Richard Feynman

Richard Phillips Feynman (May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988) (surname pronounced FINE-man; /ˈfaɪnmən/ in IPA) was one of the most influential American physicists of the 20th century, expanding greatly the theory of quantum electrodynamics. As well as being an inspiring lecturer and amateur 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, along with Julian Schwinger and Shin-Ichiro Tomonaga. Apart from pure physics, Dr. Feynman also is credited with the revolutionary concept and early exploration of quantum computing.

Feynman was a keen and influential popularizer of physics in both his books and lectures, notably a seminal 1959 talk on top-down nanotechnology called There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom and his transcribed lectures, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, a 3-volume set which was immediately recognized as a classic undergraduate text. 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!. Richard Feynman was, in many respects, an eccentric and a free spirit.

Biography

File:Nobel feynman.jpg

Richard Feynman's Nobel Prize photograph.

Feynman was born in Far Rockaway, Queens, New York; his parents were Jewish and attended temple every Friday, although they were unritualistic in their practice of Judaism as a religion. The young Feynman was heavily influenced by his father, Melville Feynman, who encouraged him to ask questions in order to challenge orthodox thinking. His mother instilled in him a powerful sense of humor which he kept all his life. As a child, he delighted in repairing radios and had a talent for engineering. At school he was bright, but his measured IQ was merely above average at 124. He kept experimenting on and re-creating mathematical topics, such as the half-derivative (a mathematical operator, which when applied twice in succession, resulted in the derivative of a function), utilizing his own notation, before entering college. (Thus, even while in high school, he was developing the mathematical intuition behind his Taylor series of mathematical operators.) His habit of direct characterization would sometimes disconcert more conventional thinkers; for example, one of his questions when learning feline anatomy was: "Do you have a map of the cat?" When he spoke, it was with clarity.

Education

In his last year at Far Rockaway High School, Feynman won the New York University Math Championship. Feynman received a bachelor's degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1939, and was named Putnam Fellow that same year. While there, Feynman had taken every physics course offered, and had taken a graduate course while only in his second year. He obtained a perfect score on the entrance exams to Princeton University in mathematics and physics, but did rather poorly on the history portion. He received a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1942; his thesis advisor was John Archibald Wheeler. Feynman's thesis applied the principle of stationary action to problems of quantum mechanics, laying the ground work for the "path integral" approach and Feynman diagrams. While researching his Ph.D, Feynman married his first wife, Arline Greenbaum. (Arline's first name is often spelled Arlene, as it is in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman and What Do You Care What Other People Think?, two biographies of Feynman. However, in his own letters, published in Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From the Beaten Track, Feynman wrote his wife's name as Arline.) Arline had been diagnosed with tuberculosis, a terminal illness at that time, but she and Feynman were careful, and he never contracted TB.

The Manhattan Project

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. Feynman said he was persuaded to join this effort to help make sure that Nazi Germany did not build them first. On weekends, he visited his wife in a sanatorium in Albuquerque, right up until her death on June 16 1945. He immersed himself in work on the project, and 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 radiation.

As a junior physicist, his work on the project was relatively remote from the major action, consisting mostly of administering the computation group of human computers in the Theoretical division, and then, with Nicholas Metropolis, setting up the system for using IBM punch cards for computation. John G. Kemeny, later president of Dartmouth College, worked for Feynman at this time. Feynman actually succeeded in solving one of the equations for the project which were posted on the blackboards. However, they did not "do the physics right" and Feynman's solution was not used in the project.

Feynman's other work at Los Alamos included calculating neutron equations for the Los Alamos "Water Boiler", a small nuclear reactor at the desert lab, in order to measure how close a particular assembly of fissile material was to becoming critical. After this work he was transferred to the Oak Ridge facility, where he aided engineers in calculating safety procedures for material storage (so that inadvertent criticality accidents could be avoided). He also did crucial theoretical and calculation work on the proposed uranium-hydride bomb, which was later proven to be infeasible.

Feynman was also sought out by the famous physicist Niels Bohr for one-on-one discussions. He later found out why. Most physicists were too much in awe of Bohr to argue with him, but Feynman had no such inhibitions, vigorously pointing out anything he considered to be flawed in his thinking. Feynman said he felt just as much respect for Bohr's reputation as anyone else, but that once anyone got him talking about physics, he couldn't help but forget about anything else.

