Richard Feynman

Richard Feynman (1918-1988) was a leading American physicist and educator based at California Institute of Technology. He played a role in shaping modern quantum physics, computer design, and nanotechnology. His work included studying the Principle of Stationary Action. He attracted a following for his college lectures on physics, which he published, and for his iconoclastic personality. He popularized physics with many short essays and talks, often talking about the pranks he loved to play. Feynman was courageously critical of government engineers in how they handled, one might say covered up, negligence that caused the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster.

He credits his education in reading an encyclopedia when he was young, at the insistence of his father. After studying at M.I.T. and Princeton University, he assisted in the development of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos. As an example of his extraordinary talent at mathematics by a physicist, Feynman became a very prestigious Putnam Fellow by scoring in the top five nationally on one of the early Putnam college math contests, in 1939.

Feynman's major contribution was to quantum electrodynamics. He introduced the diagrams, now called Feynman diagrams, which are used to describe the behavior of systems of interacting particles. He was awarded a Nobel Prize for Physics in 1965. He worked on the problem from 1939 to 1947, confronting two puzzles that were the source of the difficulties with quantum electrodynamical theories. The first was an infinite energy of interaction of the electron with itself. And this difficulty existed even in the classical theory. The other difficulty came from some infinities which had to do with the infinite numbers of degrees of freedom in the field. His solution, while still an undergraduate, was that electrons cannot act on themselves; they can only act on other electrons. That was not quite right, but as a graduate student, with help from his mentor, Princeton Professor John Wheeler, he did figure it out.

Family life

Feynman married three times. His wed his first wife, Arlene Greenbaum, while studying for his PhD. It was a sadly foreshortened marriage: she had tuberculosis and he devoted himself to her during her illness.

He married Mary Louise Bell in 1952 and was divorced quickly afterwards. Feynman was divorced at a time when divorce was frowned upon. His wife complained to the divorce judge: "He begins working calculus problems in his head as soon as he awakens. He did calculus while driving, while sitting in the living room and while lying in bed at night."

The Guardian reports concerning his second marriage:

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...Feynman had changed from being "a womaniser to a family man, from a solitary wanderer to a domesticated husband and father", according to Krauss. He married a young British woman, Gweneth Howarth; they had a son, Carl; later adopted a daughter, Michelle; and remained happily married until his death.

”

Inquiring mind

Feynman was famed for his uncanny ability to cut to the heart of a problem with novel approaches. Feynman liked to tell a story about how when he was a little kid, he asked his father, "Why do things fall?" As an adult, he praised his father for answering, "Nobody knows why things fall. It's a deep mystery, and the smartest people in the world don't know the basic reason for it." Contrast that with the average person's off-the-cuff answer, "Oh, it's because of gravity." Feynman liked his father's answer, because his father realized that simply giving a name to something didn't mean that you understood it.

This approach to problem solving was utterly at odds with the culture at NASA during the 1980s. NASA had decided that the space shuttle ought to be so reliable that each mission had only a 1 in 100,000 chance of failure. They fudged safety figures for parts such as the infamous O-rings, whose failure at unusually low launch temperatures destroyed Space Shuttle Challenger.

Manhattan Project

Feynman worked on the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb, assigned to the nuclear engineering section, designing some of the water shielding that protected the early reactors. Concerned more about UV radiation than brightness, Feynman courageously chose to view the atomic bomb test called "Trinity" by viewing it through a car windshield rather than with the eye protection recommended by others.

Challenger investigation

He had a leading role in the investigation of the crash of the space shuttle Challenger.

Feynman cut through the red tape and figured out what caused the Challenger disaster.

• I took this stuff that I got out of your seal and I put it in ice water, and I discovered that when you put some pressure on it for a while and then undo it, it doesn't stretch back. It stays the same dimension. In other words, for a few seconds at least and more seconds than that, there is no resilience in this particular material when it is at a temperature of 32 degrees.

His style of investigating with his own direct methods rather than following the commission schedule put him at odds with Rogers, who once commented, "Feynman is becoming a real pain." During a televised hearing, Feynman famously demonstrated how the O-rings became less resilient and subject to seal failures at ice-cold temperatures by immersing a sample of the material in a glass of ice water.

