Richard Feynman

In his books and lectures, Feynman was an ardent and influential popularizer of physics. Best known are his Feynman Lectures in Physics, having 3 parts in the English edition. He is known for his unsurpassed curiosity, wit, brilliant mind, and playful temperament; but he is equally famous for his many adventures, described in his books You can't be serious, Mr. Feynman!, I don't suppose you're worried about other people's opinions, are you? and Tuva Or Bust!. Richard Feynman was in many ways an eccentric free thinker.

He was born in Far Rockaway in the borough of Queens, New York. His parents were of Jewish descent. Although they were not ritual followers of Judaism, the family attended temple every Friday. Young Feynman was greatly influenced by his father, Mellville. The latter always encouraged him to ask questions, and in this way to overcome orthodox thinking. His mother instilled in him a strong sense of humour that remained with him throughout his life. In his childhood he enthusiastically repaired radios, showing his talent for electrical engineering. He was bright in school, but his IQ (125), measured during this period, is only slightly above average. Even before entering college, he was constantly experimenting and reinterpreting various topics in mathematics, such as half derivatives (a mathematical operator that, when applied twice in a row, leads to the derivative of a function), using his own set of symbols.

(Thus, while still in high school, he developed his mathematical intuition with his Taylor series of mathematical operators.) His habit for naming things directly could sometimes throw people with conventional thinking off balance. As an example, one of his questions to a librarian in the biology library was, "Don't you have a map of a cat?" He was referring to an anatomical diagram of a cat . He always spoke accurately and clearly.

Feynman earned his bachelor's degree from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in 1939, and won the William Putnam Mathematics Competition that same year. He achieved excellent results during the entrance examinations in mathematics and physics at Princeton University, in contrast to relatively poor results in the history section.

In 1942 he achieved a PhD from Princeton University, his thesis advisor being John Archibald Wheeler. Feynman's dissertation applied the principle of stationary action to problems in quantum mechanics, laying the foundations for the "path integral" approach and Feynman diagrams.

During his doctoral studies, Feynman married his first wife, Arline Greenbaum. (Her first name is often given as Arlene, for example in two of Feynman's biographies, You Can't Be Serious, Mr. Feynman and Guess You're Not Worried About Strangers' Opinions. But in his personal letters, published in Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From the Beaten Track, Feynman gives his wife's name as Arlene).

Arline was diagnosed with tuberculosis, an incurable and fatal disease at the time, but they were both so careful that Feynman never contracted Tuberculosis.

The Manhattan Project at Los Alamos (the US Army's wartime project to develop the atomic bomb). In Feynman's words, he joined the project so that he could make sure Nazi Germany did not develop the bomb first. On weekends, he visited his wife at a nursing home in Albuquerque until her death on June 16, 1945. He became deeply immersed in the work on the project and participated in the Trinity bomb test. Feynman claimed he was the only one who saw the explosion without dark glasses, looking through the front windshield of the van (thus protecting himself from harmful ultraviolet radiation).

The young physicist's work on the project was relatively distant from the main event, consisting mainly of managing the human computing group in the Theoretical Division, and later with Nicholas Metropolis in the preparation of a system for the use of IBM's punch-tags.

Feynman's other work at Los Alamos consisted of calculating the neutron equations used to measure the critical amount of fissile material for the "Water Boiler," a small nuclear reactor in the Desert Laboratory. After this work, he was transferred to the Oak Ridge site, where he assisted engineers in calculating safety regulations for material storage (to prevent unwanted critical accidents). He also did critical theoretical and computational work for the planned uranium-hydride bomb, which later proved unfeasible to build.

The famous physicist Niels Bohr sought out Feynman for a one-on-one discussion. Feynman only later found out why. Most physicists had a tremendous respect for Bohr that prevented them from any polemic with him. But Feynman had no inhibitions about vehemently pointing out everything he thought was wrong. Feynman said that he felt as much respect for Bohr as anyone else, but whenever he got into a discussion of physics, he forgot everything else.

He also became friends with the head of the lab, Robert Oppenheimer, who tried unsuccessfully several times after the war to get him to work at the University of California, Berkeley.

As a result of the top-secret work, the Los Alamos center was isolated. In his own words, "There was nothing I could do there." The bored Feynman found all sorts of amusements: learning, for example, to guess the combinations of numerical locks on cabinets and workbenches hiding secret project documents. As a joke, he once left a series of gloating messages in his colleague's locked desk, causing him to panic that a foreign spy had gotten his hands on the secret materials for making an atomic bomb. (Interestingly, Feynman once borrowed a car from Klaus Fuchs, later revealed to be the real spy, in order to visit his ailing wife).

On another occasion, Feynman found an isolated spot on a mesa where he drummed Indian rhythms, "And maybe I'll do a little dancing and singing."

After the Feynman project, he began working as a professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where Hans Bethe (the physicist who proved that the sun's energy comes from nuclear fusion) was also a professor. However, he felt uninspired there. Despairing that his creativity had completely fizzled out, he switched to solving less useful but fun problems, such as analyzing wobbly spinning plates balancing on juggler's sticks. (As it later turned out, this activity served him well in later research).

For this reason, he was very surprised by offers from competing universities. He finally decided on the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, California, turning down a position near Princeton at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (where distinguished academics, including Albert Einstein, were at the time).

Feynman turned down the job for the Institute because he would have no teaching duties there. Feynman considered his students a source of inspiration and, during a non-creative period, a form of comfort. If he felt he could not be creative, he at least taught. His desire to work in a temperate climate was another major decision factor. He set this goal for himself when, in the midst of a snowstorm in Ithaca, he tried to put snow chains on the wheels of his car.

Feynman is sometimes referred to as the "Great Interpreter"; in explaining the subject to his students, he took great care not to make it arcane but accessible to everyone. His basic principle was that if a topic could not be explained in a freshman class, the topic was not yet fully understood.

Feynman achieved great pleasure in explaining "at the freshman level" the connection between spin and statistics (groups of particles with spin 1/2 repel, while groups with integer spin attract), a question he had pondered in his own lectures and which he resolved in his 1986 lecture The Reason for Antiparticles (published in The Reason for Antiparticles: The 1986 Dirac Memorial Lecture) He rejected mechanical learning and similar methods of teaching that favored form over purpose, whether it was at a conference on education in Brazil or at a state commission for the approval of school textbooks.

Clear thinking and clear presentation were essential prerequisites for his attention. It was very risky to come into contact with him at all unprepared. He did not forget who was the pretender or the fool. During one sabbatical he returned to Newton's fundamental principles to study them anew. What he learned from Newton, he also passed on to his students, such as Newton's attempt to explain diffraction.