Richard Feynman

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Richard Feynman
Feynman in a jacket and tie, smiling
Feynman c. 1965
Born
Richard Phillips Feynman

(1918-05-11)May 11, 1918
New York City, U.S.
DiedFebruary 15, 1988(1988-02-15) (aged 69)
Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Resting placeMountain View Cemetery and Mausoleum
Education
Known for
Spouses
Arline Greenbaum
(m. 1942; died 1945)
Mary Louise Bell
(m. 1952; div. 1958)
Gweneth Howarth
(m. 1960)
Children2
Awards
Scientific career
FieldsTheoretical physics
Institutions
ThesisThe Principle of Least Action in Quantum Mechanics (1942)
Doctoral advisorJohn Archibald Wheeler
Doctoral students
Other notable students
Signature

Richard Phillips Feynman (

parton model. For his contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 jointly with Julian Schwinger and Shin'ichirō Tomonaga
.

Feynman developed a widely used pictorial representation scheme for the mathematical expressions describing the behavior of subatomic particles, which later became known as Feynman diagrams. During his lifetime, Feynman became one of the best-known scientists in the world. In a 1999 poll of 130 leading physicists worldwide by the British journal Physics World, he was ranked the seventh-greatest physicist of all time.[1]

He assisted in the development of the atomic bomb during World War II and became known to the wider public in the 1980s as a member of the Rogers Commission, the panel that investigated the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. Along with his work in theoretical physics, Feynman has been credited with pioneering the field of quantum computing and introducing the concept of nanotechnology. He held the Richard C. Tolman professorship in theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology.

Feynman was a keen popularizer of physics through both books and lectures, including a 1959 talk on top-down nanotechnology called There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom and the three-volume publication of his undergraduate lectures, The Feynman Lectures on Physics. Feynman also became known through his autobiographical books Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think?, and books written about him such as Tuva or Bust! by Ralph Leighton and the biography Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick.

Early life

Feynman was born on May 11, 1918, in New York City,

Jewish family in Minsk, Russian Empire,[4] and emigrated with his parents to the United States at the age of five. Feynman's mother was born in the United States into a Jewish family. Lucille's father had emigrated from Poland, and her mother also came from a family of Polish immigrants. She trained as a primary school teacher but married Melville in 1917, before taking up a profession.[2][3] Feynman was a late talker and did not speak until after his third birthday. As an adult, he spoke with a New York accent[5][6] strong enough to be perceived as an affectation or exaggeration,[7][8] so much so that his friends Wolfgang Pauli and Hans Bethe once commented that Feynman spoke like a "bum".[7]

The young Feynman was heavily influenced by his father, who encouraged him to ask questions to challenge orthodox thinking, and who was always ready to teach Feynman something new. From his mother, he gained the sense of humor that he had throughout his life. As a child, he had a talent for engineering,[9] maintained an experimental laboratory in his home, and delighted in repairing radios. This radio repairing was probably the first job Feynman had, and during this time he showed early signs of an aptitude for his later career in theoretical physics, when he would analyze the issues theoretically and arrive at the solutions.[10] When he was in grade school, he created a home burglar alarm system while his parents were out for the day running errands.[11]

When Richard was five, his mother gave birth to a younger brother, Henry Phillips, who died at age four weeks.[12] Four years later, Richard's sister Joan was born and the family moved to Far Rockaway, Queens.[3] Though separated by nine years, Joan and Richard were close, and they both shared a curiosity about the world.[13] Though their mother thought women lacked the capacity to understand such things, Richard encouraged Joan's interest in astronomy, and Joan eventually became an astrophysicist.[14]

Religion

Feynman's parents were both from Jewish families,

atheist".[16][17] Many years later, in a letter to Tina Levitan, declining a request for information for her book on Jewish Nobel Prize winners, he stated, "To select, for approbation the peculiar elements that come from some supposedly Jewish heredity is to open the door to all kinds of nonsense on racial theory", adding, "at thirteen I was not only converted to other religious views, but I also stopped believing that the Jewish people are in any way 'the chosen people'".[18]

Later in life, during a visit to the Jewish Theological Seminary, Feynman encountered the Talmud for the first time. He saw that it contained the original text in a little square on the page, and surrounding it were commentaries written over time by different people. In this way the Talmud had evolved, and everything that was discussed was carefully recorded. Despite being impressed, Feynman was disappointed with the lack of interest for nature and the outside world expressed by the rabbis, who cared about only those questions which arise from the Talmud.[19]

