Richard Feynman

Richard Feynman

Feynman Los Alamos wartime badge
Born May 11, 1918(1918-05-11)
Far Rockaway, Queens, New York, USA
Died February 15, 1988(1988-02-15) (aged 69)
Los Angeles, California, USA
Residence United States
Nationality American
Fields Physics
Institutions Manhattan Project
Cornell University
California Institute of Technology
Alma mater Massachusetts Institute of Technology (S.B.),
Princeton University (Ph.D.)
Doctoral advisor John Archibald Wheeler
Other academic advisors Manuel Sandoval Vallarta
Doctoral students

F. L. Vernon, Jr.[1]
Willard H. Wells[1]
Al Hibbs[1]
George Zweig[1]
Giovanni Rossi Lomanitz[1]


Thomas Curtright[1]
Other notable students Douglas D. Osheroff
Robert Barro
Known for Feynman diagrams
Feynman point
Feynman–Kac formula
Wheeler–Feynman absorber theory
Feynman sprinkler
Feynman Long Division Puzzles
Hellmann–Feynman theorem
Feynman slash notation
Feynman parametrization
Sticky bead argument
One-electron universe
Quantum cellular automata
Influences Paul Dirac
Influenced Hagen Kleinert
Rod Crewther
José Leite Lopes
Notable awards Albert Einstein Award (1954)
E. O. Lawrence Award (1962)
Nobel Prize in Physics (1965)
Oersted Medal (1972)
National Medal of Science (1979)
Signature
Notes
He was the father of Carl Feynman and Michelle Feynman. He was the brother of Joan Feynman.

Richard Phillips Feynman (pronounced /ˈfaɪnmən/, May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988) was an American physicist known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics and the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as in particle physics (he proposed the parton model). For his contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman, jointly with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965. He developed a widely used pictorial representation scheme for the mathematical expressions governing 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.

He assisted in the development of the atomic bomb and was a member of the panel that investigated the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. In addition to his work in theoretical physics, Feynman has been credited with pioneering the field of quantum computing,[2] and introducing the concept of nanotechnology.[3] He held the Richard Chace Tolman professorship in theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology.

Feynman was a keen popularizer of physics through both books and lectures, notably a 1959 talk on top-down nanotechnology called There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom and The Feynman Lectures on Physics. Feynman also became known through his semi-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!

He was regarded as an eccentric and free spirit. He studied Maya hieroglyphs, was a prankster, juggler, safecracker, bongo drum player, painter, and even developed his own pickup artist method he tested in bars.[4]

Feynman also had a deep interest in biology, and was a friend of the geneticist and microbiologist Esther Lederberg, who developed replica plating and discovered bacteriophage lambda.[5] They had several mutual physicist friends who, after beginning their careers in nuclear research, moved for moral reasons into genetics, among them Leó Szilárd, Guido Pontecorvo, and Aaron Novick.

Contents

Biography

Richard Phillips Feynman was born on May 11, 1918,[6] in Far Rockaway, Queens, New York.[7] His family originated from Russia and Poland; both of his parents were Jewish,[8] but they were not devout. Feynman (in common with the famous physicists Edward Teller and Albert Einstein) was a late talker; by his third birthday he had yet to utter a single word. The young Feynman was heavily influenced by his father, Melville, who encouraged him to ask questions to challenge orthodox thinking. From his mother, Lucille, he gained the sense of humor that he had throughout his life. As a child, he delighted in repairing radios and had a talent for engineering. His sister Joan also became a professional physicist.[9][10]

Education

In high school, his IQ was determined to be 125: high, but "merely respectable" according to biographer Gleick.[11] Feynman later scoffed at psychometric testing. By 15, he had learned differential and integral calculus. Before entering college, he was experimenting with and re-creating mathematical topics, such as the half-derivative, utilizing his own notation. In high school, he was developing the mathematical intuition behind his Taylor series of mathematical operators.[12]

His habit of direct characterization sometimes rattled more conventional thinkers; for example, one of his questions when learning feline anatomy was "Do you have a map of the cat?" (referring to an anatomical chart).

