Creator of quantum electrodynamics. The man who was probably joking Work on the commission to investigate the Challenger shuttle disaster

What makes the 1965 Nobel laureate, American physicist Richard Phillips Feynman (1918–1988) great?

The shortest answer is that Feynman created “Feynman diagrams” - the intellectual apparatus of quantum electrodynamics (QED). The Feynman diagram symbolically depicts the interaction of fermions (quanta of matter, any of the 24 elementary particles of the Standard Model) and bosons (field quanta, carriers of interactions) in space and time coordinates. The use of the method developed by Feynman made it possible to create the Standard Model of quantum physics - a harmonious idea of ​​the quark structure of elementary particles that underlies the modern physical picture of the world.

A somewhat longer and more technical answer is that "Feynman diagrams" are formalized graphical representations of functional integrals along quantum amplitude paths ( complex number, expressing the range of an infinite number of quantum probabilities) and reduce into a single mathematics the three fundamental equations of quantum mechanics: Heisenberg, Schrödinger and Dirac, each of which can be obtained by transforming the Feynman formulation. Feynman's formalism is based on the use of Lagrange's method of least action, which eliminates the relativistic contradictions between the Heisenberg–Schrödinger–Dirac solutions and Einstein's special theory of relativity.

Unfortunately, as practice shows, such an answer may sound like gobbledygook not only for readers whose knowledge of quantum mechanics is exhausted by school physics, but also for some Phystech students who took quantum physics in their junior years. Therefore, it makes sense to explain what was said in the previous paragraph in simple (and not entirely accurate) words.

Quantum mechanics describes the physical processes of the microworld as probabilistic in nature, and an elementary particle can move from state A to state B along any non-forbidden trajectory in space and time, and there are an infinite number of such trajectories. In a number of solutions, this infinity of probabilities is mathematically converted into an infinitely large physical quantity - for example, mass or energy. Feynman showed that it is not necessary to operate with an infinite number of trajectories, but that they can simply be integrated into a single expected trajectory. This mathematical generalization of probability trajectories allows us to get rid of bad infinities. Perhaps this is fundamentally how nature functions, combining a probabilistic microworld and a really existing macroworld. The vectors obtained in this way can be plotted in space and time coordinates: time along the X axis, space along the Y axis. And if we accept that antiparticles are particles moving backward in time (before Feynman, this interpretation was proposed in 1931 by the Swiss physicist Ernst Stuckelberg), then the diagram allows us to cover the entire spectrum of possible interactions in the microworld ( For a detailed popular exposition of the path integral formalism, see: Feynman, Richard. QED is a strange theory of light and matter. Per. from English O.L. Tikhodeeva, S.G. Tikhodeeva. Library "Quantum". Vol. 66. M., Nauka, 1988).

The fate of Feynman's diagrams can very accurately be described by the verses of another great contemporary of Feynman, who received the Nobel Prize in 1958:

In kinship with everything that is, confident

And knowing the future in everyday life,

It is impossible not to fall into the end, as if into heresy,

Into unheard of simplicity.

But we will not be spared

When we don’t hide it.

People need her most

But the complex is clearer to them.

Boris Pasternak. Waves

Feynman's path integrals accomplished precisely this task—bringing the infinite variety of possibilities in space and time into ultimate simplicity. We take this simplicity for granted to such an extent that Feynman diagrams now illustrate sections on quantum physics in high school textbooks. And at the time of their creation, Feynman diagrams were received with skepticism by the community of theoretical physicists.

Firstly, critics suspected philosophical and mathematical errors in the method by which Feynman dealt with the problem of infinities - philosophical in relation to the approach to the problem and view of the structure of nature, mathematical - in the calculations. And secondly, the physics of the microworld, which several decades earlier was a revolution, by this time had already created its own dogmatism. One of the most immutable dogmas was the idea that the only acceptable proof was mathematical. Quantum physics had its own sacred language - formulas and equations. The more complex and confusing, the better! Drawing pictures was considered profanity.

Niels Bohr is credited with saying to Wolfgang Pauli and Werner Heisenberg: “We all agree that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is: is she crazy enough to be right? I don't think she's crazy enough." Freeman Dyson commented on this statement as follows: it is easier to publish an insane article in the leading US physics journal The Physical Review, the more incomprehensible it is. Reviewers reject articles they understand; those they do not understand are passed over ( Dyson, Freeman. Innovation in Physics. Scientific American, September, 1958. In: Hsu, Jong-Ping Hsu; Hsu, Leonardo. JingShin Theoretical Physics Symposium in Honor of Professor Ta-You Wu. World Scientific, Jan 1, 1998).

In the chain of discoveries that led, among other things, to Feynman's creation of the path integral formalism, there were many examples of ideas that were “not crazy enough” to be accepted. Paul Dirac very carefully pointed out in 1928 that his equation does not even suggest the possibility of the existence of “antiparticles” (in quotes), but the presence of a solution in which a particle with a negative energy value appears. Dmitry Skobeltsyn and Chenyang Chao observed the positron experimentally, but were unable or did not dare to interpret their observations as the detection of the positron. Frederic and Irene Joliot-Curie also discovered the positron, but considered it a proton. When Carl Anderson searched for and found a positron in cosmic rays in 1932, he did not dare recognize it as an “antielectron” until the editor of the Physical Review himself suggested giving the new particle the name “positron.”

The Lamb shift suffered a similar fate. This QED effect, which manifests itself in the shift of fine lines in the spectrum of a hydrogen atom depending on the energy level of the atom, is explained by the fact that the electron emits and absorbs a “virtual” photon that cannot be observed. The report that Willis Lamb (in 20th-century transcription Lamb) and Robert Rutherford gave in June 1947 at the Shelter Island conference demonstrated that relativistic effects were not taken into account in Dirac's electron theory, and became the main event of the year. It was precisely his attempts to explain the Lamb shift that led Feynman to the final formalization of his method. But at the same time, back in 1938, Soviet physicist Dmitry Blokhintsev discovered this effect, submitted the work to the Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics and was rejected for “unusual calculations.” Then Victor Weiskopf discovered the effect several months earlier than Lamb and, deciding that there were errors in his calculations, did not publish the results, after which it turned out that there was no error, but Weiskopf’s consultant, Richard Feynman, was mistaken ( Kuzemsky A.L. Works by D.I. Blokhintsev and the development of quantum physics. JINR. Physics of elementary particles and the atomic nucleus. 2008, vol. 39, issue. 1).

