Richard Feynman

A Far Rockaway kid who took machines apart

Richard Phillips Feynman was born on 11 May 1918 in Manhattan and grew up in Far Rockaway, a working-class corner of Queens facing the Atlantic. His father Melville, a uniform salesman with no scientific training, ran a deliberate curriculum at the dinner table. Melville would read aloud from the Encyclopædia Britannica, pause over a picture of a dinosaur, and ask the boy to imagine what twenty feet meant if the animal walked through their front yard. The lesson was always the same: a name is not a thing. That distinction became Feynman’s lifelong philosophical stance.

Young Richard kept a notebook of repairs for the neighbours, fixing radios he could not yet afford to own. He liked the broken machine more than the radio itself. At Far Rockaway High he scored a perfect mark on the New York Math Olympiad. He graduated to MIT, then to Princeton, where he finished his PhD under John Wheeler in 1942 at twenty-four.

Los Alamos, Arline, the bomb

In the spring of 1943 Feynman kissed his gravely ill wife Arline goodbye in an Albuquerque sanatorium and drove to a fenced mesa in northern New Mexico, where the United States was secretly building an atomic bomb. He took charge of T-4, the computation group. The “computers” were rooms of young women working mechanical Marchant calculators in parallel. Feynman organised them like a factory floor, colour-coded the problem cards, and lifted throughput by an order of magnitude.

He was also the camp’s worst-behaved genius, picking the locks on the cabinets that held the bomb design and leaving polite notes inside (“This one was easy. Try the next one”). Arline died in June 1945, weeks before the Trinity test. Feynman watched the first nuclear explosion through a truck windshield because he had calculated that the glass would block the ultraviolet, and he did not want to wear the welder’s goggles everyone else was issued.

In 1941, with World War II occurring in Europe but the United States not yet at war, Feynman spent the summer working on ballistics problems at the Frankford Arsenal in Pennsylvania. After the attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the war, Feynman was recruited by Robert R. Wilson, who was working on means to produce enriched uranium for use in an atomic bomb, as part of what would become the Manhattan Project. At the time, Feynman had not earned a graduate degree. Wilson's team…

Cornell, Caltech, and the bottle uncorked

After the war Feynman took a professorship at Cornell, but he could not work. He felt empty. His wife had died, the bomb he helped build had killed a hundred thousand civilians, and his father had died two months after Arline. He told Hans Bethe he was finished as a physicist. Bethe told him to stop trying to do important physics and just play.

In a Cornell cafeteria, watching a student spin a dinner plate with the wobble running at a different rate from the rim, Feynman started calculating the relationship between the two rotations for fun. The calculation led him back to the unfinished business of quantum electrodynamics. “It was like uncorking a bottle,” he later said. “Everything flowed out effortlessly.” By 1948 he had a new formulation of quantum mechanics (the path integral) and a graphical shorthand for calculating particle interactions that we now call Feynman diagrams. In 1950 he moved to Caltech in Pasadena and never left.

Diagrams, the Nobel, and the Lectures

At the 1948 Pocono workshop Feynman and Julian Schwinger presented parallel solutions to the same problem: how to make QED give finite numbers. Schwinger covered the blackboards with elegant operator algebra that few could follow. Feynman went second, drawing arrows and squiggles; Niels Bohr stood up to scold him for being unrigorous. But both methods gave the same answer for the electron’s magnetic moment, agreeing with experiment to one part in a million. Within a year Freeman Dyson proved the two languages equivalent. The 1965 Nobel Prize was shared by Feynman, Schwinger, and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, who had reached the same destination from wartime Tokyo.

His most lasting Caltech work was the three-volume Feynman Lectures on Physics, written from a freshman course in 1961-1963. By his own measure the course failed (the freshmen could not keep up), but the Lectures became the canonical introduction to physics for serious students worldwide. He also wrote two volumes of stories, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think?, full of safecracking, bongo drums, Brazilian samba, and almost no physics. They are also, secretly, a manual of how to think.

Feynman played an important role on the Presidential Rogers Commission, which investigated the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. He had been reluctant to participate, but was persuaded by advice from his wife. Feynman clashed several times with commission chairman William P. Rogers. During a break in one hearing, Rogers told commission member Neil Armstrong, "Feynman is becoming a pain in the ass." During a televised hearing, Feynman…

The glass of ice water

On 28 January 1986 the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded after launch, killing all seven astronauts. Feynman, then sixty-eight and fighting his second rare cancer, took a seat on the Reagan-appointed inquiry because his wife Gweneth told him someone honest had to be on it. He sniffed out, mostly from rank-and-file engineers, that the rubber O-rings sealing the solid rocket boosters lost their elasticity in the cold. Management had ignored the engineers anyway.

At a televised hearing on 11 February 1986, Feynman dropped an O-ring into a glass of ice water from the pitcher on his table, pulled it out a few minutes later, squeezed it with a C-clamp he had brought from home, and showed that the rubber stayed deformed. “I believe that has some significance for our problem,” he said mildly. His blunt minority appendix to the report ended with the line, “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.”

He died on 15 February 1988 in Los Angeles, aged sixty-nine, after declining further chemotherapy. His final words are remembered as: “I’d hate to die twice. It’s so boring.”

What he left

Feynman’s gift to physics was not a single discovery but a way of thinking. The path integral is the workhorse formulation of quantum field theory; without it there is no Standard Model. Feynman diagrams are the lingua franca of every particle physics paper. The Lectures and the popular books taught two generations of physicists that you do not understand a thing until you can explain it to a freshman, and that honesty about what you do not know is the first duty of a scientist.

Where Einstein gave us the photon and Schrödinger gave us the wave, Feynman gave us the picture: a hand-drawn arrow, a wiggly line, a vertex where they meet. That picture is how the universe calculates, drawn on a napkin, by a kid from Far Rockaway.