Richard Feynman
Richard Feynman reformulated quantum mechanics, won a Nobel Prize, and became the most quoted physicist since Einstein. Born in New York in 1918, he was taught to think by his father, a uniform salesman who would explain that a bird's name in every language tells you nothing about the bird. He took his doctorate at Princeton under John Wheeler and was recruited to Los Alamos at twenty-four, where he ran the computing group, checked the bomb designers' arithmetic, and amused himself by picking the locks on safes containing the project's secrets to demonstrate that they were not secure. His wife Arline died of tuberculosis during the project. His major work was quantum electrodynamics, for which he shared the 1965 Nobel Prize with Schwinger and Tomonaga. The theory was giving infinite answers; renormalisation made it finite, and Feynman's path-integral formulation — a particle takes every possible path, and the paths interfere — recast quantum mechanics entirely. Feynman diagrams turned intractable calculations into pictures that could be read off, and every particle physicist now uses them. He also worked on superfluidity, proposed the parton model of the proton, and gave a 1959 lecture that is treated as the founding document of nanotechnology. The Feynman Lectures on Physics, delivered at Caltech in the early 1960s, are still read. He served on the Challenger commission in 1986 and demonstrated the failure by dropping a piece of O-ring seal into iced water on television. He died of cancer in 1988. His memoirs sold in the hundreds of thousands, and his last written words were that he hated dying twice, it being so boring.
- Lived: 1918 CE – 1988 CE
- Nationality: American
- Roles: physicist, scientist