Education

Feynman attended Far Rockaway High School, which was also attended by fellow Nobel laureates Burton Richter and Baruch Samuel Blumberg.[20] Upon starting high school, Feynman was quickly promoted to a higher math class. An IQ test administered in high school estimated his IQ at 125—high but "merely respectable", according to biographer James Gleick.[21][22] His sister Joan, who scored one point higher, later jokingly claimed to an interviewer that she was smarter. Years later he declined to join Mensa International, saying that his IQ was too low.[23]

When Feynman was 15, he taught himself

tangent functions so they did not look like three variables multiplied together, and for the derivative
, to remove the temptation of canceling out the 's in .
feline anatomy, was "Do you have a map of the cat?" (referring to an anatomical chart).[29]

Feynman applied to

Manuel Vallarta, was entitled "The Scattering of Cosmic Rays by the Stars of a Galaxy".[32]

Vallarta let his student in on a secret of mentor-protégé publishing: the senior scientist's name comes first. Feynman had his revenge a few years later, when Heisenberg concluded an entire book on cosmic rays with the phrase: "such an effect is not to be expected according to Vallarta and Feynman". When they next met, Feynman asked gleefully whether Vallarta had seen Heisenberg's book. Vallarta knew why Feynman was grinning. "Yes," he replied. "You're the last word in cosmic rays."[33]

The other was his senior thesis, on "Forces in Molecules",[34] based on a topic assigned by John C. Slater, who was sufficiently impressed by the paper to have it published. Its main result is known as the Hellmann–Feynman theorem.[35]

In 1939, Feynman received a

Henry D. Smyth, had another concern, writing to Philip M. Morse to ask: "Is Feynman Jewish? We have no definite rule against Jews but have to keep their proportion in our department reasonably small because of the difficulty of placing them."[38] Morse conceded that Feynman was indeed Jewish, but reassured Smyth that Feynman's "physiognomy and manner, however, show no trace of this characteristic".[38]

Attendees at Feynman's first seminar, which was on the classical version of the

principle of stationary action to problems of quantum mechanics, inspired by a desire to quantize the Wheeler–Feynman absorber theory of electrodynamics, and laid the groundwork for the path integral formulation and Feynman diagrams.[44] A key insight was that positrons behaved like electrons moving backwards in time.[44]
James Gleick wrote:

This was Richard Feynman nearing the crest of his powers. At twenty-three ... there may now have been no physicist on earth who could match his exuberant command over the native materials of theoretical science. It was not just a facility at mathematics (though it had become clear ... that the mathematical machinery emerging in the Wheeler–Feynman collaboration was beyond Wheeler's own ability). Feynman seemed to possess a frightening ease with the substance behind the equations, like Einstein at the same age, like the Soviet physicist Lev Landau—but few others.[42]

One of the conditions of Feynman's scholarship to Princeton was that he could not be married; nevertheless, he continued to see his high school sweetheart, Arline Greenbaum, and was determined to marry her once he had been awarded his PhD despite the knowledge that she was seriously ill with tuberculosis. This was an incurable disease at the time, and she was not expected to live more than two years. On June 29, 1942, they took the ferry to Staten Island, where they were married in the city office. The ceremony was attended by neither family nor friends and was witnessed by a pair of strangers. Feynman could kiss Arline only on the cheek. After the ceremony he took her to Deborah Hospital, where he visited her on weekends.[45][46]

Manhattan Project

Feynman smiling
Feynman's Los Alamos ID badge

In 1941, with

Radiation Laboratory of the University of California. On paper, the isotron was many times more efficient than the calutron, but Feynman and Paul Olum struggled to determine whether it was practical. Ultimately, on Lawrence's recommendation, the isotron project was abandoned.[52]

At this juncture, in early 1943,

Los Alamos Laboratory, a secret laboratory on a mesa in New Mexico where atomic bombs would be designed and built. An offer was made to the Princeton team to be redeployed there. "Like a bunch of professional soldiers," Wilson later recalled, "we signed up, en masse, to go to Los Alamos."[53] Like many other young physicists, Feynman soon fell under the spell of the charismatic Oppenheimer, who telephoned Feynman long distance from Chicago to inform him that he had found a Presbyterian sanatorium in Albuquerque, New Mexico for Arline. They were among the first to depart for New Mexico, leaving on a train on March 28, 1943. The railroad supplied Arline with a wheelchair, and Feynman paid extra for a private room for her. There they spent their wedding anniversary.[54]

