Richard Phillips Feynman (; May 11, 1918 – February
15, 1988) was an American theoretical 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 for which he proposed the
parton model. For his contributions to the
development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman,
jointly with Julian Schwinger and Shin'ichirō
Tomonaga, received the Nobel Prize in Physics
in 1965.
Feynman developed a widely used pictorial
representation scheme for the mathematical
expressions describing 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.
In a 1999 poll of 130 leading physicists worldwide
by the British journal Physics World he was
ranked as one of the ten greatest physicists
of all time.He assisted in the development
of the atomic bomb during World War II and
became known to a wide public in the 1980s
as a member of the Rogers Commission, the
panel that investigated the Space Shuttle
Challenger disaster. Along with his work in
theoretical physics, Feynman has been credited
with pioneering the field of quantum computing
and introducing the concept of nanotechnology.
He held the Richard C. Tolman professorship
in theoretical physics at the California Institute
of Technology.
Feynman was a keen popularizer of physics
through both books and lectures including
a 1959 talk on top-down nanotechnology called
There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom and the
three-volume publication of his undergraduate
lectures, 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! by Ralph Leighton and the biography
Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman
by James Gleick.
== Early life ==
Feynman was born on May 11, 1918, in Queens,
New York City, to Lucille née Phillips, a
homemaker, and Melville Arthur Feynman, a
sales manager originally from Minsk in Belarus
(then part of the Russian Empire). Both were
Lithuanian Jews. They were not religious,
and by his youth, Feynman described himself
as an "avowed atheist". Many years later,
in a letter to Tina Levitan, declining a request
for information for her book on Jewish Nobel
Prize winners, he stated, "To select, for
approbation the peculiar elements that come
from some supposedly Jewish heredity is to
open the door to all kinds of nonsense on
racial theory", adding, "at thirteen I was
not only converted to other religious views,
but I also stopped believing that the Jewish
people are in any way 'the chosen people'".
Later in his life, during a visit to the Jewish
Theological Seminary, he encountered the Talmud
for the first time and remarked that it contained
a medieval kind of reasoning and was a wonderful
book.Feynman was a late talker, and did not
speak until after his third birthday. As an
adult he spoke with a New York accent strong
enough to be perceived as an affectation or
exaggeration—so much so that his friends
Wolfgang Pauli and Hans Bethe once commented
that Feynman spoke like a "bum". The young
Feynman was heavily influenced by his father,
who encouraged him to ask questions to challenge
orthodox thinking, and who was always ready
to teach Feynman something new. From his mother,
he gained the sense of humor that he had throughout
his life. As a child, he had a talent for
engineering, maintained an experimental laboratory
in his home, and delighted in repairing radios.
When he was in grade school, he created a
home burglar alarm system while his parents
were out for the day running errands.When
Richard was five his mother gave birth to
a younger brother, Henry Phillips, who died
at age four weeks. Four years later, Richard's
sister Joan was born and the family moved
to Far Rockaway, Queens. Though separated
by nine years, Joan and Richard were close,
and they both shared a curiosity about the
world. Though their mother thought women lacked
the capacity to understand such things, Richard
encouraged Joan's interest in astronomy, and
Joan eventually became an astrophysicist.
== Education ==
Feynman attended Far Rockaway High School,
a school in Far Rockaway, Queens, which was
also attended by fellow Nobel laureates Burton
Richter and Baruch Samuel Blumberg. Upon starting
high school, Feynman was quickly promoted
into a higher math class. A high-school-administered
IQ test estimated his IQ at 125—high, but
"merely respectable" according to biographer
James Gleick. His sister Joan did better,
allowing her to claim that she was smarter.
Years later he declined to join Mensa International,
saying that his IQ was too low. Physicist
Steve Hsu stated of the test: I suspect that
this test emphasized verbal, as opposed to
mathematical, ability. Feynman received the
highest score in the United States by a large
margin on the notoriously difficult Putnam
mathematics competition exam... He also had
the highest scores on record on the math/physics
graduate admission exams at Princeton... Feynman's
cognitive abilities might have been a bit
lopsided... I recall looking at excerpts from
a notebook Feynman kept while an undergraduate...
[it] contained a number of misspellings and
grammatical errors. I doubt Feynman cared
very much about such things.
When Feynman was 15, he taught himself trigonometry,
advanced algebra, infinite series, analytic
geometry, and both differential and integral
calculus. Before entering college, he was
experimenting with and deriving mathematical
topics such as the half-derivative using his
own notation. He created special symbols for
logarithm, sine, cosine and tangent functions
so they did not look like three variables
multiplied together, and for the derivative,
to remove the temptation of canceling out
the d's. A member of the Arista Honor Society,
in his last year in high school he won the
New York University Math Championship. 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 applied to Columbia University but
was not accepted because of their quota for
the number of Jews admitted. Instead, he attended
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
where he joined the Pi Lambda Phi fraternity.
Although he originally majored in mathematics,
he later switched to electrical engineering,
as he considered mathematics to be too abstract.
Noticing that he "had gone too far," he then
switched to physics, which he claimed was
"somewhere in between." As an undergraduate,
he published two papers in the Physical Review.
One of these, which was co-written with Manuel
Vallarta, was titled "The Scattering of Cosmic
Rays by the Stars of a Galaxy". Vallarta let
his student in on a secret of mentor-protégé
publishing: the senior scientist's name comes
first. Feynman had his revenge a few years
later, when Heisenberg concluded an entire
book on cosmic rays with the phrase: "such
an effect is not to be expected according
to Vallarta and Feynman." When they next met,
Feynman asked gleefully whether Vallarta had
seen Heisenberg's book. Vallarta knew why
Feynman was grinning. "Yes," he replied. "You're
the last word in cosmic rays."
The other was his senior thesis, on "Forces
in Molecules", based on an idea by John C.
Slater, who was sufficiently impressed by
the paper to have it published. Today, it
is known as the Hellmann–Feynman theorem.In
1939, Feynman received a bachelor's degree,
and was named a Putnam Fellow. He attained
a perfect score on the graduate school entrance
exams to Princeton University in physics—an
unprecedented feat—and an outstanding score
in mathematics, but did poorly on the history
and English portions. The head of the physics
department there, Henry D. Smyth, had another
concern, writing to Philip M. Morse to ask:
"Is Feynman Jewish? We have no definite rule
against Jews but have to keep their proportion
in our department reasonably small because
of the difficulty of placing them." Morse
conceded that Feynman was indeed Jewish, but
reassured Smyth that Feynman's "physiognomy
and manner, however, show no trace of this
characteristic".Attendees at Feynman's first
seminar, which was on the classical version
of the Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory, included
Albert Einstein, Wolfgang Pauli, and John
von Neumann. Pauli made the prescient comment
that the theory would be extremely difficult
to quantize, and Einstein said that one might
try to apply this method to gravity in general
relativity, which Sir Fred Hoyle and Jayant
Narlikar did much later as the Hoyle–Narlikar
theory of gravity. Feynman received a Ph.D.
from Princeton in 1942; his thesis advisor
was John Archibald Wheeler. His doctoral thesis
was titled "The Principle of Least Action
in Quantum Mechanics". Feynman had applied
the principle of stationary action to problems
of quantum mechanics, inspired by a desire
to quantize the Wheeler–Feynman absorber
theory of electrodynamics, and laid the groundwork
for the path integral formulation and Feynman
diagrams. A key insight was that positrons
behaved like electrons moving backwards in
time. James Gleick wrote:
This was Richard Feynman nearing the crest
of his powers. At twenty-three ... there may
now have been 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 in the Wheeler–Feynman
collaboration was beyond Wheeler's own ability).