Feynman was so critical of flaws in NASA's "safety culture" that he threatened to remove his name from the report unless it included his personal observations on the reliability of the shuttle. He argued that the estimates of reliability offered by NASA management were wildly unrealistic, differing as much as a thousandfold from the estimates of working engineers. "For a successful technology," he concluded, "reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."

• NASA officials argue that ... since the Shuttle is a manned vehicle "the probability of mission success is necessarily very close to 1.0." It is not very clear what this phrase means. Does it mean it is close to 1 or that it ought to be close to 1?"

• In fact, previous NASA experience had shown, on occasion, just such difficulties, near accidents, and accidents, all giving warning that the probability of flight failure was not so very small.

Religious views

Feynman didn't believe in an Abrahamic God, but felt that belief in God was entirely consistent with science. But Feynman also rejected the Philosophy of Science which recognizes important limitations on scientific assertions, such as falsifiability.

"As an independent thinker Feynman is against all kinds of authority — religious, political or scientific." Feynman was strongly anti-communist.

Feynman rejected any suggestion that science might disprove the existence of God and instead Feynman took more of a probabilistic approach:

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I do not believe that science can disprove the existence of God (in the traditional Abrahamic view); I think that is impossible. And if it is impossible, is not a belief in science and in a God — an ordinary God of religion — a consistent possibility? Yes, it is consistent. Despite the fact that I said that more than half of the scientists don’t believe in God, many scientists do believe in both science and God, in a perfectly consistent way.

”

The quote below in 1981 below from Feynman about his preference to focus on issues he can figure out may be a more precise explanation of his religious views late in life, rather than labeling him as an "atheist" as some websites do. The quote attributed to Feynman as being an "avowed atheist" was as a young man, when a rebellious attitude is common among many, particularly in a university culture. At age 13, as his parents regularly attended a synogogue every Friday, Feynman said later that he rejected that "Jewish people are in any way 'the chosen people.'" But Feynman did not even look at the Talmud until late in life, when he saw it for the first time and was somewhat impressed by it.

String theory

Although string theory "generalizes Feynman's perturbative approach, replacing the point fermions and bosons by closed strings, and thus removing all of the sources of infinities in Feynman's approach (no point particles or point vertices)," Feynman was critical of how string theory lacked testability.

Feynman stated in criticism of string theory:

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I don't like that they are not calculating anything. 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.’ For example, the theory requires ten dimensions. Well, maybe there is a way of wrapping up six of the dimensions. Yes, that is possible mathematically, but why not seven? When they write their equations, the equations should decide how many of these things get wrapped up, not the desire to agree with experiment. In other words, there is no reason whatsoever in superstring theory that it is not eight of the ten dimensions that get wrapped up and that the result is two dimensions, which would be completely in disagreement with experience. So the fact that it might disagree with experience is very tenuous, it does not produce anything, it has to be excused most of the time. It does not look right.

”

Quotes

Here is a collection of quotations by Richard Feynman:

• “I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.”
• “I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting ‘not knowing’ than to have answers that might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I’m not absolutely sure of anything, and there are many things I don’t know anything about such as whether it means anything to ask ‘why we’re here?’ and what the question might mean; I might think about it a little bit, and if I can’t figure it out, I’ll move on to something else, but I don’t have to know an answer, I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it is, as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn’t frighten me.” (1981, at age 63, from an interview with Christopher Sykes “The Pleasure of Finding Things Out” interview)
• “Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt.” (c. 1960)
• "What the three [1965] Nobel Prize winners [including Feynman] did, in the words of Feynman, was":

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to get rid of the infinities in the calculations. The infinities are still there, but now they can be skirted around ... We have designed a method for sweeping them under the rug.

”

Books

• Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! - his personal and academic life up to the 1960s
• What Do You Care What Other People Think? - half the book is about the Challenger disaster
• QED- A accessible explanation of quantum electrodynamics written for a layman.
• The meaning of it all- A book of philosophy.
• The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman (2000) excerpt and text search
• "The Development of the Space-Time View of Quantum Electrodynamics", his Nobel Prize Lecture, 1965

See also

• Manhattan Project
• Albert Einstein
• J. Robert Oppenheimer
• Niels Bohr
• Edward Teller
• Enrico Fermi

External links

• Biography