At Los Alamos, Feynman was assigned to Hans Bethe's Theoretical (T) Division,

Stanley Frankel and Nicholas Metropolis, he assisted in establishing a system for using IBM punched cards for computation.[58] He invented a new method of computing logarithms that he later used on the Connection Machine.[59][60] An avid drummer, Feynman figured out how to get the machine to click in musical rhythms.[61]

Other work at Los Alamos included calculating neutron equations for the Los Alamos "Water Boiler", a small nuclear reactor, to measure how close an assembly of fissile material was to criticality.[62]

On completing this work, Feynman was sent to the

uranium enrichment facilities. He aided the engineers there in devising safety procedures for material storage so that criticality accidents could be avoided, especially when enriched uranium came into contact with water, which acted as a neutron moderator. He insisted on giving the rank and file a lecture on nuclear physics so that they would realize the dangers.[63] He explained that while any amount of unenriched uranium could be safely stored, the enriched uranium had to be carefully handled. He developed a series of safety recommendations for the various grades of enrichments.[64] He was told that if the people at Oak Ridge gave him any difficulty with his proposals, he was to inform them that Los Alamos "could not be responsible for their safety otherwise".[65]

Los Alamos Laboratory
. Feynman is in the second row, fourth from left, next to Oppenheimer.

Returning to Los Alamos, Feynman was put in charge of the group responsible for the theoretical work and calculations on the proposed uranium hydride bomb, which ultimately proved to be infeasible.[56][66] He was sought out by physicist Niels Bohr for one-on-one discussions. He later discovered the reason: most of the other physicists were too much in awe of Bohr to argue with him. Feynman had no such inhibitions, vigorously pointing out anything he considered to be flawed in Bohr's thinking. He said he felt as much respect for Bohr as anyone else, but once anyone got him talking about physics, he would become so focused he forgot about social niceties. Perhaps because of this, Bohr never warmed to Feynman.[67][68]

At Los Alamos, which was isolated for security, Feynman amused himself by investigating the combination locks on the cabinets and desks of physicists. He often found that they left the lock combinations on the factory settings, wrote the combinations down, or used easily guessable combinations like dates.

e = 2.71828 ...), and found that the three filing cabinets where a colleague kept research notes all had the same combination. He left notes in the cabinets as a prank, spooking his colleague, Frederic de Hoffmann, into thinking a spy had gained access to them.[70]

Feynman's $380 (equivalent to $6,000 in 2022) monthly salary was about half the amount needed for his modest living expenses and Arline's medical bills, and they were forced to dip into her $3,300 (equivalent to $56,000 in 2022) in savings.

FBI would compile a bulky file on Feynman,[75] particularly in view of Feynman's Q clearance.[76]

Robert Oppenheimer
(immediately right of Feynman) at a Los Alamos Laboratory social function during the Manhattan Project.

Informed that Arline was dying, Feynman drove to Albuquerque and sat with her for hours until she died on June 16, 1945.

Trinity nuclear test. Feynman claimed to be the only person to see the explosion without the very dark glasses or welder's lenses provided, reasoning that it was safe to look through a truck windshield, as it would screen out the harmful ultraviolet radiation. The immense brightness of the explosion made him duck to the truck's floor, where he saw a temporary "purple splotch" afterimage.[78]

Cornell

Feynman nominally held an appointment at the University of Wisconsin–Madison as an assistant professor of physics, but was on unpaid leave during his involvement in the Manhattan Project.[79] In 1945, he received a letter from Dean Mark Ingraham of the College of Letters and Science requesting his return to the university to teach in the coming academic year. His appointment was not extended when he did not commit to returning. In a talk given there several years later, Feynman quipped, "It's great to be back at the only university that ever had the good sense to fire me."[80]

As early as October 30, 1943, Bethe had written to the chairman of the physics department of his university,

Raymond T. Birge, was reluctant. He made Feynman an offer in May 1945, but Feynman turned it down. Cornell matched its salary offer of $3,900 (equivalent to $63,000 in 2022) per annum.[81] Feynman became one of the first of the Los Alamos Laboratory's group leaders to depart, leaving for Ithaca, New York, in October 1945.[84]

