Surely You're Joking!
by Kenneth Lyen
Richard Feynman (1918-1988)
I read the autobiography of Richard Feynman over 20 years ago, and I confess I had forgotten most of it. However, my interest was reignited when I went to the Singapore ArtScience Museum exhibition on the life of Richard Feynman. Born 100 years ago, he made major contributions to quantum mechanics, created a diagram to explain quantum mechanics known as the "Feynman Diagram". He also made contributions to quantum electrodynamics for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1965, and he devised the parton model of hadrons.
Early Life and Education
Born in New York to Jewish parents from Minsk, Belarus, Richard did not embrace any religion and was a confessed atheist. He had delayed speech, and did not start saying any words until he was 3 years old. He excelled in mathematics but his English was plagued by misspellings and grammatical errors. He had his IQ tested and he only managed 125, which was not high enough to enroll into Mensa. At school, he won the New York University Math Championship, but when he applied to Columbia University he was turned down ostensibly because the Jewish quota had been exceeded. Instead he gained entry into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He started off studying mathematics, but grew bored by the subject, changing to electrical engineering, and finally switching to physics. He did well on graduation in 1939, and entered Princeton University’s graduate program in physics, emerging with a PhD.
Arline Greenbaum
During his time at Princeton, he dated Arline Greenbaum, and knowing that she suffered from tuberculosis which was incurable at the time, he nevertheless married her in 1942. She was quite ill and spent much of her life in hospital. When Pearl Harbor was attacked by the Japanese in 1941, the US government increased their involvement in the Manhattan Project, whose objective was to develop a nuclear bomb. Richard Feynman was recruited, and he had to find a sanatorium in New Mexico where his wife could stay. She passed away in 1945.
The Feynman Diagram (1948)
In 1948, Feynman created an original representation of mathematical expressions describing the behavior of subatomic particles. This simplified visual representation of the complex interactions of subatomic particles was important in enabling scientists to undertake critical calculations. It revolutionized many aspects of theoretical physics, especially in quantum field theory and solid-state theory.
The Parton Model for Particle Physics (1969)
Feynman’s other achievements included the development of the parton model for particle physics in 1969. This is a model of hadrons, such as protons and neutrons, which could interpret the cascades of radiation (a parton shower) produced from quantum chromodynamics (QCD). The latter is a type of quantum field theory (called the non-abelian gauge theory) describing the strong interaction between quarks and gluons, the fundamental particles that make up composite hadrons such as the proton, neutron and pion.
Educationalist (1950-1988)
Feynman was appointed professor physics at Caltech in 1950, a position he held until his death in 1988. He was a great educationalist and his lecture series in physics have been recorded. According to his students, they said that he had the ability to break down any difficult concept and teach it from a very basic level and build it up from there. He was a good communicator, spoke with enthusiasm, and could put things in perspective. Above all, he motivated his students to think.
Nobel Prize (1965)
In 1965 Richard Feynman was awarded the Nobel Prize, which was shared with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, "for their fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics, with deep-ploughing consequences for the physics of elementary particles."
Music and Art
Feynman enjoyed playing the bongo drums, and he was also keen in drawing and oil-painting, and safe-cracking as a hobby.
Death (1988)
In 1978, Feynman developed abdominal pain, and was diagnosed to have liposarcoma. When the tumor was removed, it was found to be the size of a football, but it had already crushed one kidney and his spleen. He was well until 1986, when he had a further operation for the tumor, but in 1987, he developed renal failure and a ruptured duodenal ulcer. He passed away soon after.
What is Feynman’s legacy?
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Physics: In the book Quantum Man: Richard Feynman’s Life in Science by Lawrence M. Krauss, he describes Richard Feynman as “one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century. His most original contribution, the path-integral formulation of quantum mechanics, has turned out to be hugely generative. In the nonrelativistic domain, Feynman conceived a microscopic entity (such as an electron) going from space-time point (x1,t1) to space-time point (x2,t2). To generalize the theory Feynman introduced a graphic shorthand (the Feynman Diagram) which is a representation of quantum field theory processes in terms of particle paths. This was later also used in the process for calculating the Higgs-Boson particle. In 1948 Feynman showed how quantum electrodynamics (QED) could be made to yield finite results for all observable quantities in the lowest orders of perturbation theory. Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga had demonstrated the same thing, and the three men shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 for their work on QED.”
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Manhattan Project: Feynman participated in the development of the atomic bomb during the 2nd World War.
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Educationalist: As Professor of Physics at Caltech, he was an effective educationalist and his physics lectures “have deeply influenced subsequent generations of physics teachers and physics graduate students.”
Written by Kenneth Lyen
28 October 2018, updated 8 April 2019