Due to the top secret nature of the work, Los Alamos was isolated; in his own words, "There wasn't anything to do there". Bored, Feynman claims he indulged his curiosity by learning to pick the combination locks on cabinets and desks used to secure his papers. Feynman once played a joke on another atomic bomb scientist by guessing the combination to his three locked filing cabinets, which contained a comprehensive set of atomic bomb research notes (for his convenience while selecting material for declassification). Feynman guessed the combination on one by amateur psychology (it was 27-18-28 after the base of natural logarithms, e=2.71828), and then discovered it was the same for all three. He left a series of mischievous notes as a prank, which initially spooked his colleague into thinking a spy or saboteur had actually gained access to atomic bomb secrets. (Interestingly, Feynman once borrowed the car of physicist Klaus Fuchs, who was later discovered to actually be a spy, in order to visit his sick wife.) On another occasion, he noted that a captain in his building at Los Alamos had a massive safe, better than anything the bomb scientists had, installed with much ado in his office. Some time after the captain left Los Alamos, Feynman discovered that the captain with the massive safe had (1) never bothered to change the combination from the single generic factory setting, so that even an amateur safecracker could open it, and (2) there was nothing important being kept in the safe, whereas all the secrets of the bomb scientists were mostly kept in relatively insecure locked cabinets. (These anecdotes are related by him in the book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!)

On occasion, Feynman would find an isolated section of the mesa to drum Indian-style; "and maybe I would dance and chant, a little". These antics did not go unnoticed, and rumors spread about a mysterious Indian drummer called "Injun Joe". He also became a friend of laboratory head J. Robert Oppenheimer, who unsuccessfully tried to court him away from his other commitments to work at the University of California, Berkeley after the war.

Early career: Cornell University

After the project, Feynman started working as a professor at Cornell University, where Hans Bethe (who proved that the sun's source of energy was nuclear fusion) worked. However he felt uninspired there; despairing that he had burned out, he turned to less useful, but fun problems, such as analyzing the physics of a twirling, nutating dish, as it is being balanced by a juggler. (As it turned out, this work served him well in future research.) 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 near Princeton, at the Institute for Advanced Study (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, comfort. He felt that if he could not be creative, at least he could teach. Another major factor in his decision was just a desire to live in a mild climate, a goal he seized on while having to put snow chains on his car's wheels in the middle of a snowstorm in Ithaca, New York.

Feynman the "Great Explainer": *The Feynman Lectures on Physics* found an appreciative audience beyond the undergraduate community.

Feynman is sometimes called the "Great Explainer"; he took great care when explaining topics to his students, making it a moral point not to make a topic arcane, but accessible to others. His principle was that if a topic could not be explained in a freshman lecture, it was not fully understood yet. Feynman gained great pleasure from coming up with such a "freshman level" explanation of the connection between spin and statistics (that groups of particles with spin 1/2 "repel", whereas groups with integer spin "clump"), a question he pondered in his own lectures and which he solved in the 1986 Dirac memorial lecture. He opposed rote learning and other teaching methods that emphasized form over function, everywhere from a conference on education in Brazil to a state commission on school textbook selection. Clear thinking and clear presentation were fundamental prerequisites for his attention. It could be perilous to even approach him when unprepared, and he did not forget who the fools or pretenders were^[1].

On one sabbatical year, he returned to Newton's Principia to study it anew; what he learned from Newton, he also passed along to his students, such as Newton's attempted explanation of diffraction.

The Caltech years

Feynman did much of his best work while at Caltech, including research in:

Quantum electrodynamics. The theory for which Feynman won his Nobel Prize is known for its extremely accurate predictions^[2],^[3]. 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.^[4]

Physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, where helium seems to display a lack of viscosity when flowing. Applying the Schrödinger equation to the question showed that the superfluid was displaying quantum mechanical behavior observable on a macroscopic scale. This helped enormously with the problem of superconductivity.

A model of weak decay, which showed that the current coupling in the process is a combination of vector and axial. (An example of weak decay is the decay of a neutron into an electron, a proton, and an anti-neutrino.) Although E.C. George Sudharsan and Robert Marshak developed the theory nearly simultaneously, Feynman's collaboration with Murray Gell-Mann was seen as the seminal one, the theory was of massive importance, and the weak interaction was neatly described.

He also developed Feynman diagrams, a bookkeeping device which helps in conceptualizing and calculating interactions between particles in spacetime, notably the interactions between electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons. This device allowed him, and now others, to work with concepts which would have been less approachable without it, such as time reversibility and other fundamental processes. Feynman famously painted Feynman diagrams on the exterior of his van.

Feynman diagrams are now fundamental for string theory and M-theory, and have even been extended topologically. Feynman's mental picture for these diagrams started with the hard sphere approximation, and the interactions could be thought of as collisions at first. It was not until decades later that physicists thought of analyzing the nodes of the Feynman diagrams more closely. The world-lines of the diagrams have become tubes to better model the more complicated objects such as strings and M-branes.

