses: the "ordinary" and the "magicians." Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest caliber." - Mark Kac
Interests
art, painting, playing the bongos, Mayan hieroglyphics
Sport & Clubs
yachting
Music & Bands
samba
Connections
While researching his Ph.D., Feynman married his first wife and longtime sweetheart, Arline Greenbaum, who was already quite ill with tuberculosis. Their wedding ceremony was attended by neither family nor friends. Arlene died on June 16, 1945.
His second wife was Mary Louise Bell. The two married in Boise, Idaho, on June 28, 1952. The marriage ended in divorce on May 20, 1956.
On September 24, 1960, Richard married Gweneth Howarth, a freelance landscape artist. They had a son, Carl, in 1962, and adopted a daughter, Michelle, in 1968.
Father:
Melville Feynman
Mother:
Lucille (née Phillips) Feynman
late wife:
Arline Greenbaum
Against his family's wishes, Feynman had married Arline Greenbaum who had been diagnosed with tuberculosis, a contagious and, at that time, fatal disease. The couple took extraordinary precautions, and Feynman never contracted the disease. Richard and Arline were soul mates. While he was at Los Alamos, she stayed at a hospital in Albuquerque, where Richard visited her nearly every weekend. Arline succumbed to the disease in 1945.
ex-wife:
Mary Louise Bell
In a divorce complaint, Feynman’s second wife Mary Louise Bell complained, "He begins working calculus problems in his head as soon as he awakens. He did calculus while driving in his car, while sitting in the living room, and while lying in bed at night."
Jenijoy La Belle was the first female professor at California Institute of Technology. Feynman was on her side when she and filed suit with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission after she was refused tenure in 1974.
1965, shared with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, for their fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics, with deep-ploughing consequences for the physics of elementary particles.
1965, shared with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, for their fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics, with deep-ploughing consequences for the physics of elementary particles.