Feynman seemed to possess a frightening ease
with the substance behind the equations, like
Einstein at the same age, like the Soviet
physicist Lev Landau—but few others.
One of the conditions of Feynman's scholarship
to Princeton was that he could not be married;
nevertheless, he continued to see his high
school sweetheart, Arline Greenbaum, and was
determined to marry her once he had been awarded
his Ph.D. despite the knowledge that she was
seriously ill with tuberculosis. This was
an incurable disease at the time, and she
was not expected to live more than two years.
On June 29, 1942, they took the ferry to Staten
Island, where they were married in the city
office. The ceremony was attended by neither
family nor friends and was witnessed by a
pair of strangers. Feynman could only kiss
Arline on the cheek. After the ceremony he
took her to Deborah Hospital, where he visited
her on weekends.
== Manhattan Project ==
In 1941, with World War II raging in Europe
but the United States not yet at war, Feynman
spent the summer working on ballistics problems
at the Frankford Arsenal in Pennsylvania.
After the attack on Pearl Harbor had brought
the United States into the war, Feynman was
recruited by Robert R. Wilson, who was working
on means to produce enriched uranium for use
in an atomic bomb, as part of what would become
the Manhattan Project. Wilson's team at Princeton
was working on a device called an isotron,
intended to electromagnetically separate uranium-235
from uranium-238. This was done in a quite
different manner from that used by the calutron
that was under development by a team under
Wilson's former mentor, Ernest O. Lawrence,
at the Radiation Laboratory of the University
of California. On paper, the isotron was many
times more efficient than the calutron, but
Feynman and Paul Olum struggled to determine
whether or not it was practical. Ultimately,
on Lawrence's recommendation, the isotron
project was abandoned.At this juncture, in
early 1943, Robert Oppenheimer was establishing
the Los Alamos Laboratory, a secret laboratory
on a mesa in New Mexico where atomic bombs
would be designed and built. An offer was
made to the Princeton team to be redeployed
there. "Like a bunch of professional soldiers,"
Wilson later recalled, "we signed up, en masse,
to go to Los Alamos." Like many other young
physicists, Feynman soon fell under the spell
of the charismatic Oppenheimer, who telephoned
Feynman long distance from Chicago to inform
him that he had found a sanatorium in Albuquerque,
New Mexico, for Arline. They were among the
first to depart for New Mexico, leaving on
a train on March 28, 1943. The railroad supplied
Arline with a wheelchair, and Feynman paid
extra for a private room for her.At Los Alamos,
Feynman was assigned to Hans Bethe's Theoretical
(T) 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. As a junior
physicist, he was not central to the project.
He administered the computation group of human
computers in the theoretical division. With
Stanley Frankel and Nicholas Metropolis, he
assisted in establishing a system for using
IBM punched cards for computation. He invented
a new method of computing logarithms that
he later used on the Connection Machine. 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, Feynman was sent to
the Clinton Engineer Works in Oak Ridge, Tennessee,
where the Manhattan Project had its uranium
enrichment facilities. He aided the engineers
there in devising safety procedures for material
storage so that criticality accidents could
be avoided, especially when enriched uranium
came into contact with water, which acted
as a neutron moderator. He insisted on giving
the rank and file a lecture on nuclear physics
so that they would realize the dangers. He
explained that while any amount of unenriched
uranium could be safely stored, the enriched
uranium had to be carefully handled. He developed
a series of safety recommendations for the
various grades of enrichments. He was told
that if the people at Oak Ridge gave him any
difficulty with his proposals, he was to inform
them that Los Alamos "could not be responsible
for their safety otherwise".
Returning to Los Alamos, Feynman was put in
charge of the group responsible for the theoretical
work and calculations on the proposed uranium
hydride bomb, which ultimately proved to be
infeasible. He was sought out by physicist
Niels Bohr for one-on-one discussions. He
later discovered the reason: most of the other
physicists were too much 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. He 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. Perhaps because of this,
Bohr never warmed to Feynman.At Los Alamos,
which was isolated for security, Feynman amused
himself by investigating the combination locks
on the cabinets and desks, who (he found)
often left them on the factory settings, or
wrote the combinations down, or used easily
guessable combinations like dates. He found
one cabinet's combination by trying numbers
he thought a physicist might 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 research notes all had the same combination.
He left notes in the cabinets as a prank,
spooking his colleague, Frederic de Hoffmann,
into thinking a spy had gained access to them.Feynman's
$380 monthly salary was about half the amount
needed for his modest living expenses and
Arline's medical bills, and they were forced
to dip into her $3,300 in savings. On weekends
he drove to Albuquerque to see Arline in a
car borrowed from his friend Klaus Fuchs.
Asked who at Los Alamos was most likely to
be a spy, Fuchs mentioned Feynman's safe cracking
and frequent trips to Albuquerque; Fuchs himself
later confessed to spying for the Soviet Union.
The FBI would compile a bulky file on Feynman.
Informed that Arline was dying, Feynman drove
to Albuquerque and sat with her for hours
until she died on June 16, 1945. He then immersed
himself in work on the project and was present
at the Trinity nuclear 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.
The immense brightness of the explosion made
him duck to the truck's floor, where he saw
a temporary "purple splotch" afterimage.
== Cornell ==
Feynman nominally held an appointment at the
University of Wisconsin–Madison as an assistant
professor of physics, but was on unpaid leave
during 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 the university to
teach in the coming academic year. His appointment
was not extended when he did not commit to
returning. In a talk given there several years
later, Feynman quipped, "It's great to be
back at the only university that ever had
the good sense to fire me."As early as October
30, 1943, Bethe had written to the chairman
of the physics department of his university,
Cornell, to recommend that Feynman be hired.
On February 28, 1944, this was endorsed by
Robert Bacher, also from Cornell, and one
of the most senior scientists at Los Alamos.
This led to an offer being made in August
1944, which Feynman accepted. Oppenheimer
had also hoped to recruit Feynman to the University
of California, but the head of the physics
department, Raymond T. Birge, was reluctant.