From his diagrams of a small number of particles interacting in spacetime, Feynman could then model all of physics^[5] in terms of those particles' spins and the range of coupling of the fundamental forces. The quark model, however, was a rival to Feynman's parton formulation. Feynman did not dispute the quark model; for example, when the 5th quark was discovered, Feynman immediately pointed out to his students that the discovery implied the existence of a 6th quark, which was duly 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 was able to derive the Einstein field equation of general relativity, but little more^[6]. Unfortunately, at this time he became exhausted by working on multiple major projects at the same time, including his Lectures in Physics.

File:Feynman caltech 1974.png

Feynman during his famous cargo cult science speech at the Caltech 1974 commencement address.

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, which are a major reason that Feynman is still regarded by most physicists as one of the greatest teachers of physics ever. Feynman later won the Oersted Medal for teaching, of which he seemed especially proud. His students competed keenly for his attention; once he was awakened when a student solved a problem and dropped it in his mailbox at home; glimpsing the student sneaking across his lawn, he could not go back to sleep, and he read the student's solution. That morning his breakfast was interrupted by another triumphant student, but Feynman informed this student that he was too late.

Partly as a way to bring publicity to progress in physics, Feynman offered $1000 prizes for two of his challenges in nanotechnology. He was also one of the first scientists to realize the possibility of quantum computers. 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. He would give lectures which his students often annotated into books, such as Statistical Mechanics and Lectures on Gravity. The Feynman Lectures on Physics took two physicists, Robert B. Leighton and Matthew Sands as full-time editors for a number of years. Even though they were not adopted by the universities as textbooks, the books continue to be bestsellers, as they provide a deep understanding about physics. As of 2005, The Feynman Lectures on Physics have now sold over 1.5 million copies in English, an estimated 1 million copies in Russian, and an estimated half million copies in other languages.

In 1974 Feynman delivered the Caltech commencement address on the topic of cargo cult science, work having the semblance of science but which is only pseudoscience due to a lack of utter integrity 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."

Personal life

Feynman's first wife Arline Greenbaum died of tuberculosis while he was working on the Manhattan project. He married a second time, to Mary Louise Bell of Neodesha, Kansas in June, 1952; this marriage was brief and unsuccessful. He later married Gweneth Howarth from the United Kingdom, who shared his enthusiasm for life and spirited adventure. Besides their home in Altadena, California, they had a beach house in Baja California. They remained married for life, had a son, Carl, in 1962, and adopted a daughter, Michelle, in 1968^[7].

Feynman had a great deal of success teaching Carl using discussions about ants and Martians as a device for gaining perspective on problems and issues; he was surprised to learn that the same teaching devices did not apply for Michelle. Mathematics was a common interest for father and son; they both entered the computer field as consultants and were involved in advancing a new method of using multiple computers to solve complex problems - later known as parallel computing. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory retained Feynman as a computational consultant during critical missions. One coworker characterized Feynman as akin to Don Quixote at his desk, rather than at a computer workstation, ready to do battle with the windmills.

According to Professor Steven Frautschi, a colleague of Feynman, Feynman was the only person in the Altadena region to buy flood insurance after the massive 1978 fire, predicting correctly that the fire's destruction would lead to land erosion, causing mudslides and flooding. The flood occurred in 1979 after winter rains and destroyed multiple houses in the neighborhood.

Feynman traveled a great deal, notably to Brazil, and near the end of his life schemed to visit the obscure Russian land of Tuva, a dream that, due to Cold War bureaucratic problems, never succeeded^[8]. During this period he discovered that he had a form of cancer, but, thanks to surgery, he managed to hold it off. Out of his enthusiastic interest of reaching Tuva came the phrase "Tuva or Bust", which was tossed about frequently amongst his circle of friends in hope that they, one day, could see it first-hand.

Feynman did not work only on physics, and had a large circle of friends from all walks of life, including the arts. He took up painting at one time and enjoyed some success under the pseudonym "Ofey", culminating in an exhibition dedicated to his work. While at Los Alamos on the Top Secret Manhattan Project, he earned the notoriety of being a master safe-cracker. He learned to play drums (frigideira) in acceptable samba style in Brazil by persistence and practice, and participated in a samba "school". Feynman even translated Mayan heiroglyphics. Such actions earned him a reputation of eccentricity.

