an architect of quantum theories, a brash young group leader on the atomic bomb project and the inventor of the indispensable "Feynman diagrams" of particle behavior, he took half-made conceptions of matter and energy in the l940's and shaped them into tools that ordinary physicists could understand and calculate with.
altho his handiwork permeates the foundation of modern science, millions of Americans heard his name for the first time in l986, when he brought an inquisitive and caustic presence to the Presidential commission investigation the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger.
early on, he stunned a Washington hearing room by calling for ice water, plunking in a piece of the critical O-ring seal from the rocket booster and then pinching it with a small clamp. It was a turning point in the investigation --- a simple experiment, taking half a minute and no money, that perfectly demonstrated both the vulnerability of the seal and the absolute confidence of the experimenter.
to physicist who knew Dr. Feynman as a colleague or as a teacher, neither his faith in nature's simplicity nor his impatience with mediocrity came as a surprise.
"he was the most original mind of his generation," said Freeman Dyson of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ.
"he's the most creative theoretical physicist of his time and a true genius,' said Sidney D. Drell, former president of the American Physical Society. "He has touched with his unique creativity just about every field of physics."
hans Bethe of Cornell University, paraphrasing the mathematician, Mark Kac, said there were two kids of geniuses. The ordinary kind does great things but lets other scientist feel that they could do the same if only they worked hard enuff. The other kind performs magic. "A magician does things that nobody else could ever do and that seems completely unexpected," Dr. Bethe said, "and that's Feynman."
dr. Feynman shared the Nobel Prize for work he completed in his 20's remaking the theory of quantum electrodynamics (1) , which governs every physical and chemical process except those embracing gravitation and radioactivity .... work with Murray Gell-Mann (2) that created a theory for weak interactions, describing such phenomenas the emission of electrons from radioactive nuclei.
dr. feynman himself is said to have liked the later work better. "I won the prize for shoving a great problem under the carpet." he said disingenuously, "but in this case there was a moment when I knew how nature worked ... it had elegance and beauty."
he also provided (3) a mathematical theory that explained the strange behavior of liquid helium at temperatures a breath away from absolute zero. And later, exploring the behavior of electrons (4) in higher energy collisions at the Stanford Center, he provided an explanation that proved to the the most illuminating and characteristically, the simplest.
these were his four greatest scientific achievements, but he also left a deep mark on modern physics as an educator and author.
at Cornell in the 40's and Cal Tech he developed a lecture style that kept him at the center of attention, the impossible combination of the theoretical physicist and circus barker, all body motion and sound effects.
one series of lectures remains an indispensable physics texts: the feynman lecture on physics (published by Addison-Wesley).
another series became an eloquent book: the character of physical laws; and yet another became "QED: the strange theory of light and matter." His l985 memoirs "Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman" became a surprising bestseller. (after his death, "What Do You Care What Other People Think" provided another peek into his incredibly diverse life)
above all, in and out of science, he was a curious character ... his phrase ... and the double meaning was intentional. He was never content with what he knew or what other people knew. 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 enuff biology to study the mutations of bateriophages.
in his youth he experimented for months with trying to observe his unraveling stream of consciousness at the point of falling asleep; in his middle age he experimented with inducing out of body hallucinations in a sensory deprivation tank.
but he was no mystic, and he despised all kinds of fake learning, particularly pseudo-science. In that category he place a good part of modern psychology,calling it "cargo cult science."
certain Pacific islanders, he explained, wanted the cargo planes to keep returning after WWII 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 science investigation, but they're missing something essential because the planes don't land." For Dr. Feynman, the planes almost always landed.
richard Phillip Feynman was born on May ll, l9l8, in Far Rockaway, Queens. His meditative approach to radio repair, a hobby he took up when he was ll or l2 years old, gave him a neighborhood reputation as the boy who could fix radios by thinking.
after graduating from FR-HS in l935, he went on to the MIT and then to Princeton, where he received his doctorate in l942. By then he had been recruited for the Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb at Los Alamos, NM.
stories from the time, including Dr. Feynman's own, give the impression that he spent most of his time thinking.
... (text blurred & unreadable) ... and the security officers. He and his wife exchanged letters they had cut into pieces of a jigsaw puzzle ...
dr. feynman also devoted himself to cracking the combinations safes that had been installed to protect the bomb secrets ... (text blurred) ... the plutonium production schedules, the construction dimensions, the neutron radiation data, "the whole schmeer," as he wrote later. When the responsible officers turned their back he would unlock the steel doors and leave notes with messages like, "I borrowed document No. LA 43232: Feynman the safecracker."
but Dr. Feynman's real role was deeper than he liked to suggest in his anecdotes for public consumption. Dr. Bethe, the leader of the theoretical division, recognized him as the most ingenious member of this team.
the two
dr. Feynman's years with the Manhattan Project brought the brazen young scientist into close contact with the world's greatest physicists and mathematicians. He would attend meeting in Edward Teller's office, furiously exchanging ideas with Enrico Fermi and John von Neumann, (note: hang around smart people) manipulating his desk calculator at top speed while von Neumann worked the same problems in his head.
in the end, he said that he was possibly the only an confident enuff or reckless enuff to watch the first atomic bomb test with the naked eye, protected only by a truck windshield. He decided that the only harm could come from ultraviolet rays and that the window glass would screen these.
only afterward, sitting in a NY restaurant and calculating the radius of potential bomb damage in midtown Manhattan, did he lose the euphoric feeling that drove him in the years he worked to develop the bomb.
"you see, what happened to me -- what happened to the rest of us," he wrote, "is we started for a good reason, then you're working very hard to accomplish something, and it's pleasure, it's excitement. And you stop thinking, you know; you just stop."
in a way, he was born too late to discover the big mysteries. By the l940's the two great revolutions of 20th century physics were in full swing. Einstein's theory of relativity had transformed scientists' understanding of space and time, and quantum theory had transformed their understanding of the behavior of matter and energy in the guises of particles or waves.
together, these revolutions had made the atomic bomb possible. Now physicists were applying them to a new framework within which to study the properties of fundamental particles and the relationship between gravity, electromagnetism and the forces that bind the atom.
a crucial part of this framework was QED, a modernization of the classical understanding of electromagnetic radiation ... radiation like light and radio waves formulated in the l9th century.
in the domain of everyday life, electromagnetic forces are familiar and well understood. At the subatomic level, though, were they govern the interaction of electrically charged particles, the theory had run into trouble. Its prediction failed to match experiments, and as physicist tried to make calculations more accurately, the discrepancies grew without limit.
physicists struggled for more than a decade to find revisions that would make the theory work. Then, working independently, Drs. Feynman, Sin-Itero Tomonaga of Japan and Julian Schwinger of Maryland University ...
dr. Tomonaga and Dr. Schwinger connected their work to the old theory in ways that other physicists could quickly understand. But Dr. Feynman rebuilt QED from the ground up. He invented a new way of calculating that drew skepticism at first.
"he
tried to rediscover the whole of physics by himself,"
Leyden note:
personal constructivism -- it had to make 'sense' to him.
said Dr. Dyson, who knew him well at Cornell. "Somewhat to this disappointment, what he discover