Because Feynman was no longer working at the Los Alamos Laboratory, he was no longer exempt from

quaternions, and tried unsuccessfully to use them to formulate a relativistic theory of electrons. His work during this period, which used equations of rotation to express various spinning speeds, ultimately proved important to his Nobel Prize–winning work, yet because he felt burned out and had turned his attention to less immediately practical problems, he was surprised by the offers of professorships from other renowned universities, including the Institute for Advanced Study, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of California, Berkeley.[87]

A diagram displaying two particles colliding and releasing gamma radiation
Feynman diagram of electron/positron annihilation

Feynman was not the only frustrated theoretical physicist in the early post-war years.

two-meson hypothesis.[93]

Bethe took the lead from the work of

Feynman diagrams, used for the first time, puzzled the audience. Feynman failed to get his point across, and Paul Dirac, Edward Teller and Niels Bohr all raised objections.[97][98]

To

Feynman propagator.[103] Finally, in papers on the "Mathematical Formulation of the Quantum Theory of Electromagnetic Interaction" in 1950 and "An Operator Calculus Having Applications in Quantum Electrodynamics" in 1951, he developed the mathematical basis of his ideas, derived familiar formulae and advanced new ones.[104]

While papers by others initially cited Schwinger, papers citing Feynman and employing Feynman diagrams appeared in 1950, and soon became prevalent.

stochastic processes.[107] To Schwinger, however, the Feynman diagram was "pedagogy, not physics".[108]

By 1949, Feynman was becoming restless at Cornell. He never settled into a particular house or apartment, living in guest houses or student residences, or with married friends "until these arrangements became sexually volatile".[109] He liked to date undergraduates, hire prostitutes, and sleep with the wives of friends.[110] He was not fond of Ithaca's cold winter weather, and pined for a warmer climate.[111] Above all, he was always in the shadow of Hans Bethe at Cornell.[109] Despite all of this, Feynman looked back favorably on the Telluride House, where he resided for a large period of his Cornell career. In an interview, he described the House as "a group of boys that have been specially selected because of their scholarship, because of their cleverness or whatever it is, to be given free board and lodging and so on, because of their brains". He enjoyed the house's convenience and said that "it's there that I did the fundamental work" for which he won the Nobel Prize.[112][113]

1949, Brazil

Feynman spent several weeks in Rio de Janeiro in July 1949.[114] That year, the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb, generating concerns about espionage.[115] Fuchs was arrested as a Soviet spy in 1950 and the FBI questioned Bethe about Feynman's loyalty.[116] Physicist David Bohm was arrested on December 4, 1950[117] and emigrated to Brazil in October 1951.[118] Because of the fears of a nuclear war, a girlfriend told Feynman that he should also consider moving to South America.[115] He had a sabbatical coming for 1951–1952,[119] and elected to spend it in Brazil, where he gave courses at the Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Físicas.

Feynman seated on the floor with drums around him
Feynman with drums

In Brazil, Feynman was impressed with samba music, and learned to play the frigideira,[120] a metal percussion instrument based on a frying pan.[121] He was an enthusiastic amateur player of bongo and conga drums and often played them in the pit orchestra in musicals.[122][123] He spent time in Rio with his friend Bohm, but Bohm could not convince Feynman to investigate Bohm's ideas on physics.[124]

Caltech years

Personal and political life

Feynman did not return to Cornell. Bacher, who had been instrumental in bringing Feynman to Cornell, had lured him to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Part of the deal was that he could spend his first year on sabbatical in Brazil.

Oppenheimer security hearing ("Where there's smoke there's fire") offended him. They separated on May 20, 1956. An interlocutory decree of divorce was entered on June 19, 1956, on the grounds of "extreme cruelty". The divorce became final on May 5, 1958.[126][127]

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.

In the wake of the 1957 Sputnik crisis, the U.S. government's interest in science rose for a time. Feynman was considered for a seat on the President's Science Advisory Committee, but was not appointed. At this time, the FBI interviewed a woman close to Feynman, possibly his ex-wife Bell, who sent a written statement to J. Edgar Hoover on August 8, 1958:

I do not know—but I believe that Richard Feynman is either a Communist or very strongly pro-Communist—and as such is a very definite security risk. This man is, in my opinion, an extremely complex and dangerous person, a very dangerous person to have in a position of public trust ... In matters of intrigue Richard Feynman is, I believe immensely clever—indeed a genius—and he is, I further believe, completely ruthless, unhampered by morals, ethics, or religion—and will stop at absolutely nothing to achieve his ends.[127]

