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Richard P. Feynman |
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| 'A genius who brought us new ways to view the world' Independent |
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Richard P. Feynman, co-creator of the atomic bomb, Nobel Prize winner and solver of the Challenger space shuttle disaster was one of the twentieth century’s most brilliant theoretical physicists and original thinkers. He was at various times a repairer of radios, a picker of locks, an artist, a dancer, a percussionist, and a decipherer of Mayan hieroglyphics. Consistently rejecting authority, wholeheartedly embracing the value of doubt, Feynman’s infectious sense of curiosity infused everything he did.
When Richard Phillips Feynman was born in Far Rockaway, New York, in 1918, his father was desperate to encourage him to think ‘like a scientist’. His father’s methods worked. Feynman went on to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then Princeton, where he received his Ph.D. in 1942. Feynman was a key player in the Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory where he helped to build the atomic bomb during the Second World War and shortly afterwards he became Professor of Theoretical Physics at Cornell University, where he worked with Hans Bethe.
Quantum physics explains how a thing is both a wave and a particle, or can have no mass at rest yet has measurable momentum while moving and it was in this field that Feynman made massive breakthroughs. QED contains lectures outlining his theories that revolutionised our understanding of quantum electrodynamics - which is how light and electrons interact - and he shared the Nobel Prize for this work in 1965. Feynman’s simplified rules of calculation became standard tools of theoretical analysis in these areas and ‘Feynman diagrams’ presented a new way of seeing the world.
Feynman was a visiting professor at the California Institute of Technology in 1950, where he later accepted a permanent faculty appointment, and became Richard Chace Tolman Professor of Theoretical Physics in 1959. He had an extraordinary ability to communicate his science to audiences at all levels, and was a well-known and popular lecturer. It was here that he gave his Lectures on Gravitation and Lectures on Computation. In 1986 he came to widespread public attention during the enquiry into the Challenger disaster when he proved conclusively that its cause was due to the effect of cold on the shuttle’s rubber sealings.
Richard Feynman died in 1988 after a long illness. Freeman Dyson, of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, called him ‘the most original mind of his generation’, while in its obituary The New York Times described him as ‘arguably the most brilliant, iconoclastic and influential of the postwar generation of theoretical physicists’.
‘Everything is interesting if you go into it deeply enough’
Richard Feynman
Words of Wisdom
‘If you keep proving stuff that others have done, getting confidence, increasing the complexities of your solutions – for the fun of it – then one day you’ll turn around and discover that nobody actually did that one! And that’s the way to become a computer scientist’
‘Science is a way to teach how something gets known, what is not known, to what extent things are known (for nothing is known absolutely), how to handle doubt and uncertainty, what the rules of evidence are, how to think about things so that judgments can be made, how to distinguish truth from fraud, from show … in learning science you learn to handle by trial and error, to develop a spirit of invention and of free inquiry which is of tremendous value far beyond science. One learns to ask oneself: ‘Is there a better way to do it?’
Engineering and Science, Caltech
‘There isn’t any solution to this problem of education other than to realise that the best teaching can be done only when there is a direct individual relationship between a student and a good teacher – a situation in which the student discusses the ideas, thinks about things, and talks about things.’
The Feynman Lectures on Physics
‘It is odd, but on the infrequent occasions when I have been called upon in a formal place to play the bongo drums, the introducer never seems to find it necessary to mention that I also do theoretical physics. I believe that is probably because we respect the arts more than the sciences’
The Character of Physical Law
‘For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled’
What Do You Care
‘If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would could contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms – little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied.’
Six Easy Pieces
‘I wonder why. I wonder why.
I wonder why I wonder.
I wonder why I wonder why
I wonder why I wonder!’
‘On the Limitations of Reason’