He made Feynman an offer in May 1945, but
Feynman turned it down. Cornell matched its
salary offer of $3,900 per annum. Feynman
became one of the first of the Los Alamos
Laboratory's group leaders to depart, leaving
for Ithaca, New York, in October 1945.Because
Feynman was no longer working at the Los Alamos
Laboratory, he was no longer exempt from the
draft. At his induction physical Army psychiatrists
diagnosed Feynman as suffering from a mental
illness, and the Army gave him a 4-F exemption
on mental grounds. His father died suddenly
on October 8, 1946, and Feynman suffered from
depression. On October 17, 1946, he wrote
a letter to Arline, expressing his deep love
and heartbreak. The letter was sealed and
only opened after his death. "Please excuse
my not mailing this," the letter concluded,
"but I don't know your new address." Unable
to focus on research problems, Feynman began
tackling physics problems, not for utility,
but for self-satisfaction. One of these involved
analyzing the physics of a twirling, nutating
disk as it is moving through the air, inspired
by an incident in the cafeteria at Cornell
when someone tossed a dinner plate in the
air. He read the work of Sir William Rowan
Hamilton on quaternions, and attempted unsuccessfully
to use them to formulate a relativistic theory
of electrons. His work during this period,
which used equations of rotation to express
various spinning speeds, ultimately proved
important to his Nobel Prize–winning work,
yet because he felt burned out and had turned
his attention to less immediately practical
problems, he was surprised by the offers of
professorships from other renowned universities,
including the Institute for Advanced Study,
the University of California, Los Angeles,
and the University of California, Berkeley.
Feynman was not the only frustrated theoretical
physicist in the early post-war years. Quantum
electrodynamics suffered from infinite integrals
in perturbation theory. These were clear mathematical
flaws in the theory, which Feynman and Wheeler
had unsuccessfully attempted to work around.
"Theoreticians", noted Murray Gell-Mann, "were
in disgrace." In June 1947, leading American
physicists met at the Shelter Island Conference.
For Feynman, it was his "first big conference
with big men ... I had never gone to one like
this one in peacetime." The problems plaguing
quantum electrodynamics were discussed, but
the theoreticians were completely overshadowed
by the achievements of the experimentalists,
who reported the discovery of the Lamb shift,
the measurement of the magnetic moment of
the electron, and Robert Marshak's two-meson
hypothesis.Bethe took the lead from the work
of Hans Kramers, and derived a renormalized
non-relativistic quantum equation for the
Lamb shift. The next step was to create a
relativistic version. Feynman thought that
he could do this, but when he went back to
Bethe with his solution, it did not converge.
Feynman carefully worked through the problem
again, applying the path integral formulation
that he had used in his thesis. Like Bethe,
he made the integral finite by applying a
cut-off term. The result corresponded to Bethe's
version. Feynman presented his work to his
peers at the Pocono Conference in 1948. It
did not go well. Julian Schwinger gave a long
presentation of his work in quantum electrodynamics,
and Feynman then offered his version, titled
"Alternative Formulation of Quantum Electrodynamics".
The unfamiliar Feynman diagrams, used for
the first time, puzzled the audience. Feynman
failed to get his point across, and Paul Dirac,
Edward Teller and Niels Bohr all raised objections.To
Freeman Dyson, one thing at least was clear:
Shin'ichirō Tomonaga, Schwinger and Feynman
understood what they were talking about even
if no one else did, but had not published
anything. He was convinced that Feynman's
formulation was easier to understand, and
ultimately managed to convince Oppenheimer
that this was the case. Dyson published a
paper in 1949, which added new rules to Feynman's
that told how to implement renormalization.
Feynman was prompted to publish his ideas
in the Physical Review in a series of papers
over three years. His 1948 papers on "A Relativistic
Cut-Off for Classical Electrodynamics" attempted
to explain what he had been unable to get
across at Pocono. His 1949 paper on "The Theory
of Positrons" addressed the Schrödinger equation
and Dirac equation, and introduced what is
now called the Feynman propagator. Finally,
in papers on the "Mathematical Formulation
of the Quantum Theory of Electromagnetic Interaction"
in 1950 and "An Operator Calculus Having Applications
in Quantum Electrodynamics" in 1951, he developed
the mathematical basis of his ideas, derived
familiar formulae and advanced new ones.While
papers by others initially cited Schwinger,
papers citing Feynman and employing Feynman
diagrams appeared in 1950, and soon became
prevalent. Students learned and used the powerful
new tool that Feynman had created. Computer
programs were later written to compute Feynman
diagrams, providing a tool of unprecedented
power. It is possible to write such programs
because the Feynman diagrams constitute a
formal language with a formal grammar. Marc
Kac provided the formal proofs of the summation
under history, showing that the parabolic
partial differential equation can be re-expressed
as a sum under different histories (that is,
an expectation operator), what is now known
as the Feynman–Kac formula, the use of which
extends beyond physics to many applications
of stochastic processes. To Schwinger, however,
the Feynman diagram was "pedagogy, not physics."By
1949, Feynman was becoming restless at Cornell.
He never settled into a particular house or
apartment, living in guest houses or student
residences, or with married friends "until
these arrangements became sexually volatile."
He liked to date undergraduates, hire prostitutes,
and sleep with the wives of friends. He was
not fond of Ithaca's cold winter weather,
and pined for a warmer climate. Above all,
at Cornell, he was always in the shadow of
Hans Bethe. Despite all of this, Feynman looked
back favorably on the Telluride House, where
he resided for a large period of his Cornell
career. In an interview, he described the
House as "a group of boys that have been specially
selected because of their scholarship, because
of their cleverness or whatever it is, to
be given free board and lodging and so on,
because of their brains." He enjoyed the house's
convenience and said that "it's there that
I did the fundamental work" for which he won
the Nobel Prize.
== Caltech years ==
=== Personal and political life ===
Feynman spent several weeks in Rio de Janeiro
in July 1949. That year, the Soviet Union
detonated its first atomic bomb, generating
anti-communist hysteria. Fuchs was arrested
as a Soviet spy in 1950 and the FBI questioned
Bethe about Feynman's loyalty. Physicist David
Bohm was arrested on December 4, 1950 and
emigrated to Brazil in October 1951. A girlfriend
told Feynman that he should also consider
moving to South America. He had a sabbatical
coming for 1951–52, and elected to spend
it in Brazil, where he gave courses at the
Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Físicas. In
Brazil, Feynman was impressed with samba music,
and learned to play a metal percussion instrument,
the frigideira. He was an enthusiastic amateur
player of bongo drums and often played them
in the pit orchestra in musicals. He spent
time in Rio with his friend Bohm but Bohm
could not convince Feynman to investigate
Bohm's ideas on physics.Feynman did not return
to Cornell. Bacher, who had been instrumental
in bringing Feynman to Cornell, had lured
him to the California Institute of Technology
(Caltech). Part of the deal was that he could
spend his first year on sabbatical in Brazil.
He had become smitten by Mary Louise Bell
from Neodesha, Kansas. They had met in a cafeteria
in Cornell, where she had studied the history
of Mexican art and textiles. She later followed
him to Caltech, where he gave a lecture. While
he was in Brazil, she taught classes on the
history of furniture and interiors at Michigan
State University. He proposed to her by mail
from Rio de Janeiro, and they married in Boise,
Idaho, on June 28, 1952, shortly after he
returned. They frequently quarreled and she
was frightened by his violent temper. Their
politics were different; although he registered
and voted as a Republican, she was more conservative,
and her opinion on the 1954 Oppenheimer security
hearing ("Where there's smoke there's fire")
offended him. They separated on May 20, 1956.
