Richard P. Feynman

Richard Phillips Feynman was an American theoretical physicist born on May 11, 1918, in Queens, New York City, and he lived through an age when physics moved from chalkboard theory into war, spaceflight, and the public imagination. He shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics with Julian Schwinger and Shin’ichirō Tomonaga for their fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics, with consequences for the physics of elementary particles. At the California Institute of Technology, he held the Richard C. Tolman professorship in theoretical physics.

Feynman is best known for giving physicists new ways to think and calculate. His work included the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, and the parton model. He also developed a pictorial system for mathematical expressions describing the behavior of subatomic particles. These drawings became known as Feynman diagrams and remain widely used. Beyond those central achievements, he has been credited with pioneering the field of quantum computing and introducing the concept of nanotechnology.

His life also crossed major public events. During World War II, Feynman assisted in the development of the atomic bomb. Decades later, in the 1980s, he became known to a much wider audience as a member of the Rogers Commission, the panel that investigated the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. In a 1999 poll of 130 leading physicists by the British journal Physics World, he was ranked the seventh-greatest physicist of all time.

Feynman’s habits of mind were shaped early. His father, Melville Arthur Feynman, encouraged him to ask questions and challenge orthodox thinking, and was always ready to teach him something new. His mother, Lucille, gave him the sense of humor he carried through life. As a child, he kept an experimental laboratory at home, repaired radios, and even built a burglar alarm system while his parents were out. His younger sister Joan shared his curiosity about the world, and Richard encouraged her interest in astronomy by taking her to see the aurora borealis in Far Rockaway. Joan later became an astrophysicist.

Feynman also became one of physics’ great explainers. His talk “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom” in 1959 helped introduce ideas about top-down nanotechnology. His undergraduate lectures at Caltech became The Feynman Lectures on Physics, published from 1961 to 1964. He spoke to lay audiences in works later recorded as The Character of Physical Law and QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter. Ralph Leighton’s anecdote collections, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think?, gave readers another side of him: funny, direct, skeptical, and restless. His words still carry weight because they come from the same source as his science: a fierce need to ask what is really going on.