Although admitting that he used cannabis and ketamine, Feynman never experimented with LSD and gave up alcohol when he began to show early signs of alcoholism. He did not want to do anything that could damage his brain. Feynman had very liberal views on sexuality and was not ashamed of admitting it. In Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, he gives advice on the best way to pick up a girl in a hostess bar and drew artwork for a massage parlor. He used a nude/topless bar as an office away from the office, visiting it six times a week. As a way to study consciousness, Feynman participated in the famed sensory deprivation tanks of his friend John Lilly. Feynman also enjoyed bike riding and being interviewed.

Feynman's later years

Feynman was requested to serve on the presidential Rogers Commission which investigated the Challenger disaster of 1986. 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 flexible gas seals with a simple demonstration using a glass of ice water, a clamp, and a sample of o-ring material. His opinion of the cause of the accident differed from the official findings and was 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 book What Do You Care What Other People Think? includes stories from Feynman's work on the commission. His engineering skill is reflected in his 98% estimate of the Space Shuttle's reliability, which is underscored by the two failures over the 114 flights of the Space Shuttle as of 2006.

The cancer returned in 1987, with Feynman entering the 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. According to his sister, Dr. Joan Feynman, Richard Feynman's last words were "This dying is boring." He and his wife Gweneth, who died in 1989, are buried in Mountain View Cemetery, Altadena, California.

Commemorations of Feynman

File:Scientists4fdc f cropped.jpg

First-day covers for the American Scientists commemorative stamp set.

On May 4, 2005 the United States Postal Service issued the American Scientists commemorative postage stamp series, a 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.

A shuttlecraft named after Feynman appeared in two episodes of the science fiction television show Star Trek: The Next Generation ("The Nth Degree," 1991; "Chain of Command, Part 1," 1992). An error in the art department, however, caused the shuttle name to be misspelled, "FEYMAN."

Feynman appears in the fiction book The Diamond Age as one of the heroes of the world where nanotechnology is ubiquitous.

Works by Feynman

The Feynman Lectures on Physics are perhaps his most accessible work for anyone with an interest in physics. He produced it lecturing to undergraduates in 1962. As the news of the lectures' accessibility grew, a large number of professional physicists began to drop in on them. A professional physicist, Robert B. Leighton, then edited 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 B. Leighton's son, with support from Kip Thorne and several other physicists.

Elementary Particles and the Laws of Physics: The 1986 Dirac Memorial Lectures ISBN 0521340004
^ Feynman's Lost Lecture: The Motion of Planets Around the Sun ISBN 0099736217
Feynman’s Tips On Physics: A Problem-Solving Supplement to the Feynman Lectures On Physics ISBN 0-8053-9063-4
^ Lectures on Computation ISBN 0201489910
^ Lectures on Gravitation ISBN 0-201-62734-5
^ QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter ISBN 0691024170
Quantum Electrodynamics ISBN 0-8053-2501-8
^ Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals (with Albert Hibbs) ISBN 0-070-20650-3
Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher ISBN 0201409550
Six Not So Easy Pieces: Einstein’s Relativity, Symmetry and Space-Time ISBN 0201150263
^ Statistical Mechanics ISBN 0-8053-2509-3
The Character of Physical Law ISBN 0-262-56003-8
The Feynman Lectures on Physics: The Definitive and Extended Edition (with Leighton and Sands). 3 volumes, Addison Wesley, 2005, ISBN: 0805390456. Includes Feynman’s Tips on Physics, a set of four previously unreleased lectures on problem solving.
^ The Feynman Processor : Quantum Entanglement and the Computing Revolution ISBN 0-7382-0173-1
^ Theory of Fundamental Processes ISBN 0-8053-2507-7

