Skip to content

Richard Feynman

From the Quicksilver Metaweb.

page for Feynman

Stephensonia

Cargo Cults are a way to link Feynman to Enoch Root.

Authored entries

Richard P. Feynman Nobel Prize Overview

Richard P. Feynman was born in New York City on the 11th May 1918. He studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he obtained his B.Sc. in 1939 and at Princeton University where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1942. He was Research Assistant at Princeton (1940-1941), Professor of Theoretical Physics at Cornell University (1945-1950), Visiting Professor and thereafter appointed Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology (1950-1959). Until his death, he was the Richard Chace Tolman Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology.

Professor Feynman is a member of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science; the National Academy of Science; in 1965 he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Society, London (Great Britain).

He holds the following awards: Albert Einstein Award (1954, Princeton); Einstein Award (Albert Einstein Award College of Medicine); Lawrence Award (1962).

Richard Feynman married Gweneth Howarth, a son, Carl Richard (born 22nd April 1961), and a daughter Michelle Catherine (born 13th August 1968) survived them. He died in 1988.

Richard Feynman

grabbed from various Wikipedia sources

Richard Phillips Feynman (May 11 ,1918 -February 15 ,1988) (last name pronounced "fine-man") was one of the most influential American physicists of the 20th century, expanding greatly the knowledge of quantum electrodynamics. As well as being an inspiring lecturer and musician, he helped in the development of the atomic bomb and was later a member of the panel which investigated the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. For his work on quantum electrodynamics, Feynman was one of the recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1965. He is also famous for his many adventures, detailed in the books Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman!, What Do You Care What Other People Think? and Tuva Or Bust! Sm.feynman.jpg
Richard Phillips Feynman

Biography

Feynman was born in Far Rockaway, Queens, New York; his parents were Jewish, although they did not practice Judaism as a religion. The young Feynman was heavily influenced by his father who encouraged him to ask questions in order to challenge orthodox thinking. His mother instilled in him a powerful sense of humour which he kept all his life.

Feynman attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, before moving on to Princeton as a graduate. While researching his Ph.D, he married his first wife, Arlene Greenbaum, who had been diagnosed with tuberculosis, a terminal illness at that time.

At Princeton, the physicist Robert R. Wilson encouraged Feynman to participate in the Manhattan Project --the wartime U.S. Army project at Los Alamos developing the atomic bomb. He visited his wife in hospital on weekends, right up until her death in July 1945. Immersing himself in work on the project, he was present at the Trinity bomb test. Feynman claimed to be the only person to see the explosion without the dark glasses provided, looking through a truck windshield to screen out harmful ultraviolet frequencies. Feynman also was asked to reaquaint Albert Einstein with the basics of physics.

After the project, Feynman started working as a professor at Cornell University. However he was unhappy there, feeling uninspired. He was therefore surprised to be offered professorships from competing universities, eventually choosing to work at the California Institute of Technology at Pasadena, California, despite being offered a position at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, which included, at that time, such distinguished faculty as Albert Einstein. Feynman rejected the Institute on the grounds that there were no teaching duties. Feynman found his students to be a source of inspiration and also, during uncreative times, comforting. He felt that if he could not be creative, at least he could teach.

Feynman is sometimes called, rarely derogatorily, the 'Great Explainer', or some other similar variant.

Feynman did much of his best work while at Caltech, including research in: * Quantum electrodynamics: The problem for which Feynman won his Nobel Prize involved the probability of quantum states changing. He helped develop a functional integral formulation of quantum mechanics, in which every possible path from one state to the next is considered, the final path being a sum over the possibilities.

He also developed Feynman diagrams, which helped in conceptualising and calculating of interactions between particles.

While at Caltech Feynman was asked to "spruce up" the teaching of undergraduates. After three years devoted to the task, a series of lectures was produced, eventually becoming the famous Feynman Lectures on Physics. Feynman later won the Oersted medal for teaching, which he seemed especially proud of.

Feynman was a keen and influential popularizer of physics in both his books and lectures, notably a talk on nanotechnology called Plenty of Room at the Bottom. He considered the possibility of direct manipulation of individual atoms as a more powerful form of synthetic chemistry.

Feynman considered a number of interesting ramifications of a general ability to manipulate matter on an atomic scale. He was particularly interested in the possibility of denser computer circuitry and microscopes that could see things much smaller than is possible with scanning electron microscopes. Researchers at IBM created today's atomic force microscopes, scanning tunneling microscopes, and other examples of probe microscopy and storage systems such as Millipede.