An interlocutory decree of divorce was entered
on June 19, 1956, on the grounds of "extreme
cruelty". The divorce became final on May
5, 1958.
In the wake of the 1957 Sputnik crisis, the
US government's interest in science rose for
a time. Feynman was considered for a seat
on the President's Science Advisory Committee,
but was not appointed. At this time, the FBI
interviewed a woman close to Feynman, possibly
Mary Lou, who sent a written statement to
J. Edgar Hoover on August 8, 1958:I do not
know—but I believe that Richard Feynman
is either a Communist or very strongly pro-Communist—and
as such as [sic] a very definite security
risk. This man is, in my opinion, an extremely
complex and dangerous person, a very dangerous
person to have in a position of public trust
... In matters of intrigue Richard Feynman
is, I believe immensely clever—indeed a
genius—and he is, I further believe, completely
ruthless, unhampered by morals, ethics, or
religion—and will stop at absolutely nothing
to achieve his ends.
The government nevertheless sent Feynman to
Geneva for the September 1958 Atoms for Peace
Conference. On the beach at Lake Geneva, he
met Gweneth Howarth, who was from Ripponden,
Yorkshire, and working in Switzerland as an
au pair. Feynman's love life had been turbulent
since his divorce; his previous girlfriend
had walked off with his Albert Einstein Award
medal and, on the advice of an earlier girlfriend,
had feigned pregnancy and blackmailed him
into paying for an abortion, then used the
money to buy furniture. When Feynman found
that Howarth was being paid only $25 a month,
he offered her $20 a week to be his live-in
maid. Feynman knew that this sort of behavior
was illegal under the Mann Act, so he had
a friend, Matthew Sands, act as her sponsor.
Howarth pointed out that she already had two
boyfriends, but decided to take Feynman up
on his offer, and arrived in Altadena, California,
in June 1959. She made a point of dating other
men, but Feynman proposed in early 1960. They
were married on September 24, 1960, at the
Huntington Hotel in Pasadena. They had a son,
Carl, in 1962, and adopted a daughter, Michelle,
in 1968. Besides their home in Altadena, they
had a beach house in Baja California, purchased
with the money from Feynman's Nobel Prize.Feynman
tried marijuana and ketamine at John Lilly's
famed sensory deprivation tanks, as a way
of studying consciousness. He gave up alcohol
when he began to show vague, early signs of
alcoholism, as he did not want to do anything
that could damage his brain. Despite his curiosity
about hallucinations, he was reluctant to
experiment with LSD.
=== Physics ===
At Caltech, Feynman investigated the physics
of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid
helium, where helium seems to display a complete
lack of viscosity when flowing. Feynman provided
a quantum-mechanical explanation for the Soviet
physicist Lev Landau's theory of superfluidity.
Applying the Schrödinger equation to the
question showed that the superfluid was displaying
quantum mechanical behavior observable on
a macroscopic scale. This helped with the
problem of superconductivity, but the solution
eluded Feynman. It was solved with the BCS
theory of superconductivity, proposed by John
Bardeen, Leon Neil Cooper, and John Robert
Schrieffer in 1957.
Feynman, inspired by a desire to quantize
the Wheeler–Feynman absorber theory of electrodynamics,
laid the groundwork for the path integral
formulation and Feynman diagrams.With Murray
Gell-Mann, Feynman developed a model of weak
decay, which showed that the current coupling
in the process is a combination of vector
and axial currents (an example of weak decay
is the decay of a neutron into an electron,
a proton, and an antineutrino). Although E.
C. George Sudarshan and Robert Marshak developed
the theory nearly simultaneously, Feynman's
collaboration with Murray Gell-Mann was seen
as seminal because the weak interaction was
neatly described by the vector and axial currents.
It thus combined the 1933 beta decay theory
of Enrico Fermi with an explanation of parity
violation.Feynman attempted an explanation,
called the parton model, of the strong interactions
governing nucleon scattering. The parton model
emerged as a complement to the quark model
developed by 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; 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 SLAC National Accelerator
Laboratory deep inelastic scattering experiments
of the late 1960s showed that nucleons (protons
and neutrons) contained point-like particles
that scattered electrons. It was natural to
identify these with quarks, but Feynman's
parton model attempted to interpret the experimental
data in a way that 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 that carry the forces
between the quarks, and their three-valued
color quantum number solves the omega-minus
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
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 derived the Einstein field equation
of general relativity, but little more. The
computational device that Feynman discovered
then for gravity, "ghosts", which are "particles"
in the interior of his diagrams that have
the "wrong" connection between spin and statistics,
have proved invaluable in explaining the quantum
particle behavior of the Yang–Mills theories,
for example, quantum chromodynamics and the
electro-weak theory. He did work on all four
of the forces of nature: electromagnetic,
the weak force, the strong force and gravity.
John and Mary Gribbin state in their book
on Feynman that "Nobody else has made such
influential contributions to the investigation
of all four of the interactions".Partly as
a way to bring publicity to progress in physics,
Feynman offered $1,000 prizes for two of his
challenges in nanotechnology; one was claimed
by William McLellan and the other by Tom Newman.
He was also one of the first scientists to
conceive the possibility of quantum computers.
In 1984–1986, 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 of critical exponents measured
in satellite experiments.
=== Pedagogy ===
In the early 1960s, Feynman acceded to a request
to "spruce up" the teaching of undergraduates
at Caltech. After three years devoted to the
task, he produced a series of lectures that
later became The Feynman Lectures on Physics.
He wanted a picture of a drumhead sprinkled
with powder to show the modes of vibration
at the beginning of the book. Concerned over
the connections to drugs and rock and roll
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. The Feynman Lectures on Physics
occupied two physicists, Robert B. Leighton
and Matthew Sands, as part-time co-authors
for several years. Even though the books were
not adopted by universities as textbooks,
they continue to sell well because they provide
a deep understanding of physics. Many of his
lectures and miscellaneous talks were turned
into other books, including The Character
of Physical Law, QED: The Strange Theory of
Light and Matter, Statistical Mechanics, Lectures
on Gravitation, and the Feynman Lectures on
Computation.Feynman wrote about his experiences
teaching physics undergraduates in Brazil.
The students' study habits and the Portuguese
language textbooks were so devoid of any context
or applications for their information that,
in Feynman's opinion, the students were not
learning physics at all. At the end of the
year, Feynman was invited to give a lecture
on his teaching experiences, and he agreed
to do so, provided he could speak frankly,
which he did.
Feynman opposed rote learning or unthinking
memorization and other teaching methods that
emphasized form over function. Clear thinking
and clear presentation were fundamental prerequisites
for his attention. It could be perilous even
to approach him unprepared, and he did not
forget fools and pretenders. In 1964, he served
on the California State Curriculum Commission,
which was responsible for approving textbooks
to be used by schools in California. He was
not impressed with what he found. Many of
the mathematics texts covered subjects of
use only to pure mathematicians as part of
the "New Math". Elementary students were taught
about sets, but:It will perhaps surprise most
people who have studied these textbooks to
discover that the symbol ∪ or ∩ representing
union and intersection of sets and the special
use of the brackets { } and so forth, all
the elaborate notation for sets that is given
in these books, almost never appear in any
writings in theoretical physics, in engineering,
in business arithmetic, computer design, or
other places where mathematics is being used.