Feynman attended Far Rockaway High School, a school that also produced fellow laureates Burton Richter and Baruch Samuel Blumberg.[13] A member of the Arista Honor Society, in his last year in high school, Feynman won the New York University Math Championship; the large difference between his score and those of his closest competitors shocked the judges.[14]

He applied to Columbia University, but was not accepted, because of the "Jewish quota" (a discriminatory practice of limiting the number of places available to students of Jewish background).[15][16] Instead he attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received a bachelor's degree in 1939, and in the same year was named a Putnam Fellow. While there, Feynman took every physics course offered, including a graduate course on theoretical physics while only in his second year.

He obtained a perfect score on the graduate school entrance exams to Princeton University in mathematics and physics — an unprecedented feat — but did rather poorly on the history and English portions.[14] Attendees at Feynman's first seminar included Albert Einstein, Wolfgang Pauli, and John von Neumann. He received a Ph.D. from Princeton in 1942; his thesis advisor was John Archibald Wheeler. Feynman's thesis applied the principle of stationary action to problems of quantum mechanics, laying the ground work for the "path integral" approach and Feynman diagrams, and was entitled "The Principle of Least Action in Quantum Mechanics".

This was Richard Feynman nearing the crest of his powers. At twenty-three ... there was 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 from the Wheeler-Feynman collaboration was beyond Wheeler's own ability). Feynman seemed to possess a frightening ease with the substance behind the equations, like Albert Einstein at the same age, like the Soviet physicist Lev Landau—but few others.

– James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

The Manhattan Project

Feynman (center) with Robert Oppenheimer (right) relaxing at a Los Alamos social function during the Manhattan Project.

At Princeton, the physicist Robert R. Wilson encouraged Feynman to participate in the Manhattan Project—the wartime U.S. Army project at Los Alamos developing the atomic bomb. Feynman said he was persuaded to join this effort to build it before Nazi Germany.

He was assigned to Hans Bethe's theoretical division, and impressed Bethe enough to be made a group leader. He and Bethe developed the Bethe-Feynman formula for calculating the yield of a fission bomb, which built upon previous work by Robert Serber.

He immersed himself in work on the project, and was present at the Trinity bomb 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.

As a junior physicist, he was not central to the project. The greater part of his work was administering the computation group of human computers in the Theoretical division (one of his students there, John G. Kemeny, later went on to co-write the computer language BASIC). Later, with Nicholas Metropolis, he assisted in establishing the system for using IBM punched cards for computation. Feynman succeeded in solving one of the equations for the project that were posted on the blackboards. However, they did not "do the physics right" and Feynman's solution was not used.

Feynman's 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. On completing this work he was transferred to the Oak Ridge facility, where he aided engineers in devising safety procedures for material storage so that criticality accidents (for example, due to sub-critical amounts of fissile material inadvertently stored in proximity on opposite sides of a wall) could be avoided. He also did theoretical work and calculations on the proposed uranium-hydride bomb, which later proved not to be feasible.

Feynman was sought out by physicist Niels Bohr for one-on-one discussions. He later discovered the reason: most physicists were too 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. Feynman 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.

Due to the top secret nature of the work, Los Alamos was isolated. In Feynman's own words, "There wasn't anything to do there". Bored, he indulged his curiosity by learning to pick the combination locks on cabinets and desks used to secure papers. Feynman played many jokes on colleagues. In one case he found the combination to a locked filing cabinet by trying the numbers a physicist would use (it proved to be 27-18-28 after the base of natural logarithms, e = 2.71828...), and found that the three filing cabinets where a colleague kept a set of atomic bomb research notes all had the same combination. He left a series of notes as a prank, which initially spooked his colleague, Frederic de Hoffman, into thinking a spy or saboteur had gained access to atomic bomb secrets. On several occasions, Feynman drove to Albuquerque to see his ailing wife in a car borrowed from Klaus Fuchs, who was later discovered to be a real spy for the Soviets, transporting nuclear secrets in his car to Santa Fe.

On occasion, Feynman would find an isolated section of the mesa to drum in the style of American natives; "and maybe I would dance and chant, a little". These antics did not go unnoticed, and rumors spread about a mysterious Indian drummer called "Injun Joe". He also became a friend of laboratory head J. Robert Oppenheimer, who unsuccessfully tried to court him away from his other commitments after the war to work at the University of California, Berkeley.