Feynman himself also spent quite a long time overcoming the mistrust of his colleagues. At the next conference in Pocono (spring 1948), Feynman presented the first version of his method. His method of solving the main current problem of QED was much simpler than the alternative renormalization method of Julian Schwinger (a third method, moderate in complexity, was proposed by Shinichiro Tomonaga, then living in occupied Japan). Schwinger was the keynote speaker on the first day and aroused everyone's enthusiasm by being at the forefront of the conference's understanding. Feynman reported his method after Schwinger and came under criticism from such heavyweights as Hans Bethe, Paul Dirac and Niels Bohr, who suspected him of encroaching on the foundations of quantum physics, including the Pauli exclusivity principle.

Not everything that seems fundamental in physics actually is. Less than ten years later, in 1956, Yang Zhenning, Li Zhendao and Wu (Wu) Jianxiong disproved the parity conservation law that was considered fundamental for weak interactions. Parity is understood as the equivalence of an object and its reflection - figuratively speaking, if you show the tongue to the reflection, the reflection will show the tongue to you. But in the microworld this is not always the case - there the reflection may not react or show something else instead of language.

Richard Feynman and physicist Yang Zhenning. 1950s

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It is worth noting here that the 1957 Nobel Prize for this discovery was given to the men Yang and Li, but the woman Wu was not given the prize - apparently, here, as in the already well-known case with Lise Meitner, the bias of Swedish academics against women manifested itself. Feynman was also often accused of sexism, and not always undeservedly.

Much of the acceptance of Feynman diagrams by physicists was not due to Feynman himself, but to his younger colleague, the young British physicist Freeman Dyson. While Feynman worked to publish his theory, carefully developing arguments against the skeptics, Dyson showed that the theories of Schwinger, Tomonaga and Feynman were mathematically equivalent. But Dyson took a different approach to Feynman diagrams - he argued that one may or may not agree that diagrams reflect true physical reality (which Dirac and Bohr so ​​strongly objected to in Pocono), but in any case they can serve as an excellent and reliable way constructing the logic of calculations, and demonstrated this by constructing a new Feynman diagram to solve his problem ( F. J. Dyson. The radiation theories of Tomonaga, Schwinger, and Feynman. Phys. Rev. 75 (3)b 1949).

And from that moment on, physicists exploded. By 1955, there was not a month in the Physical Review when new articles with Feynman diagrams were not published—at least 150 of them were published in five years. Feynman’s technique was simple enough and easy to understand that not just a few, but hundreds of physicists could use it, despite the fact that its mathematical apparatus was at the level of the most stringent requirements of physical science. The debate about the physical meaning of Feynman's formalism has not stopped even now: Feynman's co-author and opponent Murray (Murray) Gell-Mann argued that Feynman's rules were more applicable to quantum cosmology, and Schwinger, who shared the Nobel Prize with him, did not teach in principle Feynman diagrams to your students.

Feynman himself did not consider diagrams to be the pinnacle of his achievements. In his Nobel lecture, he described his contributions to physical science:

“I understood how to carry out calculations, while everyone else did not know this. This was my triumph; I realized that I actually managed to get something valuable. At this point I was persuaded to publish my method, since everyone claimed that this method showed an easy way to carry out calculations.<…>So what happened to the old theory I fell in love with as a young man? I would say she has become an old woman with very little attractive left in her; the hearts of young people will not beat faster today when they meet her. But we can tell her the best thing that can be said to any old woman: she was a good mother and raised very good children" ( Feynman, R.P., The Development of the Space-Time View of Quantum Electrodynamics, Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1965. Preprint les Prix Nobel en 1965. The Nobel Foundation. Stockholm, 1966. Translation by I. M. Drösch. Advances in physical sciences. T. 91. Issue. 1. January 1967).

Feynman's scientific legacy is far from limited to his contribution to the creation of QED. A prominent scientific publicist and popularizer, physicist Lorenz Krauss, in his work dedicated to Feynman’s scientific heritage, identified a number of areas in which progress was made possible thanks to Feynman’s work. This is the superfluidity of helium (where Feynman collaborated in absentia with Lev Landau; the US and USSR authorities prevented the two researchers from meeting personally). These are weak interactions, where Feynman, together with Murray Gell-Mann, developed the universal theory of V-A (vector and axial currents). This is the discovery of “black holes”: a popular scientific term made by Feynman’s supervisor, also Nobel laureate John Archibald Wheeler, and key proofs done using Feynman’s techniques by Stephen Hawking. This is string theory - and here Krauss notes that Feynman himself would hardly have considered such a legacy flattering for himself: “String theorists do not make predictions, but self-justifications” ( Krauss, Lawrence M. Quantum Man: Richard Feynman’s Life in Science. W. W. Norton & Company, 2011).

Interestingly, the original idea for the V-A theory, which became one of the theoretical foundations of the future Standard Model, belonged to George Sudarshan, but his co-author and supervisor Robert Marshak withheld publication, perhaps because he considered Sudarshan’s graduate student not mature enough to publish on his own. As a result, the alternative proof made by Feynman and Gell-Mann, who knew about Sudarshan's idea from him, was long considered the first. The Nobel Prize not received by Sudarshan is considered one of the most serious omissions of the Nobel Committee.

The least appreciated part of Feynman's legacy is his contribution to parallel computing. While working on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, Feynman, who led the calculation team, had mechanical devices, capable of performing only one mathematical operation - addition or multiplication (tabulators and multipliers) ( For examples of such devices, see: Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA). Feynman and Stanley Frenkel developed an algorithm for distributing work, which made it possible to speed up calculations several times, and later added an error correction mechanism using color coding of punched cards.

40 years later, Feynman found himself at the center of the parallel computing problem again, but this time at a startup called Thinking Machines Corporation, whose founder, Danny Hillis, had studied with Feynman's son, Carl, at MIT. Here Feynman used his methods to calculate the optimal load on the chips, significantly reducing the required resources and simultaneously passing on to the startup the experience of the Manhattan Project in organizing the research process ( Hills, Danny. Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine. Physics Today, January 15, 1989).

But all of the above is just a story about the scale of Feynman’s scientific achievements. He gives no insight into the origins of these achievements or what kind of person Richard Feynman was. And the answer to this question is perhaps much more important than the story about Feynman’s specific achievements, since Feynman with his life left us an example of what a person was not, should not have been, but could be, breaking through the immutable structures of everyday ideas with his mind. Feynman's personality is perhaps the ideal of the modern innovator, and those who knew Feynman do not remember him for his scientific achievements.