Popular works by and about Feynman

Classic Feynman: All the Adventures of a Curious Character, edited by Ralph Leighton, W. W. Norton, 2005, ISBN 0393061329. Chronologically reordered omnibus volume of Surely You’re Joking and What Do You Care What People Think?, with a bundled CD containing one of Feynman’s signature lectures.
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.
Disturbing the Universe, Freeman Dyson, Harper and Row, 1979, ISBN: 0060111089. 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’s Rainbow: A Search for Beauty in Physics and in Life, Leonard Mlodinow, Warner Books, 2003, ISBN 0-446-69251-4
^ Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, James Gleick, Pantheon, 1992, ISBN 0679747044
^ Most of the Good Stuff: Memories of Richard Feynman, edited by Laurie M. Brown and John S. Rigden, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1993, ISBN 0883188708.
^ No Ordinary Genius: The Illustrated Richard Feynman, edited by Christopher Sykes, W W Norton & Co Inc, 1994, ISBN 0393036219.
^ Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track: The Letters of Richard P. Feynman, edited by Michelle Feynman, Basic Books, 2005, ISBN 0-7382-0636-9.
^ QED and the Men Who Made It: Dyson, Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga (Princeton Series in Physics), Silvan S. Schweber, Princeton University Press, 1994, ISBN 0691036853.
^ Richard Feynman: A Life in Science, John Gribbin and Mary Gribbin, Dutton Adult, 1997, ISBN 052594124X.
^ 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), edited by Julian Schwinger, Dover, 1958, ISBN 0486604446
^ Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, Richard Feynman, Ralph Leighton (contributor), Edward Hutchings (editor), W W Norton, 1984, ISBN 0-393-01921-7
^ The art of Richard P. Feynman: Images by a curious character, edited by Michelle Feynman, G+B Arts International, 1995, ISBN 2-88449-047-7.
^ The Beat of a Different Drum: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, Jagdish Mehra, Oxford University Press, 1994, ISBN 0198539487
^ The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen Scientist, Richard Feynman, Perseus Publishing, 1999, ISBN 0738201669.
^ The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman, edited by Jeffrey Robbins, Perseus Books, 1999, ISBN 0738201081.
^ The Road from Los Alamos (Masters of Modern Physics vol. 2), Hans A. Bethe, p.241, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1991, ISBN 0671740121
^ Tuva Or Bust!, Ralph Leighton, W. W. Norton & Company, 2000, ISBN 0393320693
^ What Do You Care What Other People Think?, Richard Feynman, Ralph Leighton (contributor), W W Norton, 1988, ISBN 0-553-17334-0
Don't you have time to think?, Edited and with Additional Commentary by Michelle Feynman, Allen Lane, 2005, ISBN 0-713-99847-4

Audio recordings

Safecracker Suite (a collection of drum pieces interspersed with Feynman telling anecdotes)
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
- Feynman on Science and Vision, Volume 11
- Feynman on Sound, Volume 12
- Feynman on Fields, Volume 13
- Feynman on Electricity and Magnetism, Part 1, Volume 14
- Feynman on Electricity and Magnetism, Part 2, Volume 15
- Feynman on Electromagnetism, Volume 16
- Feynman on Electrodynamics, Volume 17
- Feynman on Flow, Volume 18
- Masers and Light, Volume 19
- The Very Best Lectures, Volume 20
Samples of Feynman's drumming, chanting and speech are included in the song "Kargyraa Rap (Durgen Chugaa)" on the album Back Tuva Future by Kongar-ol Ondar. The hidden track on this album also includes excerpts from lectures without musical background.

Video recordings

The Messenger Lectures (1964)
- The Law of Gravitation
- The Relation of Mathematics to Physics
- The Great Conservation Principles
- Symmetry in Physical Law
- The Distinction of Past and Future
- Probability and Uncertainty - The Quantum Mechanical View of Nature
- Seeking New Laws
QED in New Zealand (1979)
Elementary Particles and the Laws of Physics (1986)

Quotations

"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."
"Physics is to math what sex is to masturbation."
"Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it."
"Mathematics is not real, but it feels real. Where is this place?"
"The same equations have the same solutions." (Thus when you have solved a mathematical problem, you can re-use the solution in another physical situation. Feynman was skilled in transforming a problem into one that he could solve.)
"When you are solving a problem, don't worry. Now, after you have solved the problem, then that's the time to worry."
"The wonderful thing about science is that it's alive."
"All fundamental processes are reversible."
"What does it mean, to understand? ... I don't know."
"What I cannot create, I do not understand." (Taken from his chalkboard after his death.)
"Know how to solve every problem that has ever been solved." (Taken from his chalkboard after his death.)
"But I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose—which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn't frighten me."
"To those who do not know mathematics it is difficult to get across a real feeling as to the beauty, the deepest beauty, of nature ... If you want to learn about nature, to appreciate nature, it is necessary to understand the language that she speaks in."
"I cannot define the real problem, therefore I suspect there's no real problem, but I'm not sure there's no real problem." (about Quantum Mechanics)
"I'd hate to die twice. It's so boring" (last words).

Quotations about Feynman

The "Feynman Problem Solving Algorithm", as facetiously observed by a colleague, Murray Gell-Mann in the NY Times, was:

write down the problem;
think very hard;
write down the answer.

The Nobel laureate physicist and mathematician E.P. Wigner said about Feynman, "He is a second Dirac. Only this time human".

Jeff Coffin (of Béla Fleck and the Flecktones) says in the song "Hoedown" (during a live show recorded and released on DVD as "Live at the Quick"):

This verse is for Richard Feynman, He was not a simple simon.

External links