The U.S. government nevertheless sent Feynman to Geneva for the September 1958 Atoms for Peace Conference. On the beach at Lake Geneva, he met Gweneth Howarth, who was from Ripponden, West Yorkshire, and working in Switzerland as an au pair. Feynman's love life had been turbulent since his divorce; his previous girlfriend had walked off with his Albert Einstein Award medal and, on the advice of an earlier girlfriend, had feigned pregnancy and extorted him into paying for an abortion, then used the money to buy furniture. When Feynman found that Howarth was being paid only $25 a month, he offered her $20 (equivalent to $202 in 2022) a week to be his live-in maid. Feynman knew that this sort of behavior was illegal under the Mann Act, so he had a friend, Matthew Sands, act as her sponsor. Howarth pointed out that she already had two boyfriends, but decided to take Feynman up on his offer, and arrived in Altadena, California, in June 1959. She made a point of dating other men, but Feynman proposed in early 1960. They were married on September 24, 1960, at the Huntington Hotel in Pasadena. They had a son, Carl, in 1962, and adopted a daughter, Michelle, in 1968.[129][130] Besides their home in Altadena, they had a beach house in Baja California, purchased with the money from Feynman's Nobel Prize.[131]

Feynman tried marijuana and ketamine at John Lilly's sensory deprivation tanks, as a way of studying consciousness.[132][133] He gave up alcohol when he began to show vague, early signs of alcoholism, as he did not want to do anything that could damage his brain. Despite his curiosity about hallucinations, he was reluctant to experiment with LSD.[134]

Feynman had synesthesia, and said that mathematical symbols had different colors for him: "When I see equations, I see the letters in colors. I don't know why. I see vague pictures of Bessel functions with light-tan j's, slightly violet-bluish n's, and dark brown x's flying around."[135]

There had been protests over his alleged sexism in 1968, and again in 1972. Although there is no evidence he supported discrimination against women in science, protestors "objected to his use of sexist stories about 'lady drivers' and clueless women in his lectures."[136][137] Feynman recalled protesters entering a hall and picketing a lecture he was about to make in San Francisco, calling him a "sexist pig". Seeing the protesters, as Feynman later recalled the incident, he addressed institutional sexism by saying that "women do indeed suffer prejudice and discrimination in physics, and your presence here today serves to remind us of these difficulties and the need to remedy them".[138]

Feynman diagram van

In 1975, in

Dodge Tradesman Maxivan with a bronze-khaki exterior and yellow-green interior, with custom Feynman diagram exterior murals.[139] After Feynman'’s death, Gweneth sold the van for $1 to one of Feynman's friends, film producer Ralph Leighton, who later put it into storage, where it began to rust. In 2012, video game designer Seamus Blackley, a father of the Xbox, bought the van.[140][141] Qantum was the license plate ID.[142]

Physics

At Caltech, Feynman investigated the physics of the

Feynman standing among trees
Feynman at the Robert Treat Paine Estate in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1984

Feynman, inspired by a desire to quantize the Wheeler–Feynman absorber theory of electrodynamics, laid the groundwork for the path integral formulation and Feynman diagrams.[44]

With

parity violation.[145]

Feynman attempted an explanation, called the

omega-minus particle, if it were interpreted as three identical strange quarks bound together, seemed impossible if quarks were real.[146][147]

The SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory deep inelastic scattering experiments of the late 1960s showed that nucleons (protons and neutrons) contained point-like particles that scattered electrons. It was natural to identify these with quarks, but Feynman's parton model attempted to interpret the experimental data in a way that did not introduce additional hypotheses. For example, the data showed that some 45% of the energy momentum was carried by electrically neutral particles in the nucleon. These electrically neutral particles are now seen to be the gluons that carry the forces between the quarks, and their three-valued color quantum number solves the omega-minus problem. Feynman did not dispute the quark model; for example, when the fifth quark was discovered in 1977, Feynman immediately pointed out to his students that the discovery implied the existence of a sixth quark, which was discovered in the decade after his death.[146][148]

After the success of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman turned to

strong force and gravity. John and Mary Gribbin state in their book on Feynman that "Nobody else has made such influential contributions to the investigation of all four of the interactions".[150]

Partly as a way to bring publicity to progress in physics, Feynman offered $1,000 prizes for