I see no need or reason for this all to be
explained or to be taught in school. It is
not a useful way to express one's self. It
is not a cogent and simple way. It is claimed
to be precise, but precise for what purpose?
In April 1966, Feynman delivered an address
to the National Science Teachers Association,
in which he suggested how students could be
made to think like scientists, be open-minded,
curious, and especially, to doubt. In the
course of the lecture, he gave a definition
of science, which he said came about by several
stages. The evolution of intelligent life
on planet Earth—creatures such as cats that
play and learn from experience. The evolution
of humans, who came to use language to pass
knowledge from one individual to the next,
so that the knowledge was not lost when an
individual died. Unfortunately, incorrect
knowledge could be passed down as well as
correct knowledge, so another step was needed.
Galileo and others started doubting the truth
of what was passed down and to investigate
ab initio, from experience, what the true
situation was—this was science.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."Feynman served as doctoral advisor to
31 students.
=== Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! ===
In the 1960s, Feynman began thinking of writing
an autobiography, and he began granting interviews
to historians. In the 1980s, working with
Ralph Leighton (Robert Leighton's son), he
recorded chapters on audio tape that Ralph
transcribed. The book was published in 1985
as Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! and
became a best-seller. The publication of the
book brought a new wave of protest about Feynman's
attitude toward women. There had been protests
over his alleged sexism in 1968, and again
in 1972. It did not help that Jenijoy La Belle,
who had been hired as Caltech's first female
professor in 1969, was refused tenure in 1974.
She filed suit with the Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission, which ruled against Caltech in
1977, adding that she had been paid less than
male colleagues. La Belle finally received
tenure in 1979. Many of Feynman's colleagues
were surprised that he took her side. He had
got to know La Belle and both liked and admired
her.Gell-Mann was upset by Feynman's account
in the book of the weak interaction work,
and threatened to sue, resulting in a correction
being inserted in later editions. This incident
was just the latest provocation in decades
of bad feeling between the two scientists.
Gell-Mann often expressed frustration at the
attention Feynman received; he remarked: "[Feynman]
was a great scientist, but he spent a great
deal of his effort generating anecdotes about
himself." He noted that Feynman's eccentricities
included a refusal to brush his teeth, which
he advised on national television that others
not do, despite dentists showing him scientific
studies that supported the practice.
=== Challenger disaster ===
When invited to join the Rogers Commission,
which investigated the Challenger disaster,
Feynman was hesitant. Washington, D.C., he
told his wife, was "a great big world of mystery
to me, with tremendous forces." But she convinced
him to go, saying he might discover something
others overlooked. Because Feynman did not
balk at blaming NASA for the disaster, he
clashed with the politically savvy commission
chairman William Rogers, a former Secretary
of State. During a break in one hearing, Rogers
told commission member Neil Armstrong, "Feynman
is becoming a pain in the ass." During a televised
hearing, Feynman demonstrated that the material
used in the shuttle's O-rings became less
resilient in cold weather by compressing a
sample of the material in a clamp and immersing
it in ice-cold water. The commission ultimately
determined that the disaster was caused by
the primary O-ring not properly sealing in
unusually cold weather at Cape Canaveral.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.
For instance, NASA managers claimed that there
was a 1 in 100,000 chance of a catastrophic
failure aboard the shuttle, but Feynman discovered
that NASA's own engineers estimated the chance
of a catastrophe at closer to 1 in 200. He
concluded that NASA management's estimate
of the reliability of the space shuttle was
unrealistic, and he was particularly angered
that NASA used it to recruit Christa McAuliffe
into the Teacher-in-Space program. He warned
in his appendix to the commission's report
(which was included only after he threatened
not to sign the report), "For a successful
technology, reality must take precedence over
public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."
=== 
Recognition and awards ===
The first public recognition of Feynman's
work came in 1954, when Lewis Strauss, the
chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC)
notified him that he had won the Albert Einstein
Award, which was worth $15,000 and came with
a gold medal. Because of Strauss's actions
in stripping Oppenheimer of his security clearance,
Feynman was reluctant to accept the award,
but Isidor Isaac Rabi cautioned him: "You
should never turn a man's generosity as a
sword against him. Any virtue that a man has,
even if he has many vices, should not be used
as a tool against him." It was followed by
the AEC's Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award in
1962. Schwinger, Tomonaga and Feynman shared
the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics "for their
fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics,
with deep-ploughing consequences for the physics
of elementary particles". He was elected a
Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1965,
received the Oersted Medal in 1972, and the
National Medal of Science in 1979. He was
elected a member of the National Academy of
Sciences, but ultimately resigned and is no
longer listed by them.
== Death ==
In 1978, Feynman sought medical treatment
for abdominal pains and was diagnosed with
liposarcoma, a rare form of cancer. Surgeons
removed a tumor the size of a football that
had crushed one kidney and his spleen. Further
operations were performed in October 1986
and October 1987. He was again hospitalized
at the UCLA Medical Center on February 3,
1988. A ruptured duodenal ulcer caused kidney
failure, and he declined to undergo the dialysis
that might have prolonged his life for a few
months. Watched over by his wife Gweneth,
sister Joan, and cousin Frances Lewine, he
died on February 15, 1988.When Feynman was
nearing death, he asked Danny Hillis why he
was so sad. Hillis replied that he thought
Feynman was going to die soon. Feynman said
that this sometimes bothered him, too, adding,
when you get to be as old as he was, and have
told so many stories to so many people, even
when he was dead he would not be completely
gone.Near the end of his life, Feynman attempted
to visit the Tuvan ASSR in Russia, a dream
thwarted by Cold War bureaucratic issues – the
letter from the Soviet government authorizing
the trip was not received until the day after
he died. His daughter Michelle later undertook
the journey. His burial was at Mountain View
Cemetery and Mausoleum in Altadena. His last
words were: "I'd hate to die twice. It's so
boring."
== Popular legacy ==
Aspects of Feynman's life have been portrayed
in various media. Feynman was portrayed by
Matthew Broderick in the 1996 biopic Infinity.