Feynman alludes to his thoughts on the justification for getting involved in the Manhattan project in The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. As mentioned earlier, he felt the possibility of Nazi Germany developing the bomb before the Allies was a compelling reason to help with its development for the US. However, he goes on to say that it was an error on his part not to reconsider the situation when Germany was defeated. In the same publication, Feynman also talks about his worries in the atomic bomb age, feeling for some considerable time that there was a high risk that the bomb would be used again soon so that it was pointless to build for the future. Later he describes this period as a "depression."

Early academic career

Following the completion of his Ph.D. in 1942, Feynman held an appointment at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW) as an assistant professor of physics. The appointment was spent on leave for his involvement in the Manhattan project. In 1945, he received a letter from Dean Mark Ingraham of the College of Letters and Science requesting his return to UW to teach in the coming academic year. His appointment was not extended when he did not commit to return. In a talk given several years later at UW, Feynman quipped, "It's great to be back at the only University that ever had the good sense to fire me".[17]

After the war, Feynman declined an offer from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, despite the presence there of such distinguished faculty members as Albert Einstein, Kurt Gödel, and John von Neumann. Feynman followed Hans Bethe, instead, to Cornell University, where Feynman taught theoretical physics from 1945 to 1950.[18] During a temporary depression following the destruction of Hiroshima by the bomb produced by the Manhattan Project, he focused on complex physics problems, not for utility, but for self-satisfaction. One of these was analyzing the physics of a twirling, nutating dish as it is moving through the air. His work during this period, which used equations of rotation to express various spinning speeds, soon proved important to his Nobel Prize-winning work. Yet because he felt burned out, and had turned his attention to less immediately practical but more entertaining problems, he felt surprised by the offers of professorships from renowned universities.[18]

Despite yet another offer from the Institute for Advanced Study, which would have included teaching duties (which was not included in the Institute's initial offer, a factor in his rejection of it), Feynman opted for the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) — as he says in his book Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman! — because a desire to live in a mild climate had firmly fixed itself in his mind while installing tire chains on his car in the middle of a snowstorm in Ithaca.

Feynman the "Great Explainer": The Feynman Lectures on Physics found an appreciative audience beyond the undergraduate community

Feynman has been called the "Great Explainer".[19] He gained a reputation for taking great care when giving explanations to his students and for making it a moral duty to make the topic accessible. His guiding principle was that if a topic could not be explained in a freshman lecture, it was not yet fully understood. Feynman gained great pleasure[20] from coming up with such a "freshman-level" explanation, for example, of the connection between spin and statistics. What he said was that groups of particles with spin 1/2 "repel", whereas groups with integer spin "clump". This was a brilliantly simplified way of demonstrating how Fermi-Dirac statistics and Bose-Einstein statistics evolved as a consequence of studying how fermions and bosons behave under a rotation of 360°. This was also a question he pondered in his more advanced lectures and to which he demonstrated the solution in the 1986 Dirac memorial lecture.[21] In the same lecture, he further explained that antiparticles must exist, for if particles only had positive energies, they would not be restricted to a so-called "light cone".

He opposed rote learning or unthinking memorization and other teaching methods that emphasized form over function. He put these opinions into action whenever he could, from a conference on education in Brazil to a State Commission on school textbook selection. Clear thinking and clear presentation were fundamental prerequisites for his attention. It could be perilous even to approach him when unprepared, and he did not forget the fools or pretenders.[22]

During one sabbatical year, he returned to Newton's Principia Mathematica to study it anew; what he learned from Newton, he passed along to his students, such as Newton's attempted explanation of diffraction.