Feynman was also interested in the relationship between physics and computation. He was also one of the first scientists to conceive the possibility of

quantum computers.[152][153][154] In the 1980s he began to spend his summers working at Thinking Machines Corporation, helping to build some of the first parallel supercomputers and considering the construction of quantum computers.[155][156]

In 1984–1986, he developed a variational method for the approximate calculation of path integrals, which has led to a powerful method of converting divergent perturbation expansions into convergent strong-coupling expansions (variational perturbation theory) and, as a consequence, to the most accurate determination[157] of critical exponents measured in satellite experiments.[158] At Caltech, he once chalked "What I cannot create I do not understand" on his blackboard.[159]

Machine technology

Feynman had studied the ideas of John von Neumann while researching quantum field theory. His most famous lecture on the subject was delivered in 1959 at the California Institute of Technology, published under the title There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom a year later. In this lecture he theorized on future opportunities for designing miniaturized machines, which could build smaller reproductions of themselves. This lecture is frequently cited in technical literature on microtechnology, and nanotechnology.[160]

Pedagogy

Feynman standing before a large blackboard with chalk writing all over it
Feynman during a lecture

In the early 1960s, Feynman acceded to a request to "spruce up" the teaching of undergraduates at the California Institute of Technology, also called Caltech. After three years devoted to the task, he produced a series of lectures that later became The Feynman Lectures on Physics. Accounts vary about how successful the original lectures were. Feynman's own preface, written just after an exam on which the students did poorly, was somewhat pessimistic. His colleagues

David L. Goodstein and Gerry Neugebauer said later that the intended audience of first-year students found the material intimidating while older students and faculty found it inspirational, so the lecture hall remained full even as the first-year students dropped away. In contrast, physicist Matthew Sands recalled the student attendance as being typical for a large lecture course.[161]

Converting the lectures into books occupied Matthew Sands and Robert B. Leighton as part-time co-authors for several years. Feynman suggested that the book cover should have a picture of a drum with mathematical diagrams about vibrations drawn upon it, in order to illustrate the application of mathematics to understanding the world. Instead, the publishers gave the books plain red covers, though they included a picture of Feynman playing drums in the foreword.[162] Even though the books were not adopted by universities as textbooks, they continue to sell well because they provide a deep understanding of physics.[163]

Many of Feynman's lectures and miscellaneous talks were turned into other books, including The Character of Physical Law, QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, Statistical Mechanics, Lectures on Gravitation, and the Feynman Lectures on Computation.[164]

Feynman wrote about his experiences teaching physics undergraduates in Brazil. The students' studying habits and the Portuguese language textbooks were so devoid of any context or applications for their information that, in Feynman's opinion, the students were not learning physics at all. At the end of the year, Feynman was invited to give a lecture on his teaching experiences, and he agreed to do so, provided he could speak frankly, which he did.[165][166]

Feynman opposed rote learning, or unthinking memorization, as well as other teaching methods that emphasized form over function. In his mind, clear thinking and clear presentation were fundamental prerequisites for his attention. It could be perilous even to approach him unprepared, and he did not forget fools and pretenders.[167]

In 1964, he served on the California State Curriculum Commission, which was responsible for approving textbooks to be used by schools in California. He was not impressed with what he found.[168] Many of the mathematics texts covered subjects of use only to pure mathematicians as part of the "New Math". Elementary students were taught about sets, but:

It will perhaps surprise most people who have studied these textbooks to discover that the symbol ∪ or ∩ representing union and intersection of sets and the special use of the brackets { } and so forth, all the elaborate notation for sets that is given in these books, almost never appear in any writings in theoretical physics, in engineering, in business arithmetic, computer design, or other places where mathematics is being used. I see no need or reason for this all to be explained or to be taught in school. It is not a useful way to express one's self. It is not a cogent and simple way. It is claimed to be precise, but precise for what purpose?[169]

In April 1966, Feynman delivered an address to the

Galileo and others started doubting the truth of what was passed down and to investigate ab initio, from experience, what the true situation was—this was science.[170]

In 1974, Feynman delivered the Caltech commencement address on the topic of

cargo cult science, which has the semblance of science, but is only pseudoscience due to a lack of "a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty" on the part of the scientist. He instructed the graduating class that "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that."[171]

Feynman served as doctoral advisor to 30 students.[172]