Feynman biographer James Glick, who worked with documents and memoirs of his contemporaries, believed that Feynman had been inventing his image for many years, withholding unfavorable information and emphasizing favorable information (apparently, having adopted this point of view from Murray Gell-Mann). One of the episodes that, according to Glick, Feynman hid all his life was the refusal of Feynman the atheist to read the funeral prayer over the grave of his unbelieving father ( Gleick, James. Genius: the life and science of Richard Feynman. Pantheon Books, New York, 1992). The author sees no way to agree with Glick’s opinion that this episode is an example of self-censorship. It is impossible to know reliably Feynman’s motives, and many conclusions will not be facts, but guesses. But who is real, Feynman “or his bright image,” is not so important now. Feynman may have invented himself. But he invented himself all his life, his whole life, and he invented a very good person, one whom one cannot help but envy. The facts of Feynman's life speak in favor of the fact that the observed Feynman was close to the real Feynman.

Feynman's formal biography is similar to other biographies of physicists of his generation. He was born into a middle-class family in the suburbs of New York, entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he began studying physics, which was not yet a widespread and not popular science in the United States - the situation changed a few years later, when physicists-emigrants from Europe came to the United States . He went from MIT to doctoral studies at Princeton and, according to his biographical descriptions, dined at the same tables in Palmer Hall (the dining hall of the graduate residence hall) as I, the author of these lines, did half a century later. Feynman completed his doctoral dissertation under the supervision of his assistant John Wheeler on the topic from which Feynman diagrams later grew. Immediately after graduating in 1942, Feynman married and went to Los Alamos, where he and Hans Bethe developed the yield calculation nuclear weapons. Feynman's marriage was happy, but short-lived: his fiancee Arlene Greenbaum was sick with tuberculosis and died in the summer of 1945, shortly before the first nuclear test. From 1945 to 1950, Feynman taught physics at Cornell University, where Bethe's group worked, and during this period completed his seminal work on quantum interaction diagrams. In 1950–1951 he taught physics in Brazil, and from 1951 at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). During this period, Feynman remarried (the marriage quickly broke down, and in his divorce petition ex-wife complained that her husband thought too much about science), and then for the third and last time he married British-born Gwyneth Hogarth, with whom he lived until his death in 1988.

Vitaly Ginzburg, who knew Feynman personally a little, was indignant when reading about him:

“...Some chapters of the book, dedicated not to science or teaching, but, one might say, to Feynman’s private or personal life, cause me some surprise and even a feeling of protest. Of course, there are no or almost no taboo topics, but I don’t understand why I should write about relationships with women in such a book and in such a style” ( Ginzburg V. In memory of Richard Feynman – a wonderful physicist and an amazing person. Science and Life, 1988, No. 7).

All Feynman's biographers considered it necessary to mention that Feynman in his single years was a noble womanizer who did not miss a single skirt, including the wives of his colleagues - some with condemnation, some with a search for justification. When reading comments on Feynman's novels, the words of A.S. come to mind. Pushkin:

“The crowd greedily reads confessions, notes, etc., because in their meanness they rejoice at the humiliation of the high, the weaknesses of the mighty. At the discovery of any abomination, she is delighted. He is small, like us, he is vile, like us! You are lying, scoundrels: he is both small and vile - not like you - differently. – Writing your Mémoires is tempting and pleasant. You don’t love anyone as much, you don’t know anyone as much as you know yourself. The subject is inexhaustible. But it's difficult. It is possible not to lie; to be sincere is a physical impossibility. The pen will sometimes stop, as if running before an abyss - at something that an outsider would read indifferently. It is not difficult to despise – braver – the judgment of people; it is impossible to despise your own court" ( A.S. Pushkin - P.A. Vyazemsky. 1825. – A.S. Pushkin. Collected works in 10 volumes. T. 9. M., 1962).

All sources available to us - letters, reviews of contemporaries, autobiographical stories - converge in the image of Feynman. And in all his fleeting novels, and in his two love stories - the tragic one for his first wife Arlene and the happy one for his last wife Gwyneth, and even in the episode that Ginzburg did not like so much (where Feynman learns how to seduce girls), Feynman appears as an unusually whole person , true to his convictions and principles and driven by the same impulse - a fantastic, absolute thirst for life, love and curiosity for it in all its facets and manifestations.

Richard Feynman with his wife Gwyneth Hogarth at the Nobel Ball

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Feynman was one of the most talented mathematicians of his generation. He mastered the school mathematics course on his own several years before graduating from school, won many mathematics Olympiads, and in the late 1930s set an absolute record at the student mathematics Olympiad. Memoirists reported that he solved problems on the fly of such complexity that others took weeks and months. But Feynman is as different from a stereotypical math school Olympiad student as possible: he does not withdraw into a shell from the world and from people, but opens up to it at every step, asking himself questions and immediately trying to solve them.

One of Feynman's contemporaries said about him that you can understand that Feynman is depressed by the fact that he behaves a little more cheerfully than usual. This remark refers to the period 1945–1947, which Feynman himself characterized almost flippantly: “a little exhausted.” This is a self-characterization of the state of a man who almost simultaneously lost both his beloved wife and faith in the future - after the use of nuclear weapons, moral guidelines were lost, and the world came to a state of “anomie”, when the old rules do not apply, and there are no new ones yet. Behind this self-characteristic lies an almost unbending strength of spirit, which draws the will to live everywhere.

Feynman the man was troubled by a variety of problems all his life.

Here he is as a teenager working in the kitchen and trying to figure out a new way to cut slippery beans - ending up cutting his hand and ruining the beans.

Here Feynman asks the question of what happens in the mind when a person falls asleep, and learns to control his dreams (the author of this essay tried to do the same in his youth).

Here Feynman is arguing at the table in Princeton in which direction the Segner wheel (a jet spinner, on the principle of which a garden sprinkler works) will spin if it sucks in rather than blows out water, and immediately goes to make a laboratory setup to test the theories. The installation explodes, the entire laboratory is in water. For those who are wondering, the Segner suction wheel will not rotate in either direction, since the water is thrown out in one direction, but is drawn in from all of them at once.

So Feynman finds out that many safes in Los Alamos and Oak Ridge, including the one where all US nuclear secrets are stored, have default combinations, and learns to open them without looking, and then selects combinations for the safes of his colleagues, figuring out what they could be used as memorable numbers - for one it is the birthday of a daughter, for another it is the numbers pi and e (probably Feynman can also be considered the first social hacker known in history).

Here Feynman takes lessons from an artist he knows about “picking” using the method “the less we love a woman...” (at this point I always warn students that the technique worked in 1946, after the war, when there were few men and girls were at a disadvantage, and Nowadays it is better to behave differently). The description of this process leaves the impression that Feynman the researcher, Feynman the tester, completely suppresses Feynman the sensualist; for him, female sympathy is the same as a safe that can be opened if you understand how it works.