Actor Alan Alda commissioned playwright Peter
Parnell to write a two-character play about
a fictional day in the life of Feynman set
two years before Feynman's death. The play,
QED, premiered at the Mark Taper Forum in
Los Angeles in 2001 and was later presented
at the Vivian Beaumont Theater on Broadway,
with both presentations starring Alda as Richard
Feynman. Real Time Opera premiered its opera
Feynman at the Norfolk (CT) Chamber Music
Festival in June 2005. In 2011, Feynman was
the subject of a biographical graphic novel
entitled simply Feynman, written by Jim Ottaviani
and illustrated by Leland Myrick. In 2013,
Feynman's role on the Rogers Commission was
dramatised by the BBC in The Challenger (US
title: The Challenger Disaster), with William
Hurt playing Feynman. In the 2016 book, Idea
Makers: Personal Perspectives on the Lives
& Ideas of Some Notable People, it states
that one of the things Feynman often said
was that "peace of mind is the most important
prerequisite for creative work." Feynman felt
one should do everything possible to achieve
that peace of mind.Feynman is commemorated
in various ways. 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 Victor Stabin under the artistic
direction of Carl T. Herrman. The main building
for the Computing Division at Fermilab is
named the "Feynman Computing Center" in his
honor. A photograph of Richard Feynman giving
a lecture was part of the 1997 poster series
commissioned by Apple Inc. for their "Think
Different" advertising campaign. The Sheldon
Cooper character in The Big Bang Theory is
a Feynman fan who emulates him by playing
the bongo drums. On January 27, 2016, Bill
Gates wrote an article "The Best Teacher I
Never Had" describing Feynman's talents as
a teacher which inspired Gates to create Project
Tuva to place the videos of Feynman's Messenger
Lectures, The Character of Physical Law, on
a website for public viewing. In 2015 Gates
made a video on why he thought Feynman was
special. The video was made for the 50th anniversary
of Feynman's 1965 Nobel Prize, in response
to Caltech's request for thoughts on Feynman.
== 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 978-981-02-4131-5.
Feynman, Richard P. (1942). Laurie M. Brown,
ed. The Principle of Least Action in Quantum
Mechanics. PhD Dissertation, Princeton University.
World Scientific (with title Feynman's Thesis:
a New Approach to Quantum Theory) (published
2005). ISBN 978-981-256-380-4.
Wheeler, John A.; Feynman, Richard P. (1945).
"Interaction with the Absorber as the Mechanism
of Radiation". Reviews of Modern Physics.
17 (2–3): 157–181. Bibcode:1945RvMP...17..157W.
doi:10.1103/RevModPhys.17.157.
Feynman, Richard P. (1946). A Theorem and
its Application to Finite Tampers. Los Alamos
Scientific Laboratory, Atomic Energy Commission.
OSTI 4341197.
Feynman, Richard P.; Welton, T. A. (1946).
Neutron Diffusion in a Space Lattice of Fissionable
and Absorbing Materials. Los Alamos Scientific
Laboratory, Atomic Energy Commission. OSTI
4381097.
Feynman, Richard P.; Metropolis, N.; Teller,
E. (1947). Equations of State of Elements
Based on the Generalized Fermi-Thomas Theory.
Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, Atomic Energy
Commission. OSTI 4417654.
Feynman, Richard P. (1948). "Space-time approach
to non-relativistic quantum mechanics". Reviews
of Modern Physics. 20 (2): 367–387. Bibcode:1948RvMP...20..367F.
doi:10.1103/RevModPhys.20.367.
Feynman, Richard P. (1948). "A Relativistic
Cut-Off for Classical Electrodynamics". Physical
Review. 74 (8): 939–946. Bibcode:1948PhRv...74..939F.
doi:10.1103/PhysRev.74.939.
Feynman, Richard P. (1948). "A Relativistic
Cut-Off for Quantum Electrodynamics". Physical
Review. 74 (10): 1430–1438. Bibcode:1948PhRv...74.1430F.
doi:10.1103/PhysRev.74.1430.
Wheeler, John A.; Feynman, Richard P. (1949).
"Classical Electrodynamics in Terms of Direct
Interparticle Action" (PDF). Reviews of Modern
Physics. 21 (3): 425–433. Bibcode:1949RvMP...21..425W.
doi:10.1103/RevModPhys.21.425.
Feynman, Richard P. (1949). "The theory of
positrons". Physical Review. 76 (6): 749–759.
Bibcode:1949PhRv...76..749F. doi:10.1103/PhysRev.76.749.
Feynman, Richard P. (1949). "Space-Time Approach
to Quantum Electrodynamic". Physical Review.
76 (6): 769–789. Bibcode:1949PhRv...76..769F.
doi:10.1103/PhysRev.76.769.
Feynman, Richard P. (1950). "Mathematical
formulation of the quantum theory of electromagnetic
interaction". Physical Review. 80 (3): 440–457.
Bibcode:1950PhRv...80..440F. doi:10.1103/PhysRev.80.440.
Feynman, Richard P. (1951). "An Operator Calculus
Having Applications in Quantum Electrodynamics".
Physical Review. 84: 108–128. Bibcode:1951PhRv...84..108F.
doi:10.1103/PhysRev.84.108.
Feynman, Richard P. (1953). "The λ-Transition
in Liquid Helium". Physical Review. 90 (6):
1116–1117. Bibcode:1953PhRv...90.1116F.
doi:10.1103/PhysRev.90.1116.2.
Feynman, Richard P.; de Hoffmann, F.; Serber,
R. (1955). Dispersion of the Neutron Emission
in U235 Fission. Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory,
Atomic Energy Commission. OSTI 4354998.
Feynman, Richard P. (1956). "Science and the
Open Channel". Science (published February
24, 1956). 123 (3191): 307. Bibcode:1956Sci...123..307F.
doi:10.1126/science.123.3191.307. PMID 17774518.
Cohen, M.; Feynman, Richard P. (1957). "Theory
of Inelastic Scattering of Cold Neutrons from
Liquid Helium". Physical Review. 107: 13–24.
Bibcode:1957PhRv..107...13C. doi:10.1103/PhysRev.107.13.
Feynman, Richard P.; Vernon, F. L.; Hellwarth,
R. W. (1957). "Geometric representation of
the Schrödinger equation for solving maser
equations". J. Appl. Phys. 28: 49. Bibcode:1957JAP....28...49F.
doi:10.1063/1.1722572.
Feynman, Richard P. (1959). "Plenty of Room
at the Bottom". Presentation to American Physical
Society. Archived from the original on February
11, 2010.
Edgar, R. S.; Feynman, Richard P.; Klein,
S.; Lielausis, I.; Steinberg, C. M. (1962).
"Mapping experiments with r mutants of bacteriophage
T4D". Genetics (published February 1962).
47 (2): 179–86. PMC 1210321. PMID 13889186.
Feynman, Richard P. (1968) [1966]. "What is
Science?" (PDF). The Physics Teacher. 7 (6):
313–320. Bibcode:1969PhTea...7..313F. doi:10.1119/1.2351388.
Retrieved December 15, 2016. Lecture presented
at the fifteenth annual meeting of the National
Science Teachers Association, 1966 in New
York City
Feynman, Richard P. (1966). "The Development
of the Space-Time View of Quantum Electrodynamics".
Science (published August 12, 1966). 153 (3737):
699–708. Bibcode:1966Sci...153..699F. doi:10.1126/science.153.3737.699.
PMID 17791121.
Feynman, Richard P. (1974a). "Structure of
the proton". Science (published February 15,
1974). 183 (4125): 601–610. Bibcode:1974Sci...183..601F.
doi:10.1126/science.183.4125.601. PMID 17778830.
Feynman, Richard P. (1974). "Cargo Cult Science"
(PDF). Engineering and Science. 37 (7).
Feynman, Richard P.; Kleinert, Hagen (1986).
"Effective classical partition functions".
Physical Review A (published December 1986).
34 (6): 5080–5084. Bibcode:1986PhRvA..34.5080F.
doi:10.1103/PhysRevA.34.5080. PMID 9897894.
