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Science · Physics

Richard Feynman

1918–1988 · American

Quantum electrodynamics; theoretical physics

Richard Feynman was an American theoretical physicist who shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics for work on quantum electrodynamics, introducing the diagrams that bear his name. A gifted teacher at Caltech and a celebrated raconteur, he became a public figure through his memoirs and, in 1986, his vivid demonstration of the O-ring failure behind the Challenger space shuttle disaster.

How to spot them

  • ▸Feynman diagrams and quantum electrodynamics (QED)
  • ▸Dropped an O-ring into iced water during the Challenger inquiry (1986)
  • ▸Memoirs 'Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!' and 'What Do You Care What Other People Think?'
  • ▸Safecracking and bongo drums at Los Alamos; taught for decades at Caltech

Key discoveries & works

Diagrams depicting particle interactions as lines and vertices (1948–49)

Pictorial shorthand for calculations in quantum field theory

Path integral formulation of quantum mechanics (1948)

A particle's behaviour is found by summing over all possible paths

The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1963–65)

Undergraduate lectures given at Caltech, edited into a celebrated textbook

There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom (1959)

Lecture to the American Physical Society often cited as the inspiration for nanotechnology

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (1985)

Best-selling collection of anecdotes about his life

QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (1985)

Popular book based on lectures explaining quantum electrodynamics

Key ideas

  • 'The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool' (Cargo Cult Science, 1974)
  • Parton model: protons and neutrons contain point-like constituents

Quick-fire facts

  • •Nobel Prize in Physics 1965, shared with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, for fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics
  • •Born in Queens, New York City, in 1918; died in Los Angeles in 1988
  • •Worked on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, where he amused himself cracking safes
  • •Served on the Rogers Commission investigating the 1986 Challenger disaster, showing on television that O-ring rubber lost resilience in cold
  • •His first wife, Arline, died of tuberculosis in 1945
  • •Also worked on the theory of superfluidity in liquid helium
  • •His late-life wish to visit Tuva in Central Asia was the subject of the book Tuva or Bust!

Drill it — 8 cards

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Sources