Richard Feynman

Richard Phillips Feynman ( 11 May 1918 - 15 February 1988) was an American scientist. His main achievements belong to the field of theoretical physics. He was one of the founders of quantum electrodynamics. In 1943-1945 he was one of the developers of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos. He developed his path integration method in quantum mechanics (1948) and the so-called Feynman diagrams (1949) in quantum field theory, which could be used to explain elementary particle transformations. He proposed the parton model of the nucleon (1969), the theory of quantum vortices. Reformer of methods of teaching physics in high school. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965, together with Tomonaga and Schwinger. In addition to theoretical physics, he did research in biology.

Richard Phillips Feynman was born into a Jewish family. His father, Melville Arthur Feynman (1890-1946), emigrated to the US from Minsk with his parents in 1895; his mother's parents, Lucille Feynman (née Phillips, 1895-1981), emigrated to the US from Poland. The family lived in Far Rockaway[en] in south Queens, New York. His father decided that if he had a boy, that boy would be a scientist. (In those years, girls, though they could de jure get an academic degree, were not expected to have an academic future. Richard Feynman's younger sister, Joan Feynman, disproved that view by becoming a famous astrophysicist.) His father tried to nurture Richard's childlike interest in learning about the world around him by providing detailed answers to his many questions, using knowledge of physics, chemistry, biology, often referring to reference materials. Teaching was not pressured (Richard was never told by his father that he should be a scientist). From his mother, Feynman inherited a rousing sense of humour.

Feynman got his first job at the age of 13 repairing radios

Richard Feynman completed a four-year degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Department of Physics and went on to study at Princeton University.

When World War II broke out, Richard Feynman, already a graduate student at Princeton, tried to volunteer for the front. However, all the local draft board could offer him was general combat training. After a little deliberation Richard declined, hoping that a physicist might find a better use in the army. He soon took part in the development of the last, before the first computers, mechanical counting machines that worked to calculate artillery trajectories.

While writing his PhD thesis in physics, Feynman married Arlene Greenbaum, whom he had been in love with since the age of thirteen and to whom he was engaged at 19. By the time of their marriage, Arlene was doomed to die of tuberculosis.

Feynman's parents were against the wedding, but Feynman nevertheless had his own way. The marriage ceremony was held on the way to the train station for departure for Los Alamos; the witnesses were an accountant and bookkeeper, employees of Richmond City Hall; no relatives of the newlyweds were at the ceremony. At the end of the ceremony, when it was the husband's turn to kiss the bride, Richard, mindful of his wife's illness, sealed a chaste kiss on Arlene's cheek.

At Los Alamos, Feynman was involved in the development of the atomic bomb (see Manhattan Project). At the time of recruitment, Feynman was still at Princeton, and he had been given the idea to join the project by the famous physicist Robert Wilson. At first Feynman was not keen to work on the atomic bomb, but then he thought what would happen if the Nazis invented it first and joined the development. While Feynman was working at Los Alamos, his wife Arlene was in a nearby hospital in Albuquerque, and Feynman spent every weekend with her.

While working on the bomb, Feynman developed good skills as a safecracker. He made a convincing case for the inadequacy of the security measures in place by stealing all the information on the development of the atomic bomb from the vaults of other employees - everything from uranium enrichment technology to the bomb assembly manual. True, he needed these documents for his work. In his autobiographical book "You've Got to be Kidding Me, Mr. Feynman!" he recounts that he was involved in opening safes out of curiosity (as he did many others in his life) and after much study of the subject he found several tricks he used to open the safe cabinets in the laboratory. He was also often aided in this endeavour by human indiscretion and, at times, by luck. In this way he earned a reputation as a burglar and the distrust of his military superiors.

From the 1950s Feynman worked as a researcher at the California Institute of Technology. After the war and the death of his wife, Feynman felt devastated, so he never ceased to be surprised by the number of invitations to take up positions in university departments. Eventually he even received an invitation to Princeton - where geniuses such as Einstein taught. Feynman decided that if the world wanted him, it would have him; whether or not the world would expect to get its hands on a great physicist was not up to him [Feynman]. Once Feynman stopped doubting himself and setting himself some boundaries and goals, he again felt a rush of energy and inspiration. Then Feynman also promised himself not to work on anything he could not play with.

Feynman continued to work on his own theory of quantum transformations. He also made a breakthrough in understanding the physics of superfluidity by applying Schrödinger's equation to the phenomenon. This discovery, together with the explanation of superconductivity obtained by three other physicists a little earlier, gave a new boost to low temperature physics. In addition, Feynman worked with Murray Gell-Mann, the discoverer of quarks, on the theory of 'weak decay', best seen in the beta decay of the free neutron to proton, electron and antineutrino. This work actually led to the discovery of a new law of nature. Feynman put forward the idea of quantum computing.

In the 1960s, at the request of the academy, Feynman spent three years creating a new physics course. The result was the textbook The Feynman Lectures in Physics, which is still regarded as one of the best undergraduate textbooks in general physics today.

Feynman also made an important contribution to the methodology of scientific knowledge, explaining the principles of scientific integrity to students and publishing relevant articles (e.g. on the cult of kargo).

In 1964, Feynman gave 7 popular physics lectures at Cornell University, The Nature of Physical Laws, which formed the basis of a book of the same name.