Here Feynman conducts an experiment on military psychiatrists at a medical examination, answering their questions: “In form it is correct, but in essence it is a mockery” - and in the end he receives a “white ticket” that your good soldier Schweik.

But Feynman in Brazil takes up learning to play the samba drum - and eventually even plays at parties for a fee.

Here Feynman learns to draw on a dare - and ends up with personal exhibitions.

Here Feynman undertakes to study biology: twice, once in his youth, the other in adulthood - and makes the whole library laugh by asking for the “cat card”.

Here is Nobel laureate Feynman painting the walls in a startup office, buying pencils and soldering microcircuits.

But Feynman tries to get home from work every day by a new route.

A weak-hearted person would try to forget most of these episodes as shameful and embarrassing. Feynman laughs both at his failures and at his inability to draw timely conclusions from them. Even Feynman's 1965 Nobel speech is not so much a self-report of success, like many other Nobel laureates, as it is a story of dead ends, mistakes and failures that preceded the final Nobel result. “It is impossible to despise your own court.”

For any person, what Feynman lived would be enough for several lives (and many do not gain even a small share) - Feynman fit it all into one life. According to Feynman's biographers, his dying words were: "Dying a second time would be terribly boring." This unprecedented love of life and interest in life and the world carries within itself the origins of Feynman’s true greatness.

Feynman's greed for life is curiosity and the desire to learn, understand, master. The same motives drove Feynman the scientist: the desire to understand and reveal the secret mechanisms of the universe. Probably, if Feynman had known Pasternak’s poems, he would have been able to fully attribute these lines to himself:

I want to reach everything

To the very essence.

At work, looking for a way,

In heartbreak.

To the essence of the past days,

Until their reason,

To the foundations, to the roots,

To the core.

All the while grasping the thread

Fates, events,

Live, think, feel, love,

Complete the opening.

Biographers and Feynman's contemporaries noted: Feynman was skeptical of anything that did not have experimental proof or a reasonable explanation, and did not constrain himself with conventions when faced with pretension, worship of status, or an attempt to appear smarter. Feynman's mathematical talent allowed him to understand that mastery of the language of mathematics does not mean an outstanding mind of its bearer, but, on the contrary, can allow him to talk nonsense with impunity. And when Feynman was faced with what seemed to him nonsense, his opponents showed no mercy from him. He was just as critical of his own theories and calculations, and of pathos and quackery outside of physics - the already mentioned military psychiatrists on the commission lost his respect when they did not bother to check an obvious fact that would show whether he was telling them the truth or lies.

Vitaly Ginzburg recalled:

“...Some were afraid and did not like Feynman (this is my impression). Feynman did not take into account many conventions and even the rules of politeness. In the described case, a foreigner speaks in his poor English in front of a wide audience, it’s already difficult for him, and he is interrupted by the demand “say something new.” I wasn’t offended at all, because I was used to this manner from communicating with L.D. Landau and, most importantly, I do not suffer from painful pride (this is, in any case, my opinion). And another might have been offended and harbored ill will towards Feynman. By the way, he was, in fact, completely right...”

Ginzburg describes Feynman's signature style, which has been characteristic of him since his student years:

“You see, when I hear about physics, I think only about it and I no longer know who I’m talking to, and I talk as if in a dream. I can say: “No, no, you’re wrong” or “You’re crazy”... It turned out that I was always naive. I never felt who I was talking to. I was always concerned only with physics. If an idea seemed phony, I said it looked phony. If she looked good, I said so: good. A simple matter. I've always lived like this. It is good and pleasant if you can do this. I was lucky in life - I could do this.”

The episode with Ginzburg as presented by Feynman is unknown to us. But it is known that Niels Bohr, to whom Feynman told a fool in 1943 or 1944, suffered from Feynman’s harshness. After this, according to Feynman, Bohr, coming to Los Alamos, invited him to private conversations, since other physicists allowed their veneration for the father of atomic theory to take precedence over the interests of scientific discussion.

Recalling his Nobel Prize, Feynman said that the Nobel Committee could, before announcing the awards, quietly ask the laureates' consent to the award and accept refusals. Feynman himself, according to him, did not refuse the prize only because it would only increase the media noise around him (which, of course, is so - this was shown by the example of the same Pasternak, whose fame was only increased by unworthy persecution in the USSR and refusal of the prize ). Interestingly, Feynman apparently did not know that thirty years before him, Paul Dirac, whom Feynman deeply appreciated, had expressed exactly the same desire. Many other physicists also noted that, with the Nobel Prize, they lost the opportunity to participate in science in the same way as before - their status as living classics excluded them and their ideas from scientific discussions, leaving them only with the status of pop stars.

1965 Nobel Prize Laureates: Robert Burns Woodward, Julian Schwinger, Richard Feynman, François Jacob, André Lvov and Jacques Monod

In the era of “big science,” when all countries were building huge research structures, Feynman never led large teams. Not because he didn’t know how to lead—he did that well in his youth at Los Alamos—but because he didn’t like entrusting anyone with a search if he could handle it himself. He also could not accept other people's reports on faith. IN Last year Feynman's life was a member government commission to investigate the causes of the Challenger shuttle disaster and in a few days turned the honorary body, designed only for ceremonial performances and receiving reports, into a working team. As a result, the commission not only established the cause of the disaster within a few weeks (a frozen O-ring), but also discovered a number of technological risks when preparing the shuttles for flight. Feynman personally ran around production sites, interviewed employees and conducted experiments - including one right at a press conference, cooling a sample of seal rubber in a glass of ice water in front of the cameras. The Commission's report on the Challenger retained Feynman's phrase "Reality is more important than PR: you can't fool nature."

Despite this, memoirists remembered Feynman as a man who was a threat to pathos and falsehood, but was gentle and open to everyone who sincerely strived for knowledge, saw their strengths and weak sides and did not pretend to be something that he was not. According to Danny Hillis: “He was never afraid to tell the truth, and no matter how stupid your question was, he didn’t make you feel like a fool.” Anyone who needed Feynman's help usually received it.

Feynman's fellow rival Julian Schwinger was a very productive mentor - he trained 150 doctors, six of whom became Nobel laureates. Professor Schwinger had a proven method and school. Feynman did not leave behind a scientific school - he was a difficult co-author and no scientific supervisor at all, since he did not consider himself to have the right to tell graduate students what and how to do. The whole world considered Feynman the smartest of geniuses, but Feynman did not consider himself smarter than anyone. In a 1963 interview, he compared himself to a monkey who could not put two sticks together to knock down a banana:“I usually feel stupid, and only sometimes I manage to connect two sticks.”