Case before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission

In 1977, Feynman supported his colleague Jenijoy La Belle, who had been hired as Caltech's first female professor in 1969, and filed suit with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission after she was refused tenure in 1974. The EEOC ruled against Caltech in 1977, adding that La Belle had been paid less than male colleagues. La Belle finally received tenure in 1979. Many of Feynman's colleagues were surprised that he took her side, but he had gotten to know La Belle and liked and admired her.[136][173]

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

In the 1960s, Feynman began thinking of writing an autobiography, and he began granting interviews to historians. In the 1980s, working with Ralph Leighton (Robert Leighton's son), he recorded chapters on audio tape that Ralph transcribed. The book was published in 1985 as Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! and became a best-seller.[174]

Gell-Mann was upset by Feynman's account in the book of the weak interaction work, and threatened to sue, resulting in a correction being inserted in later editions.[175] This incident was just the latest provocation in decades of bad feeling between the two scientists. Gell-Mann often expressed frustration at the attention Feynman received;[176] he remarked: "[Feynman] was a great scientist, but he spent a great deal of his effort generating anecdotes about himself."[177]

Feynman has been criticized for a chapter in the book entitled "You Just Ask Them?", where he describes how he learned to seduce women at a bar he went to in the summer of 1946. A mentor taught him to ask a woman if she would sleep with him before buying her anything. He describes seeing women at the bar as "bitches" in his thoughts, and tells a story of how he told a woman named Ann that she was "worse than a whore" after Ann persuaded him to buy her sandwiches by telling him he could eat them at her place, but then, after he bought them, saying they actually could not eat together because another man was coming over. Later on that same evening, Ann returned to the bar to take Feynman to her place.[178][179][180] Feynman states at the end of the chapter that this behaviour was not typical of him: "So it worked even with an ordinary girl! But no matter how effective the lesson was, I never really used it after that. I didn't enjoy doing it that way. But it was interesting to know that things worked much differently from how I was brought up."[113]

Challenger disaster

A cloud of smoke
The 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster

Feynman played an

Rogers Commission, which investigated the 1986 Challenger disaster. He had been reluctant to participate, but was persuaded by advice from his wife.[181] Feynman clashed several times with commission chairman William P. Rogers. During a break in one hearing, Rogers told commission member Neil Armstrong, "Feynman is becoming a pain in the ass."[182]

During a televised hearing, Feynman demonstrated 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.[183] The commission ultimately determined that the disaster was caused by the primary O-ring not properly sealing in unusually cold weather at Cape Canaveral.[184]

Feynman devoted the latter half of his 1988 book What Do You Care What Other People Think? to his experience on the Rogers Commission, straying from his usual convention of brief, light-hearted anecdotes to deliver an extended and sober narrative. Feynman's account reveals a disconnect between NASA's engineers and executives that was far more striking than he expected. His interviews of NASA's high-ranking managers revealed startling misunderstandings of elementary concepts. For instance, NASA managers claimed that there was a 1 in 100,000 probability of a catastrophic failure aboard the Shuttle, but Feynman discovered that NASA's own engineers estimated the probability of a catastrophe at closer to 1 in 200. He concluded that NASA management's estimate of the reliability of the Space Shuttle was unrealistic, and he was particularly angered that NASA used it to recruit Christa McAuliffe into the Teacher-in-Space program. He warned in his appendix to the commission's report (which was included only after he threatened not to sign the report), "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."[185]

Recognition and awards

The first public recognition of Feynman's work came in 1954, when

Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1965,[2][189] received the Oersted Medal in 1972,[190] and the National Medal of Science in 1979.[191] He was elected a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, but ultimately resigned[192][193] and is no longer listed by them.[194]

Death

In 1978, Feynman sought medical treatment for abdominal pains and was diagnosed with

duodenal ulcer caused kidney failure, and he declined to undergo the dialysis that might have prolonged his life for a few months. Feynman's wife Gweneth, sister Joan, and cousin Frances Lewine watched over him during the final days of his life until he died on February 15, 1988.[197]

When Feynman was nearing death, he asked his friend and colleague Danny Hillis why Hillis appeared so sad. Hillis replied that he thought Feynman was going to die soon. Hillis quotes Feynman as replying:

"Yeah," he sighed, "that bugs me sometimes too. But not so much as you think . . . when you get as old as I am, you start to realize that you've told most of the good stuff you know to other people anyway."[198]

Near the end of his life, Feynman attempted to visit the Tuvan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR) in the Soviet Union, a dream thwarted by Cold War bureaucratic issues. The letter from the Soviet government authorizing the trip was not received until the day after he died. His daughter Michelle later made the journey.[199] Ralph Leighton chronicled the attempt in Tuva or Bust!, published in 1991.