Caltech years

The Feynman section at the Caltech bookstore

Feynman did significant work while at Caltech, including research in:

He also developed Feynman diagrams, a bookkeeping device which helps in conceptualizing and calculating interactions between particles in spacetime, notably the interactions between electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons. This device allowed him, and later others, to approach time reversibility and other fundamental processes. Feynman's mental picture for these diagrams started with the hard sphere approximation, and the interactions could be thought of as collisions at first. It was not until decades later that physicists thought of analyzing the nodes of the Feynman diagrams more closely. Feynman famously painted Feynman diagrams on the exterior of his van.[27]

From his diagrams of a small number of particles interacting in spacetime, Feynman could then model all of physics in terms of those particles' spins and the range of coupling of the fundamental forces.[28] Feynman attempted an explanation of the strong interactions governing nucleons scattering called the parton model. The parton model emerged as a complement to the quark model developed by his Caltech colleague Murray Gell-Mann. The relationship between the two models was murky; Gell-Mann referred to Feynman's partons derisively as "put-ons". In the mid 1960s, physicists believed that quarks were just a bookkeeping device for symmetry numbers, not real particles, as the statistics of the Omega-minus particle, if it were interpreted as three identical strange quarks bound together, seemed impossible if quarks were real. The Stanford linear accelerator deep inelastic scattering experiments of the late 1960s showed, analogously to Ernest Rutherford's experiment of scattering alpha particles on gold nuclei in 1911, that nucleons (protons and neutrons) contained point-like particles which scattered electrons. It was natural to identify these with quarks, but Feynman's parton model attempted to interpret the experimental data in a way which 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 which carry the forces between the quarks and carry also the three-valued color quantum number which solves the Omega — 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 duly discovered in the decade after his death.

After the success of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman turned to quantum gravity. By analogy with the photon, which has spin 1, he investigated the consequences of a free massless spin 2 field, and was able to derive the Einstein field equation of general relativity, but little more.[29]. However, the computational device that Feynman discovered then for gravity, "ghosts", which are "particles" in the interior of his diagrams which have the "wrong" connection between spin and statistics, have proved invaluable in explaining the quantum particle behavior of the Yang-Mills theories, for example QCD and the electro-weak theory.

Mention of Feynman's prize on the monument at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Because the monument is dedicated to American Laureates, Tomonaga is not mentioned.

In 1965, Feynman was appointed a foreign member of the Royal Society.[30] At this time in the early 1960s, Feynman exhausted himself by working on multiple major projects at the same time, including a request, while at Caltech, to "spruce up" the teaching of undergraduates. After three years devoted to the task, he produced a series of lectures that eventually became the Feynman Lectures on Physics, one reason that Feynman is still regarded as one of the greatest teachers of physics. He wanted a picture of a drumhead sprinkled with powder to show the modes of vibration at the beginning of the book. Outraged by many rock and roll and drug connections that could be made from the image, the publishers changed the cover to plain red, though they included a picture of him playing drums in the foreword. Feynman later won the Oersted Medal for teaching, of which he seemed especially proud.[31]

His students competed keenly for his attention; he was once awakened when a student solved a problem and dropped it in his mailbox; glimpsing the student sneaking across his lawn, he could not go back to sleep, and he read the student's solution. The next morning his breakfast was interrupted by another triumphant student, but Feynman informed him that he was too late.

Partly as a way to bring publicity to progress in physics, Feynman offered $1000 prizes for two of his challenges in nanotechnology, claimed by William McLellan and Tom Newman, respectively.[32] He was also one of the first scientists to conceive the possibility of quantum computers.

Many of his lectures and other miscellaneous talks were turned into books, including The Character of Physical Law and QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter. He gave lectures which his students annotated into books, such as Statistical Mechanics and Lectures on Gravity. The Feynman Lectures on Physics[33] occupied two physicists, Robert B. Leighton and Matthew Sands as part-time co-authors for several years. Even though they were not adopted by most universities as textbooks, the books continue to be bestsellers because they provide a deep understanding of physics. As of 2005, The Feynman Lectures on Physics has sold over 1.5 million copies in English, an estimated 1 million copies in Russian, and an estimated half million copies in other languages.

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."[34]

In 1984-86, 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[35] of critical exponents measured in satellite experiments[36].

In the late 1980s, according to "Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine", Feynman played a crucial role in developing the first massively parallel computer, and in finding innovative uses for it in numerical computations, in building neural networks, as well as physical simulations using cellular automata (such as turbulent fluid flow), working with Stephen Wolfram at Caltech.[37] His son Carl also played a role in the development of the original Connection Machine engineering; Feynman influencing the interconnects while his son worked on the software.