Feynman's famous introductory physics course of 1960–1962, designed for first-year Caltech students, had a very interesting effect: the first-year students felt very insecure in the room, and the senior and graduate students crowded it. Feynman taught the course with the goal of not only giving students an understanding of modern physics and how physics scientists think, but also with the goal of making them grow intellectually so that by the end of each lecture everyone would come out a little puzzled beyond their understanding. Feynman showed students how the same approaches can solve different problems and how the same physical phenomena can be viewed differently within the framework of different theories. The senior students thought about science and felt inspired - and the first-year students probably thought about the session and their brains were blown (this is not a fact, but the author’s judgment, based on his many years of experience at the Physics and Technology Institute). There is still debate about the pedagogical effect of this course, but the Feynman Lectures and the books based on them are still not outdated - not because their materials are relevant, but because Feynman's approach is relevant, which allows anyone, regardless of degree preparation, look at physical science freshly and with perspective ( Feynman R., Layton R., Sands M. Feynman lectures on physics. In 11 volumes. M., 2004).

Lecture by Richard Feynman "The Motion of Planets Around the Sun" at the University of California. 1964

Wikimedia Commons

Feynman the physicist is great for his contribution to science, but Feynman the man is great and will remain great even when his scientific achievements are forgotten after new scientific revolutions. On the list of books I recommend to my students, there is always one that almost everyone has already read: Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, a biopic based on Feynman's interviews, stories and letters. Feynman R.F. Of course you are joking, Mr. Feynman! / Per. from English ON THE. Zubchenko, O.L. Tikhodeeva, M. Shifman. M., 2001). A more accurate Russian translation: “You’re joking, Mr. Feynman.” With this phrase in 1940, the wife of the Princeton dean of the Eisenhart Graduate College made it clear to graduate students that they did not behave like that in the world (one of the European emigrants said about her that Hitler was not as scary as this lady).

Not long ago I was talking after a class at the Physics and Technology Institute with one of the students who asked me where I get all the episodes and examples in the lectures (which I cited not from notes, but from memory). When the conversation turned to how to collect and process life experience, I suggested as an example, “You're kidding, Mr. Feynman.” My interlocutor replied: “I already read this book, that’s why I went to enroll in Physics and Technology.”

Feynman continues to inspire generation after generation, and not just in physics. Feynman the teacher will outlive Feynman the scientist: his discoveries will become outdated, his textbooks may become outdated, but the textbook of his life will inspire many more young people. The best that Feynman has is the best that the human race possesses, this is that fiery spirit that moves humanity against the flow of entropy. The author has a confession to make: I started writing these essays out of envy of Richard Feynman, whom I am trying to reach, knowing that I will never reach him.

Let us quote Pasternak for the third and last time:

The goal of creativity is dedication,

Not hype, not success.

Shameful, meaningless

Be the talk of everyone.

But we must live without imposture,

Live like this so that in the end

Attract the love of space to you,

Hear the call of the future.

Others on the trail

They will pass your path by an inch,

But defeat comes from victory

You don't have to differentiate yourself.

And should not a single slice

Don't give up on your face

But to be alive, alive and only,

Alive and only until the end.

Richard Phillips Feynman (life - 1918-1988) - an outstanding physicist from the USA. He is one of the founders of the field of quantum electrodynamics. Between 1943 and 1945, Richard was involved in the development of the atomic bomb. He also created the path integration method (in 1938), the Feynman diagram method (in 1949). With their help, one can explain such a phenomenon as the transformation of elementary particles. Richard Feynman also proposed the parton model of the nucleon, a theory of quantized vortices, in 1969. In 1965, together with J. Schwinger and S. Tomonaga, he received the Nobel Prize in Physics.

Richard's childhood

Richard Feynman was born into a wealthy Jewish family. His parents (perhaps only his father or even his grandfather were immigrants from Russia), Lucille and Melville, lived in Far Rockaway, which is located in New York, in the south of Queens. His father worked at a garment factory in the sales department. He had great respect for scientists and had a passion for science. Melville set up a small laboratory at home in which he allowed his son to play. The father immediately decided that if a boy was born, he would be a scientist. Girls in those years were not expected to have a scientific future, although they could obtain an academic degree. However, Joan Feynman, Richard's younger sister, refuted this opinion. She became a famous astrophysicist. Melville tried from early childhood to arouse in Richard an interest in understanding the world. He answered the child’s questions in detail, using knowledge from physics, biology, and chemistry in his answers. Melville often referred to various reference materials. During his studies, he did not apply pressure and never told his son that he should become a scientist. The boy liked the chemical tricks his father showed him. Soon Richard mastered them himself and began to gather neighbors and friends for whom he staged spectacular shows. Feynman inherited his mother's sense of humor.

First job

At the age of 13, Richard got his first job - he began repairing radios. The boy gained fame - many neighbors turned to him, because, firstly, Richard repaired them efficiently and quickly, and secondly, he tried to logically determine the cause of the malfunction before starting work. Neighbors admired Feynman Jr., who always thought before disassembling another radio receiver.

Education

After completing a four-year degree in physics, Richard Feynman continued his education at Princeton University. During World War II, he tried to volunteer for the front, but was unfairly rejected during a psychiatric examination.

Marriage to Arlene Greenbaum

Richard Feynman continued his studies, now for a Ph.D. During this time he married Arlene Greenbaum. Richard had been in love with this girl since he was 13 years old, and at 19 he was engaged to her. By the time of the wedding, Arlene was doomed to death because she was suffering from tuberculosis.

Richard's parents were against their wedding, but Feynman still did it his way. The wedding took place on the way to the station before leaving for Los Alamos. An accountant and bookkeeper, employees of the Richmond City Hall, took the witness stand. Relatives of the newlyweds were not present at the ceremony. When the time came to kiss the bride, Feynman, mindful of her illness, planted a kiss on her cheek.

Participation in the development of the atomic bomb

Richard took part in the atomic bomb development project (the Manhattan Project) at Los Alamos. He was still studying at Priston when recruitment took place. The idea to join this project was given to him by Robert Wilson, the famous physicist. Feynman was not enthusiastic at first, but then he thought about what would happen if the Nazis were the first to invent it, and decided to join in the development. While Richard was busy with such a responsible matter as the Manhattan Project, his wife was in a hospital in Albuquerque, located not far from Los Alamos. They saw each other every weekend. Physicist Richard Feynman spent all his weekends with her.