Feynman proposed that it could be possible to develop a general ability to manipulate things on an atomic scale with a top-down approach. Use ordinary machine shop tools to develop and operate a set of one-fourth-scale machine shop tools. Use these to develop one-sixteenth-scale machine tools, including miniaturized hands to operate them. Continue on until the tools are able to directly manipulate atoms. This will periodically require redesign of the tools, as different forces and effects come into play. The effect of gravity will diminish, the effects of surface tension and van der Waals attraction will increase.

He concluded his talk with challenges to build a tiny motor and to write the information from a book page on a surface 1/25,000 smaller in linear scale. He offered prizes of $1000 for each challenge. Unfortunately, his motor challenge was met by a meticulous craftsman using conventional tools— met the conditions, but did not advance the art. Feynman's talk did not describe the full nanotech concept, though. It was K. Eric Drexler who envisioned self-replicating nanobots in Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology.

He was also one of the first scientists to realise the possibility of quantum computers. Though he never actually wrote any books many of his lectures and other miscellaneous talks were turned into books such as The Character of Physical Law and QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter. Quantumelectrodynamics (QED) was the subject of "QED - The Strange Theory of Light and Matter," the popular book by Richard Feynman which was first published by Princeton University Press in 1985. Feynman makes passing references to the fact that the book is based on a series of general lectures on QED which were first delivered in New Zealand.

Feynman married twice more, first to Mary Louise Bell of Neodesha, Kansas in June, 1952, which was unsuccessful and brief, and second to British Gweneth Howarth, who shared his enthusiasm for life. They remained married for life, and had a child of their own, Carl, and adopted a daughter, Michelle.

Feynman travelled a lot at this time, notably to Brazil, and schemed to visit the then obscure Russian land of Tuva, a dream that, due to Cold War bureaucratic problems, never succeeded. During this period he discovered that he had a form of cancer, but, thanks to surgery, he managed to hold it off.

Feynman was requested to serve on the presidential commission which investigated the Challenger disaster of 1986. Tactfully fed clues from a source with inside information, Feynman famously showed on television the crucial role in the disaster played by the booster's o-ring seals with a simple demonstration using a glass of ice water and a sample of o-ring material. His opinion of the cause of the accident differed from the official findings, and were considerably more critical of the role of management in sidelining the concerns of engineers. After much petitioning, Feynman's minority report was included as an appendix to the official document.

The cancer returned in 1987, with Feynman entering hospital a year later. Complications with surgery worsened his condition, whereupon Feynman decided to die with dignity and not accept any more treatment. He died on February 15 ,1988.

Wikipedia: Cargo Cult

The article is about cargo cults as a religious phenomenon. For the musician see Cargo Cult (music).

The term cargo cult is a reference to aboriginal religions that grew up in the South Pacific, especially New Guinea and Melanesian islands, initially in the mid 1800s, but most commonly in the years during and after World War II. There was no one Cargo Cult so this proper name is a misnomer—no one who participated in a cargo cult actually knew that they were doing so.

The vast amounts of war materiel that were air-dropped into these islands during the Pacific campaign against the Empire of Japan necessarily meant drastic changes to the lifestyle of these islanders as manufactured clothing, canned food, tents, weapons and other useful goods arrived in vast quantities to equip soldiers—and also the islanders who were their guides and hosts. When the war moved on, and ultimately when it ended, the airbases were abandoned and no new "cargo" was then being dropped.

In attempts to get cargo to fall by parachute or land in planes or ships again, islanders adopted a shallow version of the same practices they had seen the soldiers, sailors and airmen use. They carved headphones from wood, and wore them while sitting in control towers. They waved the landing signals while standing on the runways. They lit signal fires and torches to light up runways and lighthouses.

The cultists thought that the foreigners have some special connection to the ancestors, who were the only beings powerful enough to spill such riches. By mimicking the foreigners, they hoped to bypass them.

In a form of sympathetic magic, many built life-size mockups of airplanes out of straw, and created new military style landing strips, hoping to attract more airplanes. The cultural impact of these practices was not to bring about the return of the god-like airplanes that brought such marvelous cargo during the war, but to eradicate religious practices that had existed prior to the war.

A similar cult, the dance of the spirits, arose from contact between American Indians and the American civilization in late 19th century. The Paiute prophet Wovoka preached that by dancing in a certain fashion, the ancestors would come back on railways and a new earth would cover the white people.