Feynman diagrams are now fundamental for string theory and M-theory, and have even been extended topologically. . The world-lines of the diagrams have developed to become tubes to allow better modeling of more complicated objects such as strings and membranes. However, shortly before his death, Feynman criticized string theory in an interview: "I don't like that they're not calculating anything," he said. "I don't like that they don't check their ideas. I don't like that for anything that disagrees with an experiment, they cook up an explanation—a fix-up to say, 'Well, it still might be true.'" These words have since been much-quoted by opponents of the string-theoretic direction for particle physics.[38]

Challenger disaster

The 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.

Feynman played an important role on the Presidential Rogers Commission, which investigated the Challenger disaster. Feynman devoted the latter half of his 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. He concluded that the NASA management's space shuttle reliability estimate was fantastically unrealistic. He warned in his appendix to the commission's report, "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."[39]

M8 Entertainment Inc. announced in May 2006 that a movie would be made about the disaster. Challenger, scheduled for a 2010 release, is to be directed by Philip Kaufman—whose 1983 film The Right Stuff chronicled the early history of the space program—and will focus on the role of Feynman in the ensuing investigation. David Strathairn will play Feynman.[40]

Personal life

While researching for his Ph.D., Feynman married his first wife, Arline Greenbaum (often spelled Arlene). She was diagnosed with tuberculosis, but she and Feynman were careful, and he never contracted it. She succumbed to the disease in 1945. This portion of Feynman's life was portrayed in the 1996 film Infinity, which featured Feynman's daughter Michelle in a cameo role.

He was married a second time in June 1952, to Mary Louise Bell of Neodesha, Kansas; this marriage was brief and unsuccessful. He later married Gweneth Howarth from Ripponden, Yorkshire, who shared his enthusiasm for life and spirited adventure.[41] Besides their home in Altadena, California, they had a beach house in Baja California, purchased with the prize money from Feynman's Nobel Prize, his one third share of $55,000. They remained married until Feynman's death. They had a son, Carl, in 1962, and adopted a daughter, Michelle, in 1968.[41]

Feynman had a great deal of success teaching Carl, using discussions about ants and Martians as a device for gaining perspective on problems and issues; he was surprised to learn that the same teaching devices were not useful with Michelle.[42] Mathematics was a common interest for father and son; they both entered the computer field as consultants and were involved in advancing a new method of using multiple computers to solve complex problems—later known as parallel computing. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory retained Feynman as a computational consultant during critical missions. One co-worker characterized Feynman as akin to Don Quixote at his desk, rather than at a computer workstation, ready to do battle with the windmills.

Feynman traveled a great deal, notably to Brazil, and near the end of his life schemed to visit the Russian land of Tuva, a dream that, because of Cold War bureaucratic problems, never became reality.[43] The day after he died, a letter arrived for him from the Soviet government giving him authorization to travel to Tuva. During this period, he discovered that he had a form of cancer, but, thanks to surgery, he managed to hold it off. Out of his enthusiastic interest in reaching Tuva came the phrase "Tuva or Bust" (also the title of a book about his efforts to get there), which was tossed about frequently amongst his circle of friends in hope that they, one day, could see it firsthand. The documentary movie Genghis Blues mentions some of his attempts to communicate with Tuva, and chronicles the successful journey there by his friends.

Feynman took up drawing at one time and enjoyed some success under the pseudonym "Ofey", culminating in an exhibition dedicated to his work. He learned to play a metal percussion instrument (frigideira) in a samba style in Brazil, and participated in a samba school.

In addition, he had some degree of synesthesia for equations, explaining that the letters in certain mathematical functions appeared in color for him, even though invariably printed in standard black-and-white.[44]

According to Genius, the James Gleick-authored biography, Feynman experimented with LSD during his professorship at Caltech.[14] Somewhat embarrassed by his actions, Feynman largely sidestepped the issue when dictating his anecdotes; he mentions it in passing in the "O Americano, Outra Vez" section, while the "Altered States" chapter in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! describes only marijuana and ketamine experiences at John Lilly's famed sensory deprivation tanks, as a way of studying consciousness.[18] Feynman gave up alcohol when he began to show early signs of alcoholism, as he did not want to do anything that could damage his brain—the same reason given in "O Americano, Outra Vez" for his reluctance to experiment with LSD.[18]

In Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, he gives advice on the best way to pick up a girl in a hostess bar. At Caltech, he used a nude/topless bar as an office away from his usual office, making sketches or writing physics equations on paper placemats. When the county officials tried to close the place, all visitors except Feynman refused to testify in favor of the bar, fearing that their families or patrons would learn about their visits. Only Feynman accepted, and in court, he affirmed that the bar was a public need, stating that craftsmen, technicians, engineers, common workers "and a physics professor" frequented the establishment. While the bar lost the court case, it was allowed to remain open as a similar case was pending appeal.[18]

Feynman developed two rare forms of cancer, Liposarcoma and Waldenström's macroglobulinemia, dying shortly after a final attempt at surgery for the former.[14] His last recorded words are noted as "I'd hate to die twice. It's so boring."[14][45]

By his early youth, Feynman described himself as an "avowed atheist".[46]

Reception

On May 4, 2005, the United States Postal Service issued the American Scientists commemorative set of four 37-cent self-adhesive stamps in several configurations. The scientists depicted were Richard Feynman, John von Neumann, Barbara McClintock, and Josiah Willard Gibbs. Feynman's stamp, sepia-toned, features a photograph of a 30-something Feynman and eight small Feynman diagrams. The stamps were designed by artist Victor Stabin under the direction of U.S. Postal Service art director Carl T. Herrman.

The main building for the Computing Division at Fermilab is named the "Feynman Computing Center" in his honor.[47]

Real Time Opera premiered its opera Feynman at the Norfolk (CT) Chamber Music Festival in June 2005.[48]

In the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation, the shuttlecraft Feynman is named after him.

On the 20th anniversary of Feynman's death, composer Edward Manukyan dedicated a piece for solo clarinet to his memory.[49] It was premiered by Doug Storey, the principal clarinetist of the Amarillo Symphony.

In 2009, clips of an interview with Feynman were used in a second science education music video by composer John Boswell as part of the Symphony of Science project. Again in 2010, John Boswell used parts of Feynmans interview in his fifth installment of the Symphony of Science called The Poetry of Reality.

Philosopher Paul Feyerabend was critical of the lack of knowledge of philosophy shown by the generation of physicists that emerged after World War II, including Feynman:

The withdrawal of philosophy into a "professional" shell of its own has had disastrous consequences. The younger generation of physicists, the Feynmans, the Schwingers, etc., may be very bright; they may be more intelligent than their predecessors, than Bohr, Einstein, Schrodinger, Boltzmann, Mach and so on. But they are uncivilized savages, they lack in philosophical depth -- and this is the fault of the very same idea of professionalism which you are now defending.[50]

Bibliography

Selected scientific works

Feynman, Richard P. (2000), Laurie M. Brown, ed., Selected Papers of Richard Feynman: With Commentary, 20th Century Physics, World Scientific, ISBN 978-9810241315 .

Textbooks and lecture notes

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 1961-64. As news of the lectures' lucidity grew, a number of 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

See also

  • Feynman checkerboard
  • Flexagon
  • Foresight Nanotech Institute Feynman Prize
  • List of physicists
  • List of theoretical physicists
  • Negative probability
  • One-electron universe
  • Stückelberg–Feynman interpretation
  • Wheeler–Feynman absorber theory