Feynman becomes a burglar

Feynman acquired good safe-cracking skills while working on the bomb project. Richard was able to convincingly prove that the security measures used at that time were not effective enough. He stole information related to the development of the atomic bomb from the safes of other employees. These documents, however, were necessary for his own research. In 1985, an autobiographical book written by Richard Feynman (“You're Joking, Mister Feynman!”) was first published. In it, he noted that out of curiosity he opened safes (like many other things in his life). Richard studied this subject carefully and discovered several tricks, which he tried in the laboratory on safe cabinets. Luck often helped him in this matter. All this created Richard's reputation as a burglar in his team.

Drumming

Richard's other hobby was playing the drums. He accidentally picked up a drum one day and has played it almost every day since then. Richard admitted that he knew practically no rhythms, but he used Indian ones, which were quite simple. Sometimes he took drums with him into the forest so as not to disturb anyone, sang and beat them with a stick.

New stage in life

Since the 1950s, Richard Feynman, whose biography continues with a new stage of his life, worked as a researcher at the California Institute of Technology. After the end of the war and the death of his wife, he felt empty. Feynman never ceased to be surprised by the many letters offering him positions in departments at various universities. He was even invited to work at Princeton, where great geniuses such as Einstein taught. Feynman ultimately decided that if the world wanted it, it would have it. But whether the expectations of getting it will be justified is no longer his problem. After Feynman stopped doubting himself, he again felt a surge of inspiration and strength.

Richard's Major Achievements

Richard continued his research into his theory of quantum transformations. He also made breakthroughs in the physics of superfluidity by applying the Schrödinger equation to the phenomenon. This discovery, together with the explanation of superconductivity, which was obtained a little earlier by three scientists, led to the fact that theoretical low-temperature physics began to actively develop. In addition, Richard worked with M. Gell-Mann, the discoverer of quarks, on the theory of so-called weak decay. It manifests itself best when a free neutron beta decays into an antineutrino, electron and proton. This theory of Richard Feynman actually discovered a new law of nature. The scientist came up with the idea of ​​quantum computing. Theoretical physics has advanced greatly thanks to him.

At the request of the Academy in the 1960s, Feynman spent 3 years creating his new physics course. By 1964, the publication of a textbook entitled “The Feynman Lectures on Physics” (Richard Feynman), a book that is still considered the best textbook for physics students, dates back to this day. In addition, Richard contributed to the very methodology of scientific knowledge. He explained the principles of scientific integrity to his students, and also published relevant articles on this topic (in particular, about the cargo cult).

Psychological experiments

Feynman participated in experiments carried out by his friend in the 1960s. In his autobiographical book, which we have already mentioned, he describes the experiences of hallucinations that he experienced in a special chamber, isolated from all external influences. Feynman even smoked marijuana during his experiments, but refused to experiment with LSD for fear of damaging his brain.

Events in personal life

In the 1950s, Richard remarried, to Mary Lou. However, he soon divorced, realizing that he had mistook for love a feeling that was only a strong infatuation. At a conference in Europe in the early 1960s, he met the woman who would become his third wife. It was Gwyneth Howarth, an Englishwoman. The couple had a child, Karl. In addition, they also took in an adopted daughter, whose name was Michelle.

Passion for drawing

After some time, Feynman began to take an interest in art in order to understand the impact it has on people. Richard began taking drawing lessons. His works were not particularly beautiful at first, but over time Feynman got the hang of it and even became a very good portrait painter.

Failed trip

Richard Feynman, together with his wife and friend Ralph Layton, who was the son of Robert Layton, the great physicist, planned a trip to the state of Tuva in the 1970s. It was at that time an independent country, surrounded by inaccessible mountains on all sides. It was located between Mongolia and Russia. The small state was under the jurisdiction of the USSR (Tuva ASSR). According to the only researcher specializing in Tuva, a report on this trip could double knowledge about this state. Before the trip, Feynman and his wife re-read all the literature about this country that existed in the world at that time - two books. Feynman was interested in deciphering ancient texts that belonged to vanished civilizations, and in general, mysteries in the history of mankind. In the Tuvan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, as he assumed, there could be clues to many world secrets. However, the scientist was not given a visa, so, unfortunately, this historic trip never took place.

Feynman experiment

The National Aerospace Agency launched a reusable spacecraft on January 28, 1986. 73 seconds after launch it exploded. As it turned out, the cause was the rocket boosters that raised the shuttle and fuel tank. Scientists from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory reported to Feynman about design flaws and rubber burnouts that had already occurred. And General Kutina told him that during launch the air temperature was close to zero, and under these conditions there is a loss of rubber elasticity. In an experiment that Feynman conducted using a ring, a glass of ice and pliers, it was shown that the ring lost its elasticity at low temperatures. Due to a leak in the seal, hot gases burned through the housing. This is what happened on January 28th.

The experiment demonstrated live brought Feynman the fame of the man who unraveled the mystery of the disaster (we note that it was undeserved), which, however, he did not lay claim to. The fact is that NASA knew that at low temperatures launching a rocket would be fraught with disaster, but they decided to take a risk. Maintenance personnel and technicians who knew about a possible disaster were forced to remain silent.

Illness and death

In the 1970s, Richard Feynman was discovered to have a rare form of cancer. The tumor located in the abdominal region was excised, but the body was severely damaged. One of the kidneys refused to work. Several repeated operations did not have a significant impact on the course of the disease. in physics he was doomed.

Richard Feynman's condition gradually deteriorated. In 1987, another tumor was found in him. It was cut out, but Feynman was already very weak and was in pain all the time. He was hospitalized again in 1988, in February. In addition to cancer, doctors also discovered a ruptured ulcer. In addition, the remaining kidney failed. It was possible to give Richard a few more months of life by connecting an artificial kidney. However, he decided enough was enough and refused medical attention. Richard Feynman died on February 15, 1988. He was buried in Altadena, in a simple grave. The ashes of his wife rest next to him.

Feynman's car

Feynman purchased a Dodge Tradesman van in 1975. It was painted in the mustard colors popular at the time, and the interior was painted in shades of green. The Feynman diagrams that won Richard the Nobel Prize were drawn on this car. He made many long trips in the van. The scientist also ordered special number plates for him with the inscription QANTUM.

Feynman sometimes drove this car to work, but it was usually used by Gwyneth, his wife. At a traffic light she was once asked why there were Feynman diagrams on the car. The woman replied that it was because her name was Gwyneth Feynman.