Feynman, Richard P. (1986). Rogers Commission
Report, Volume 2 Appendix F – Personal Observations
on Reliability of Shuttle. NASA.
=== 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 1961–1964.
As news of the lectures' lucidity grew, 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.
Feynman, Richard P.; Leighton, Robert B.;
Sands, Matthew (2005) [1970]. The Feynman
Lectures on Physics: The Definitive and Extended
Edition (2nd ed.). Addison Wesley. ISBN 0-8053-9045-6.
Includes Feynman's Tips on Physics (with Michael
Gottlieb and Ralph Leighton), which includes
four previously unreleased lectures on problem
solving, exercises by Robert Leighton and
Rochus Vogt, and a historical essay by Matthew
Sands. Three volumes; originally published
as separate volumes in 1964 and 1966.
Feynman, Richard P. (1961). Theory of Fundamental
Processes. Addison Wesley. ISBN 0-8053-2507-7.
Feynman, Richard P. (1962). Quantum Electrodynamics.
Addison Wesley. ISBN 978-0-8053-2501-0.
Feynman, Richard P.; Hibbs, Albert (1965).
Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals. McGraw
Hill. ISBN 0-07-020650-3.
Feynman, Richard P. (1967). The Character
of Physical Law: The 1964 Messenger Lectures.
MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-56003-8.
Feynman, Richard P. (1972). Statistical Mechanics:
A Set of Lectures. Reading, Mass: W. A. Benjamin.
ISBN 0-8053-2509-3.
Feynman, Richard P. (1985b). QED: The Strange
Theory of Light and Matter. Princeton University
Press. ISBN 0-691-02417-0.
Feynman, Richard P. (1987). Elementary Particles
and the Laws of Physics: The 1986 Dirac Memorial
Lectures. Cambridge University Press. ISBN
0-521-34000-4.
Feynman, Richard P. (1995). Brian Hatfield,
ed. Lectures on Gravitation. Addison Wesley
Longman. ISBN 0-201-62734-5.
Feynman, Richard P. (1997). Feynman's Lost
Lecture: The Motion of Planets Around the
Sun (Vintage Press ed.). London: Vintage.
ISBN 0-09-973621-7.
Feynman, Richard P. (2000). Tony Hey and Robin
W. Allen, ed. Feynman Lectures on Computation.
Perseus Books Group. ISBN 0-7382-0296-7.
=== Popular works ===
Feynman, Richard P. (1985). Ralph Leighton,
ed. Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures
of a Curious Character. W. W. Norton & Co.
ISBN 0-393-01921-7. OCLC 10925248.
Feynman, Richard P. (1988). Ralph Leighton,
ed. What Do You Care What Other People Think?:
Further Adventures of a Curious Character.
W. W. Norton & Co. ISBN 0-393-02659-0.
No Ordinary Genius: The Illustrated Richard
Feynman, ed. Christopher Sykes, W. W. Norton
& Co, 1996, ISBN 0-393-31393-X.
Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained
by Its Most Brilliant Teacher, Perseus Books,
1994, ISBN 0-201-40955-0. Listed by the Board
of Directors of the Modern Library as one
of the 100 best nonfiction books.
Six Not So Easy Pieces: Einstein's Relativity,
Symmetry and Space-Time, Addison Wesley, 1997,
ISBN 0-201-15026-3.
Feynman, Richard P. (1998). The Meaning of
It All: Thoughts of a Citizen Scientist. Reading,
Massachusetts: Perseus Publishing,. ISBN 0-7382-0166-9.
Feynman, Richard P. (1999). Robbins, Jeffrey,
ed. The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The
Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman. Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Perseus Books. ISBN 0-7382-0108-1.
Classic Feynman: All the Adventures of a Curious
Character, edited by Ralph Leighton, W. W.
Norton & Co, 2005, ISBN 0-393-06132-9. Chronologically
reordered omnibus volume of Surely You're
Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care
What Other People Think?, with a bundled CD
containing one of Feynman's signature lectures.
=== Audio and video recordings ===
Safecracker Suite (a collection of drum pieces
interspersed with Feynman telling anecdotes)
Los Alamos From Below (audio, talk given by
Feynman at Santa Barbara on February 6, 1975)
Six Easy Pieces (original lectures upon which
the book is based)
Six Not So Easy Pieces (original lectures
upon which the book is based)
The Feynman Lectures on Physics: The Complete
Audio Collection
Samples of Feynman's drumming, chanting and
speech are included in the songs "Tuva Groove
(Bolur Daa-Bol, Bolbas Daa-Bol)" and "Kargyraa
Rap (Dürgen Chugaa)" on the album Back Tuva
Future, The Adventure Continues by Kongar-ool
Ondar. The hidden track on this album also
includes excerpts from lectures without musical
background.
The Messenger Lectures, given at Cornell in
1964, in which he explains basic topics in
physics. Available on Project Tuva free. (See
also the book The Character of Physical Law)
Take the world from another point of view
[videorecording] / with Richard Feynman; Films
for the Hu (1972)
The Douglas Robb Memorial Lectures, four public
lectures of which the four chapters of the
book QED: The Strange Theory of Light and
Matter are transcripts. (1979)
The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, BBC Horizon
episode (1981) (not to be confused with the
later published book of the same title)
Richard Feynman: Fun to Imagine Collection,
BBC Archive of six short films of Feynman
talking in a style that is accessible to all
about the physics behind common to all experiences.
(1983)
Elementary Particles and the Laws of Physics
(1986)
Tiny Machines: The Feynman Talk on Nanotechnology
(video, 1984)
Computers From the Inside Out (video)
Quantum Mechanical View of Reality: Workshop
at Esalen (video, 1983)
Idiosyncratic Thinking Workshop (video, 1985)
Bits and Pieces—From Richard's Life and
Times (video, 1988)
Strangeness Minus Three (video, BBC Horizon
1964)
No Ordinary Genius (video, Cristopher Sykes
Documentary)
Richard Feynman—The Best Mind Since Einstein
(video, Documentary)
The Motion of Planets Around the Sun (audio,
sometimes titled "Feynman's Lost Lecture")
Nature of Matter (audio)
== Notes ==
== References ==
Bashe, Charles J.; Johnson, Lyle R.; Palmer,
John H.; Pugh, Emerson W. (1986). IBM's Early
Computers. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT.
ISBN 0-262-02225-7. OCLC 12021988.
Bethe, Hans A. (1991). The Road from Los Alamos.
Masters of Modern Physics. 2. New York: Simon
and Schuster. ISBN 0-671-74012-1. OCLC 24734608.
Carroll, John Bissell (1996). Sternberg, Robert
J.; Ben-Zeev, Talia, eds. The Nature of Mathematical
Thinking. Mahwah, New Jersey: L. Erlbaum Associates.
ISBN 978-0-8058-1799-7. OCLC 34513302.
Chown, Marcus (May 2, 1985). "Strangeness
and Charm". New Scientist: 34. ISSN 0262-4079.
Close, Frank (2011). The Infinity Puzzle:
The Personalities, Politics, and Extraordinary
Science Behind the Higgs Boson. Oxford University
Press. ISBN 978-0-19-959350-7. OCLC 840427493.