His burial was at Mountain View Cemetery and Mausoleum in Altadena, California.[200] His last words were: "I'd hate to die twice. It's so boring."[199]

Popular legacy

A bronze bust with flowers next to it, resting on a stone base
Bust of Feynman on NTHU campus, Taiwan

Aspects of Feynman's life have been portrayed in various media. Feynman was portrayed by Matthew Broderick in the 1996 biopic Infinity.[201] Actor Alan Alda commissioned playwright Peter Parnell to write a two-character play about a fictional day in the life of Feynman set two years before Feynman's death. The play, QED, premiered at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in 2001 and was later presented at the Vivian Beaumont Theater on Broadway, with both presentations starring Alda as Richard Feynman.[202] Real Time Opera premiered its opera Feynman at the Norfolk (Connecticut) Chamber Music Festival in June 2005.[203] In 2011, Feynman was the subject of a biographical graphic novel entitled simply Feynman, written by Jim Ottaviani and illustrated by Leland Myrick.[204] In 2013, Feynman's role on the Rogers Commission was dramatised by the BBC in The Challenger (US title: The Challenger Disaster), with William Hurt playing Feynman.[205][206][207] In 2016, Oscar Isaac performed a public reading of Feynman's 1946 love letter to the late Arline.[208] In the 2023 American film Oppenheimer, directed by Christopher Nolan and based on American Prometheus, Feynman is portrayed by actor Jack Quaid.[209]

Feynman is commemorated in various ways. On May 4, 2005, the

Think Different" advertising campaign, which launched in 1997.[217][218] Sheldon Cooper, a fictional theoretical physicist from the television series The Big Bang Theory, is a Feynman fan who has emulated him on various occasions, once by playing the bongo drums.[219] On January 27, 2016, co-founder of Microsoft Bill Gates wrote an article describing Feynman's talents as a teacher ("The Best Teacher I Never Had"), which inspired Gates to create Project Tuva to place the videos of Feynman's Messenger Lectures, The Character of Physical Law, on a website for public viewing. In 2015 Gates made a video in response to Caltech's request for thoughts on Feynman for the 50th anniversary of Feynman's 1965 Nobel Prize, on why he thought Feynman was special.[220] At CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research, home of the Large Hadron Collider), a street on the Meyrin site is named "Route Feynman
".

Bibliography

Selected scientific works

Textbooks and lecture notes

A box set of several slim red books
The Feynman Lectures on Physics including Feynman's Tips on Physics: The Definitive and Extended Edition (2nd edition, 2005)

The Feynman Lectures on Physics is perhaps his most accessible work for anyone with an interest in physics, compiled from lectures to

Caltech undergraduates in 1961–1964. As news of the lectures' lucidity grew, professional physicists and graduate students began to drop in to listen. Co-authors Robert B. Leighton and Matthew Sands, colleagues of Feynman, edited and illustrated them into book form. The work has endured and is useful to this day. They were edited and supplemented in 2005 with Feynman's Tips on Physics: A Problem-Solving Supplement to the Feynman Lectures on Physics by Michael Gottlieb and Ralph Leighton (Robert Leighton's son), with support from Kip Thorne
and other physicists.

Popular works

Audio and video recordings

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Sources

Further reading

Articles

Books

Films and plays

  • Infinity (1996), a movie both directed by and starring Matthew Broderick as Feynman, depicting his love affair with his first wife and ending with the Trinity test.
  • (play)
  • Whittell, Crispin (2006), Clever Dick, Oberon Books, (play)
  • "The Quest for Tannu Tuva", with Richard Feynman and Ralph Leighton. 1987, BBC Horizon and PBS Nova (entitled "Last Journey of a Genius").
  • No Ordinary Genius, a two-part documentary about Feynman's life and work, with contributions from colleagues, friends and family. 1993, BBC Horizon and PBS Nova (a one-hour version, under the title The Best Mind Since Einstein) (2 × 50-minute films)
  • Space Shuttle Challenger disaster
    .
  • The Fantastic Mr Feynman. One hour documentary. 2013, BBC TV
  • How We Built The Bomb, a docudrama about The Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. Feynman is played by actor/playwright Michael Raver. 2015

External links

External videos
video icon Presentation by Michelle Feynman on Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track, May 9, 2005, C-SPAN