The car was sold after Richard's death for $1 to Ralph Leighton, a family friend. Selling for this nominal fee is the standard way Feynman disposed of his old cars. The car served its new owner for a long time. In 1993, she took part in the march in memory of R. Feynman.

Richard Feynman: quotes

Many of his quotes are popular today. We will give just a few of them.

• “What I can’t recreate, I don’t understand.”
• "Trying to discover something secret is one of my hobbies."
• "I've always liked to succeed at things I never should have been able to do."

Many great physicists of the 20th century were versatile people. Thus, Max Planck was seriously involved in mountaineering, Albert Einstein played the violin and was a yachtsman, and Erwin Schrödinger wrote poetry and knew six languages ​​in addition to his native German. However, Feynman stands apart: he played the banjo, painted pictures, participated in psychological experiments, worked briefly as a molecular biologist, put his efforts into deciphering the Mayan script and developed lockpicking skills to such a level that in one day he was able to open all the safes with top secret documentation on the Manhattan Project.

Feynman diagrams

The van that belonged to the physicist and his wife Gwyneth Dodge Tradesman decorated with very characteristic designs - converging and diverging straight and wavy lines with letters above them. One day at a crossroads Gwyneth, who usually drove on her own and family matters car, asked why her car had Feynman diagrams on it, and she replied, “Because my name is Gwyneth Feynman.”

Feynman's restored van. Photo: John Kannenberg / flickr / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Feynman diagrams are a way of depicting the interactions of elementary particles with each other. Each segment corresponds to one particle, and each node is responsible for the emission or absorption of some particles by others; wavy lines indicate interaction carriers, and straight lines indicate all other particles. For example, this is how you can depict the process of beta decay, the transformation of a neutron into a proton, antineutrino and electron.

In addition to the fact that Feynman diagrams clearly show even quite complex processes, they also allow you to derive a mathematical expression for calculating the characteristics of the very processes that are shown in the diagram. Feynman developed the method of path integration in quantum mechanics, a technique that was then adopted by theoretical physicists around the world. With its help, in particular, a substantiation of the Yang-Mills theory, one of the fundamental components of the Standard Model, was obtained.

Atomic bomb

Despite the obvious talent that manifested itself in his teenage years (Feynman repaired radios and independently mastered trigonometry, differential and integral calculus by the age of 15), Feynman was denied admission to Columbia University. Not because he made spelling errors or used his own symbols to denote sine and cosine - he was not taken because of his nationality: the future great physicist was the son of a traveling salesman and a housewife, Lithuanian Jews who had left Minsk. Later, for the same reason, he was almost denied graduate school at Princeton. Instead of Columbia University, Feynman entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the leading US centers in the field of natural sciences and engineering.

As a student, he authored two articles for Physical Review- a prestigious journal, publications in which are considered a professional success among most physicists. He was one of the few in history to receive the highest possible score in physics at Princeton, and his first seminar was attended by Wolfgang Pauli, John von Neumann and Albert Einstein himself. At 23, writes James Glick, a science journalist and author of a biography of Feynman, the scientist was among the greatest minds of the 20th century: his intellectual abilities in the field of theoretical physics were comparable only to those of Einstein or Lev Landau.

It is not surprising that when Feynman was initially designing mechanical computers for anti-aircraft gunners, he was quickly called to a much more important job. The project in which the physicist was offered to participate was top secret - so secret that many ordinary performers did not even know what exactly they were working on. However, the goal was not hidden from Feynman - to create a nuclear bomb, a completely new type of weapon capable of ending the war in favor of the Allies.

Feynman and the military

Having become a participant in the Manhattan Project, the scientist demonstrated extraordinary abilities. This did not go unnoticed by the management, and one day the physicist was sent to inspect a plant under construction for the separation of uranium isotopes (uranium-238, which is the most abundant in the ore, is unsuitable for bomb production; the required uranium-235 is much less, but it still needs to be isolated from the mixture ).

Feynman arrived at the construction site and was indeed able to give a number of valuable advice - for example, due to the secrecy, there was absolutely no danger for the workers to accumulate large amounts of uranium in one place. Thanks to his memory, he also remembered several small details, such as the number of one of the buildings and the designation of the installations - the local authorities were pretty impressed by how the visiting guest immediately pointed out “problems with the C-21 evaporator in building 90−207”, and led to show general scheme technological process.

Since there were no computers or three-dimensional visualizations at that time, the diagram was printed on “blueprints,” photocopies of the drawings. There were so many “Sineks” that they had to be laid out on several tables, and the engineers gathered in the room quickly began to explain the details of the process to Feynman. They sincerely considered him a genius, but the physicist himself admits in his autobiography that at that moment he felt pretty confused - in fact, in this scheme he did not even understand some of the conventional signs. Worse, it was already too late to ask what exactly the cross on the line meant: they continued to tell him how the design of the entire complex would not allow a critical mass of matter to accumulate even if any one valve broke down.

To get out of the awkward situation and test his guess that the mysterious cross represented a valve, Feynman randomly pointed his finger at the diagram and asked: “What happens if this valve jams?” Next, we simply quote the scientist’s memoirs:

But one of the guys looks at the other and says:

Well, if this valve sticks, - here he runs his finger along the blue up and down, up and down, the other guy leads back and forth, back and forth; they look at each other, turn to me, open their mouths like amazed fish, and say:

You are absolutely right, sir.

Although Feynman's contributions to the project were unquestioned, his attitude toward discipline and the military's demands for secrecy infuriated some people. Feynman's wife was terminally ill with tuberculosis and was in the hospital. In their correspondence with their husband, they actually mocked the censors: when they were forbidden to use encryption, the letters began to be cut into small pieces like a puzzle. Feynman also discovered that it was completely unbearable to wait for responsible persons with keys to safes, and decided that it would be easier for him if he learned to open these safes without keys and secret (well, as it seemed to the owners) combinations. The physicist was able to open the vaults with all the documentation, with all the secrets of creating nuclear weapons, in one day - and, of course, he placed mocking notes in the safes, and then, under a plausible pretext, asked the person in charge to get some document.

After the war, Feynman underwent a medical examination, following which he could have been sent to the occupation forces in Germany. As you might guess, he did not go anywhere and was declared unfit for military service - all thanks to his manner of communicating with psychiatrists.

Feynman and teaching

It is impossible to talk about Feynman without mentioning his teaching work. The course he created - “Feynman Lectures on Physics” - is still considered one of the best. The physicist was involved in establishing the teaching of physics in Brazil and in creating school courses in the USA, and in both cases, some negligent colleagues suffered from Feynman.