Notes

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 "Richard Phillips Feynman". Mathematics Genealogy Project (North Dakota State University). http://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=91222. Retrieved 2010-03-18. 
  2. ↑ West, Jacob (2003-06). "The Quantum Computer". http://www.xootic.nl/magazine/jul-2003/west.pdf. Retrieved 2009-09-20. 
  3. ↑ Edwards 2006, pp. 15–17.
  4. ↑ Twigger, Robert (February 26, 2010). "lifeshifting - niche world". Robert Twigger. http://www.roberttwigger.com/lifeshifting/2010/2/26/lifeshifting-4-niche-world.html. Retrieved 27 August 2010. 
  5. ↑ "Esther M. Zimmer Lederberg Memorial Web Site". http://www.estherlederberg.com. 
  6. ↑ Nobel Foundation 1972.
  7. ↑ J.J. O'Connor and E.F. Robertson (2002-08). "Richard Phillips Feynman". University of St. Andrews. http://turnbull.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Biographies/Feynman.html. Retrieved 2006-11-09. 
  8. ↑ "Nobel-Winners.com". June 2009. http://www.nobel-winners.com/Physics/richard_phillips_feynman.html. 
  9. ↑ Feynman 1985, Feynman 1988
  10. ↑ Charles Hirshberg (2002-04-18). "My Mother, the Scientist". Popular Science. http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2002-04/my-mother-scientist. Retrieved 2008-03-05.  An account on Joan Feynman by her son.
  11. ↑ Gleick 1992, p. 30
  12. ↑ Feynman 1985
  13. ↑ Schwach, Howard. "Museum Tracks Down FRHS Nobel Laureates", The Wave (newspaper), April 15, 2005. Accessed October 2, 2007.
  14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 14.2 14.3 14.4 Gleick 1992
  15. ↑ Mehra, Jagdish; Milton, Kimball A. (2003), Climbing the Mountain: The Scientific Biography of Julian Schwinger, Oxford University Press, p. 218, ISBN 0-198-52745-4, http://books.google.com/?id=M_ONmDLmGO4C , Chapter 7, A note on Richard Feynman, page 218
  16. ↑ http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Biographies/Feynman.html
  17. ↑ R. March, (May 2003), "Physics at the University of Wisconsin: A History", Physics in Perspective, Vol. 5, 130-149
  18. ↑ 18.0 18.1 18.2 18.3 18.4 Feynman 1985
  19. ↑ LeVine 2009
  20. ↑ Hey & Walters 1987.
  21. ↑ Feynman 1987.
  22. ↑ Bethe 1991, p. 241
  23. ↑ Background information on the 1999 Nobel Prize in Physics, Cecilia Jarlskog, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
  24. ↑ Schwinger 1958.
  25. ↑ Feynman & Hibbs 1965.
  26. ↑ "Richard Feynman and Condensed Matter Physics" by David Pines in the February 1989 Physics Today Feynman memorial issue.
  27. ↑ Feynman 2005 and Sykes 1996.
  28. ↑ Feynman 1961.
  29. ↑ Feynman 1995
  30. ↑ "Richard P. Feynman". Nobelprize.org. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1965/feynman-bio.html. Retrieved 2010-02-19. 
  31. ↑ "The Oersted Medal". American Association of Physics Teachers. http://www.aapt.org/Grants/oersted.cfm. Retrieved 2007-07-08. 
  32. ↑ Gribbin & Gribbin 1997, p. 170.
  33. ↑ Feynman 1970 Lectures on Physics.
  34. ↑ Feynman 1974b
  35. ↑ Kleinert, Hagen (1999), "Specific heat of liquid helium in zero gravity very near the lambda point", Physical Review D 60, 085001 (1999): 085001, doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.60.085001, http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PRD/v60/i8/e085001. 
  36. ↑ Lipa J.A.; Nissen, J.; Stricker, D.; Swanson, D.; Chui, T. (2003), "Specific heat of liquid helium in zero gravity very near the lambda point", Physical Review B 68: 174518, doi:10.1103/PhysRevB.68.174518, http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PRB/v68/i17/e174518. 
  37. ↑ Hillis 1989.
  38. ↑ Gleick 1992, interview by Robert Crease, Feb. 1985.
  39. ↑ R. P. Feynman. "Appendix F — Personal observations on the reliability of the Shuttle". Kennedy Space Center. http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/rogers-commission/Appendix-F.txt. 
  40. ↑ "Media 8 To Produce "Challenger" Directed by Philip Kaufman". May 24, 2006. http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=19931. Retrieved 2006-09-21. 
  41. ↑ 41.0 41.1 Feynman 2005.
  42. ↑ Sykes 1996.
  43. ↑ Leighton 2000.
  44. ↑ Feynman 1988
  45. ↑ "Richard Feynman at Find a Grave". http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=2562. Retrieved 2008-10-04. 
  46. ↑ What Do You Care What Other People Think by Richard Feynman (p. 25)
  47. ↑ "Fermilab Open House: Computing Division". fnal.gov. http://www.fnal.gov/openhouse/computing/computing.html. 
  48. ↑ "Real Time Opera". rtopera.org. http://www.rtopera.org/index.html. 
  49. ↑ "Musical Tribute to Scientists". edwardmanukyan.com. http://www.edwardmanukyan.com/musical_tribute_to_scientists.html. 
  50. ↑ For and Against Method. The comments appeared in a 1969 letter to Feyerabend's Berkeley philosophy chair Wallace Matson, which is reproduced in Appendix B of the book.