Some Amazonian Indians have carved wood mockups of cassette players (gabarora from Portuguese gravadora or Spanish grabadora) that they use to communicate with spirits.

Anthropologist Marvin Harris has linked the social mechanisms that produce cargo cults to those of Messianism.

Eventually, the Pacific cultists gave up. But, from time to time, the term "Cargo cult" is invoked as an English language idiom, to mean any group of people making obeisance to something that it is obvious they do not comprehend.

In this sense, they are perhaps best known because of a speech by physicist Richard Feynman at a Caltech commencement, which became a chapter in the book "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!". In the speech, Feynman pointed out that cargo cultists create all the appearance of an airport—right down to headsets with bamboo "antennas"—yet the airplanes don't come. Feynman argued that scientists often produce studies with all the trappings of real science, but which are nonetheless pseudoscience and unworthy of either respect or support.

Works about Feynman

15545771_6f084481d4_o.jpg
The Feynman Stamp A movie was made about Feynman's life in 1996. Called Infinity and starring Matthew Broderick, the movie focused on Feynman's relationship with his first wife, Arlene, with his work on the Manhattan Project serving as a backdrop for what was essentially a love story. The film received mixed reviews, however, and did poorly at the box office.

Jim Ottaviani has put Richard Feynman in comics highlighting bits of his life.

Shuttlecraft Feynman: Feynman was honored by the producers of Star Trek: The Next Generation ©1997 Paramount Picture by having a shuttlecraft named after him. The shuttle is featured in the episode titled Chain of Command (Part 1).

Finally, the character of Feynman was portrayed by Alan Alda in a play called QED in 2001. The play was essentially a one-man show, with only brief appearances by other characters, portraying Feynman in his office at Caltech and covering many of the stories and anecdotes included in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think?

Works by Feynman

Books on Physics

  • Elementary Particles and the Laws of Physics : The 1986 Dirac Memorial Lectures
  • Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher
  • Six Not So Easy Pieces: Einstein's Relativity, Symmetry and Space-Time
  • The Feynman Lectures on Physics (with Leighton and Sands)
  • The Character of Physical Law
  • QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter
  • Statistical Mechanics
  • Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals (with Hibbs)
  • Lectures on Gravitation
  • Lectures on Computation
  • Feynman's Lost Lecture: The Motion of Planets Around the Sun
  • The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen Scientist
  • The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
  • Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
  • What Do You Care What Other People Think?
  • Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (by James Gleick)
  • No Ordinary Genius: The Illustrated Richard Feynman (by Christopher Sykes (Editor))
  • Tuva Or Bust! (by Ralph Leighton)
  • QED and the Men Who Made It: Dyson, Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga (Princeton Series in Physics) (by Silvan S. Schweber)
  • Selected Papers on Quantum Electrodynamics (Fermi, Jordan, Heisenberg, Dyson, Weisskopf, Lamb, Dirac, Oppenheimer, Retherford, Pauli, Bethe, Bloch, Klein, Schwinger, Tomonaga, Feynman, Wigner, and many others) (by Julian Schwinger (Editor))
  • Richard Feynman: A Life in Science (by John Gribbin and Mary Gribbin)
  • The Beat of a Different Drum: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (by Jagdish Mehra)
  • Feynman's Rainbow: A Search for Beauty in Physics and in Life (by Leonard Mlodinow)
  • GTI Labs Two-Fisted Science
  • Animated Mark Badger and Jim Ottaviani Feynman at Cern

Audio Recordings

  • "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
    • Quantum Mechanics, Volume 1
    • Advanced Quantum Mechanics, Volume 2
    • From Crystal Structure to Magnetism, Volume 3
    • Electrical and Magnetic Behavior, Volume 4
    • Feynman on Fundamentals: Energy and Motion, Volume 5
    • Feynman on Fundamentals: Kinetics and Heat, Volume 6
    • Feynman on Science and Vision, Volume 7
    • Feynman on Gravity, Relativity and Electromagnetism, Volume 8
    • Basic Concepts in Classical Physics, Volume 9
    • Basic Concepts in Quantum Physics, Volume 10

Quote

"Dear Mrs. Chown, Ignore your son's attempts to teach you physics. Physics isn't the most important thing. Love is. Best wishes, Richard Feynman." * More Richard Feynman Quotes at Wikiquote