Who is richard feynman

Those are the real things. In science, you learn a kind of standard integrity and honesty. The ones you think you can solve. Richard Feynman on Why Questions — Why ask why?

What kind of why question are you actually trying to answer? Richard Feynman on Beauty and the Flower — Who can appreciate beauty more — a scientist or a layperson?

This one hurts. Feynman on the Key to Science — How would we find a new physical law? What is the key to science? Feynman answers. Feynman comes across as interesting, fun, and brilliant in a series of vignettes he wrote about his life.

In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript. Richard Feynman shared the Nobel Prize in Physics. A pre-eminent twentieth-century physicist and a Nobel laureate: Richard Feynman was certainly those. He was also much more. As the centenary of his birth rolls around on 11 May, a look at his scientific and cultural legacy recalls his restless multidimensionality.

Feynman was a master conjuror of physics. A mathematical whizz with exceptional intuition, he seemed to pull solutions out of thin air. He crafted a lexicon for particle interactions: iconic squiggles, loops and lines now known as Feynman diagrams see D. Cressey Nature , ; His Nobel-prizewinning work on quantum electrodynamics included methods that even he saw as a sleight-of-hand for removing infinite terms from calculations. Yet, his results — equivalent to more systematic, rigorously expounded mathematical techniques independently proposed by co-laureates Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga — matched atomic-physics data beautifully.

His colleagues and supervisors, including scientific director J. Robert Oppenheimer and head of the theoretical division Hans Bethe, were stunned by his computational abilities. Then there was the playfulness. His pranks, including safe-cracking and sneaking through security fences, and his passion for playing the bongos, were arguably as memorable as his science.

Feynman loved telling stories about himself and observing the reaction — the more stunned, amused or horrified the better. In the first, Feynman flaunted his rough edges and eccentricities, and much of the book is hilarious. One story sees him bungling a sprinkler experiment in the cyclotron laboratory at Princeton University in New Jersey, shattering glass tubes and flooding the space with water.

His relationships with women were complicated. In What Do You Care , he explained how he encouraged his younger sister Joan, now an acclaimed astrophysicist, to go into science. And he recounted how many of his attitudes had been shaped by his love for his first wife, Arline, who died of tuberculosis in , a few years after they married.

By that point he had undoubtedly become more cognizant of his legacy. Skip to main content. Richard Feynman. Scientific Contributions Feynman won his Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in quantum electrodynamics, a formula well known for its accurate predictions, which combines his path integral formulation and his Feynman diagrams.

D from Princeton University. Load more. Gallery Richard Feynman. Related Profiles Leroy M Hartmann. Henry F. Reginald C.