Deutsch, David (June 1, 1992). "Quantum computation".
Physics World: 57–61. ISSN 0953-8585.
Feynman, Richard P. (1987). Ralph Leighton,
ed. "Mr. Feynman Goes to Washington". Engineering
and Science. Caltech. 51 (1): 6–22. ISSN
0013-7812.
Friedman, Jerome (2004). "A Student's View
of Fermi". In Cronin, James W. Fermi Remembered.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN
978-0-226-12111-6. OCLC 835230762.
Galison, Peter (1998). "Feynman's War:Modelling
Weapons, Modelling Nature". Studies in History
and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies
in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics.
29 (3): 391–434. Bibcode:1998SHPMP..29..391G.
doi:10.1016/S1355-2198(98)00013-6.
Gleick, James (1992). Genius: The Life and
Science of Richard Feynman. Pantheon Books.
ISBN 0-679-40836-3. OCLC 243743850.
Gribbin, John; Gribbin, Mary (1997). Richard
Feynman: A Life in Science. Dutton. ISBN 0-525-94124-X.
OCLC 636838499.
Henderson, Harry (2011). Richard Feynman:
Quarks, Bombs, and Bongos. Chelsea House Publishers.
ISBN 978-0-8160-6176-1. OCLC 751114185.
Hillis, W. Daniel (1989). "Richard Feynman
and The Connection Machine". Physics Today.
Institute of Physics. 42 (2): 78. Bibcode:1989PhT....42b..78H.
doi:10.1063/1.881196. Archived from the original
on July 28, 2009.
Hoddeson, Lillian; Henriksen, Paul W.; Meade,
Roger A.; Westfall, Catherine L. (1993). Critical
Assembly: A Technical History of Los Alamos
During the Oppenheimer Years, 1943–1945.
New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN
0-521-44132-3. OCLC 26764320.
Krauss, Lawrence M. (2011). Quantum Man: Richard
Feynman's Life in Science. W. W. Norton & Company.
ISBN 0-393-06471-9. OCLC 601108916.
Mehra, Jagdish (1994). The Beat of a Different
Drum: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman.
New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-853948-7.
OCLC 28507544.
Oakes, Elizabeth H. (2007). Encyclopedia of
World Scientists, Revised edition. New York:
Facts on File. ISBN 978-1-4381-1882-6. OCLC
466364697.
Peat, David (1997). Infinite Potential: the
Life and Times of David Bohm. Reading, Massachusetts:
Addison Wesley. ISBN 0-201-40635-7. OCLC 1014736570.
Schweber, Silvan S. (1994). QED and the Men
Who Made It: Dyson, Feynman, Schwinger, and
Tomonaga. Princeton University Press. ISBN
0-691-03327-7. OCLC 918243948.
Sykes, Christopher (1994). No Ordinary Genius:
the Illustrated Richard Feynman. New York:
W. W. Norton. ISBN 0-393-03621-9. OCLC 924553844.
Wolfram, Stephen (2016). Idea Makers: Personal
Perspectives on the Lives & Ideas of Some
Notable People. Champaign, Illinois: Wolfram
Media. ISBN 978-1-57955-003-5. OCLC 951465441.
== Further reading ==
=== Articles ===
Physics Today, American Institute of Physics
magazine, February 1989 Issue. (Vol. 42, No.
2.) Special Feynman memorial issue containing
non-technical articles on Feynman's life and
work in physics.
=== Books ===
Brown, Laurie M. and Rigden, John S. (editors)
(1993) Most of the Good Stuff: Memories of
Richard 
Feynman Simon & Schuster, New York, ISBN 0-88318-870-8.
Commentary by Joan Feynman, John Wheeler,
Hans Bethe, Julian Schwinger, Murray Gell-Mann,
Daniel Hillis, David Goodstein, Freeman Dyson,
and Laurie Brown
Dyson, Freeman (1979) Disturbing the Universe.
Harper and Row. ISBN 0-06-011108-9. Dyson's
autobiography. The chapters "A Scientific
Apprenticeship" and "A Ride to Albuquerque"
describe his impressions of Feynman in the
period 1947–48 when Dyson was a graduate
student at Cornell
Feynman, Michelle, ed. (2005). Perfectly Reasonable
Deviations from the Beaten Track: The Letters
of Richard P. Feynman. Basic Books. ISBN 0-7382-0636-9.
(Published in the UK under the title: Don't
You Have Time to Think?, with additional commentary
by Michelle Feynman, Allen Lane, 2005, ISBN
0-7139-9847-4.)
Krauss, Lawrence M. (2011). Quantum Man: Richard
Feynman's Life in Science. W. W. Norton & Company.
ISBN 0-393-06471-9. OCLC 601108916.
Leighton, Ralph (2000). Tuva or Bust!: Richard
Feynman's last journey. W. W. Norton & Company.
ISBN 0-393-32069-3.
LeVine, Harry (2009). The Great Explainer:
The Story of Richard Feynman. Greensboro,
North Carolina: Morgan Reynolds. ISBN 978-1-59935-113-1.;
for high school readers
Milburn, Gerald J. (1998). The Feynman Processor:
Quantum Entanglement and the Computing Revolution.
Reading, Massachusetts: Perseus Books. ISBN
0-7382-0173-1.
Mlodinow, Leonard (2003). Feynman's Rainbow:
A Search For Beauty In Physics And In Life.
New York: Warner Books. ISBN 0-446-69251-4.
Published in the United Kingdom as Some Time
With Feynman
Ottaviani, Jim; Myrick, Leland (2011). Feynman:
The Graphic Novel. New York: First Second.
ISBN 978-1-59643-259-8. OCLC 664838951.
=== Films and plays ===
Infinity, a movie both directed by and starring
Matthew Broderick as Feynman, depicting his
love affair with his first wife and ending
with the Trinity test. 1996.
Parnell, Peter (2002), QED, Applause Books,
ISBN 978-1-55783-592-5 (play).
Whittell, Crispin (2006), Clever Dick, Oberon
Books, (play)
"The Quest for Tannu Tuva", with Richard Feynman
and Ralph Leighton. 1987, BBC Horizon and
PBS Nova (entitled "Last Journey of a Genius").
No Ordinary Genius, a two-part documentary
about Feynman's life and work, with contributions
from colleagues, friends and family. 1993,
BBC Horizon and PBS Nova (a one-hour version,
under the title The Best Mind Since Einstein)
(2 × 50-minute films)
The Challenger (2013), a BBC Two factual drama
starring William Hurt, tells the story of
American Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard
Feynman's determination to reveal the truth
behind the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.
The Fantastic Mr Feynman. One hour documentary.
2013, BBC TV.
== External links ==
Los Alamos from Below on YouTube Lecture by
Feynman
Official website
The Feynman Lectures on Physics Website by
Michael Gottlieb, assisted by Rudolf Pfeiffer
and Caltech
Feynman Online!, a site dedicated to Feynman
Feynman and the Connection Machine
Richard 
Feynman (Interviews, with and about) – American
Institute of Physics