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Nobel Laureates in Physics
1901–1925

Röntgen (1901) · Lorentz / Zeeman (1902) · Becquerel / P. Curie / M. Curie (1903) · Rayleigh (1904) · Lenard (1905) · Thomson (1906) · Michelson (1907) · Lippmann (1908) · Marconi / Braun (1909) · van der Waals (1910) · Wien (1911) · Dalén (1912) · Kamerlingh Onnes (1913) · Laue (1914) · W. L. Bragg / W. H. Bragg (1915) · Barkla (1917) · Planck (1918) · Stark (1919) · Guillaume (1920) · Einstein (1921) · N. Bohr (1922) · Millikan (1923) · M. Siegbahn (1924) · Franck / Hertz (1925)
1926–1950

Perrin (1926) · Compton / C. Wilson (1927) · O. Richardson (1928) · De Broglie (1929) · Raman (1930) · Heisenberg (1932) · Schrödinger / Dirac (1933) · Chadwick (1935) · Hess / C. D. Anderson (1936) · Davisson / Thomson (1937) · Fermi (1938) · Lawrence (1939) · Stern (1943) · Rabi (1944) · Pauli (1945) · Bridgman (1946) · Appleton (1947) · Blackett (1948) · Yukawa (1949) · Powell (1950)
1951–1975

Cockcroft / Walton (1951) · Bloch / Purcell (1952) · Zernike (1953) · Born / Bothe (1954) · Lamb / Kusch (1955) · Shockley / Bardeen / Brattain (1956) · Yang / T. D. Lee (1957) · Cherenkov / Frank / Tamm (1958) · Segrè / Chamberlain (1959) · Glaser (1960) · Hofstadter / Mössbauer (1961) · Landau (1962) · Wigner / Goeppert-Mayer / Jensen (1963) · Townes / Basov / Prokhorov (1964) · Tomonaga / Schwinger / Feynman (1965) · Kastler (1966) · Bethe (1967) · Alvarez (1968) · Gell-Mann (1969) · Alfvén / Néel (1970) · Gabor (1971) · Bardeen / Cooper / Schrieffer (1972) · Esaki / Giaever / Josephson (1973) · Ryle / Hewish (1974) · A. Bohr / Mottelson / Rainwater (1975)
1976–2000

Richter / Ting (1976) · P. W. Anderson / Mott / Van Vleck (1977) · Kapitsa / Penzias / R. Wilson (1978) · Glashow / Salam / Weinberg (1979) · Cronin / Fitch (1980) · Bloembergen / Schawlow / K. Siegbahn (1981) · K. Wilson (1982) · Chandrasekhar / Fowler (1983) · Rubbia / van der Meer (1984) · von Klitzing (1985) · Ruska / Binnig / Rohrer (1986) · Bednorz / Müller (1987) · Lederman / Schwartz / Steinberger (1988) · Ramsey / Dehmelt / Paul (1989) · Friedman / Kendall / R. Taylor (1990) · de Gennes (1991) · Charpak (1992) · Hulse / J. Taylor (1993) · Brockhouse / Shull (1994) · Perl / Reines (1995) · D. Lee / Osheroff / R. Richardson (1996) · Chu / Cohen-Tannoudji / Phillips (1997) · Laughlin / Störmer / Tsui (1998) · 't Hooft / Veltman (1999) · Alferov / Kroemer / Kilby (2000)
2001–present

Cornell / Ketterle / Wieman (2001) · Davis / Koshiba / Giacconi (2002) · Abrikosov / Ginzburg / Leggett (2003) · Gross / Politzer / Wilczek (2004) · Glauber / Hall / Hänsch (2005) · Mather / Smoot (2006) · Fert / Grünberg (2007) · Nambu / Kobayashi / Maskawa (2008) · Kao / Boyle / Smith (2009) · Geim / Novoselov (2010)
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