So, in Brazil he came across a teacher who sympathized with the Nazis. After listening to his speeches about the dominance of Jews, the physicist simply announced his last name and clarified that he also grew up in a Jewish family. But the authors of Brazilian school textbooks got much more. Let's quote again:

Flipping through the pages at random and stopping at any random place, I can show you why this is not science, but memorization in all cases, without exception. I will take the risk right now, in this audience, to flip through the pages, stop at any place, read it and show it to you.

So I did. Trrrrr-ap - my finger stopped on some page, and I began to read: “Triboluminescence. Triboluminescence is the emission of light from crushed crystals..."

I said, “Here you go.” Is there science here? No! Here there is only an interpretation of one word with the help of other words. Not a word is said here about nature: what crystals emit light if they are crushed? Why do they emit light? Can you imagine even one student going home and trying this out? They can not. But if instead you wrote: “If you take a lump of sugar and crack it with tongs in the dark, you will see a bluish flash. The same thing happens with some other crystals. Nobody knows why. This phenomenon is called triboluminescence. Then someone would do it at home, and it would be a study of nature.”

In the USA, Feynman was included in the commission that was supposed to select textbooks for schools. The scientist first agreed, and then was horrified: the books sent for reading weighed almost one and a half centners. The physicist had to spend a lot of time familiarizing himself with everything sent, making special shelves in his office for these textbooks... and then it turned out very awkward when it turned out that he was the only one of the entire commission who had undertaken such work.

The brilliant physicist, Richard Phillips Feynman, was a passionate person. In addition to his main pursuit of science (in 1985 he won the Nobel Prize in Physics), writing the outstanding Feynman lectures, he studied biology, deciphered ancient texts of disappeared civilizations, other mysteries of nature and human history, and became the author of an excellent book Of course you're joking, Mr. Feynman! An unquenchable thirst for knowledge and adventure led the scientist to open secret safes and locks. He cracked the codes of his colleagues like seeds and left notes in their safes: The safe was broken into, which caused considerable commotion and problems with the security service. Dick Feynman also paid attention to art.

Portrait of Richard Feynman
Natalie MEERSON, 2007

Dick Feynman played music with great pleasure - together with his friend and colleague Ralph Layton, he played the Afro-Cuban bongo drum with passion and enthusiasm, beating out the rhythm with his fingers and palm. He played drums in performances, and very successfully participated in the Brazilian carnival, where he performed melodies and rhythms on another percussion instrument, the frigideira. And at the age of 44, he became interested in drawing, so much so that he did not part with it until the end of his life.

The physicist was encouraged to take up painting by the artist Jirair (Jerry) Zorthian, who promised to teach him how to draw on a bet.

Jirair Zorthian
Richard Feynman

Jerry turned out to be a good teacher, giving Feynman the basics of the subject; then Dick enrolled in a correspondence course in painting at the International Art School, where he mastered drawing in pencil, pastel, watercolor and oil, although he did not bother to finish it... Here at oil Richard stopped his studies at this school, believing that he had taken everything he could!

The very first drawing, 1962

Dabney Zorthian, 1964
Female portrait

Sketch of an attic window with the last line drawn by Carl, Feynman's son, 1964

Martha Bridges, 1965

Paul Dirac, 1965

Small still life

Portrait of a man

Pencil sketch for a portrait

Portrait of a young woman, 1967

Then, on the advice of friends who saw progress in his drawings, he continued his painting education at the Pasadena Museum of Art, where they taught drawing classes with nude models. At the time, I was teaching an evening art class at the Pasadena Art Museum. Fineman was a student in my group. He always smiled. His smile is impossible to forget. He listened to me more attentively than other students and asked questions more often. He absorbed everything that interested him like a sponge. He was interested not so much in art as a whole, but in line - the beauty of the line of the female body. At first I didn't know anything about Fineman. Then someone told me that he is one of the greatest physicists alive. After that, I jokingly boasted that Nobel laureates were studying in my drawing course(remembered Walter Askin)

Nudes

Seated nude, 1968

Female portrait

Reclining nude

Posing woman 1968

One day I walked from a street in Pasadena, bathed in afternoon sunlight, into the twilight of a restaurant. Restaurant Zhianonni. A minute later, when my pupils dilated, I saw Dick sitting at the table at the other end of the room. We were separated by a huge round table or stage. In principle, one could eat at this stage table. At the same time, you had to be prepared to see a dancer’s high-heeled shoes just below your nose, beautiful legs a little higher, and even higher, a meter from your hamburger with French fries, bare breasts. The dancer glided around in a circle. Dick sat at a distance of a couple of meters from the stage table and made sketches in his notebook. I joined him. We said hi to each other and he went back to work. In his notebook I saw an almost completed drawing of a half-naked model. Then Dick ordered lunch and we talked about this and that... It was clear that Dick was a frequent visitor(recalled Feynman's colleague and student Albert Hibbs)

Portrait of a Woman, 1968

Portrait of a woman 1968

Dancer in Giannoni's bar, 1968

Dick once told me that he received a scolding from his mother. He quite often went to the Zhianonni restaurant, where he painted dancers in various states of undress. One day the police stopped by; they found some kind of violation. The trial took place. Fineman appeared in court as a witness for Gianonni's defense. Somehow his mother found out about this. It upset her(Walter Askin)

Katie McAlpine Myers

Katie McAlpine Myers, 1968

Katie McAlpine Myers

Seated figure

Reclining Nude

Nude from behind, 1972

Feynman loved working with topless models, and painted dozens of similar paintings. I am often asked: What is it like to be Richard Feynman’s daughter?.. For me, it was completely natural that every Monday evening there would be a knock on the door, dad would open it, a flexible young woman would stand on the threshold, and they would go down to dad’s office together. Dad usually sketched from life for several hours in a row. He never threw them away. Some of his models became our friends, sometimes they brought homemade pies, and one of them once gave us a puppy. Mom didn't mind; on the contrary, she supported dad in his hobby(Michelle Feynman)

Portraits of women, 1973

Sleeping woman

Women's profiles

Portrait of a Woman, 1975

Sleeping nude

Portrait of a Woman, 1975

Portrait of a Woman, 1975

Woman's face

Village on a hill

In a short period of time, Richard painted many drawings, much of which were commissioned. He liked the situation when he had to fulfill an order, he was not interested in money, but he wanted his drawings to be purchased not because they were drawn by the Nobel laureate, professor of physics Feynman. Therefore, on the advice of his friend Dudley Wright, he signed his works Ofay (Ofey). This is what Harlem residents call white people. Upon learning this, Richard said that since he was really white, he was quite happy with this pseudonym.

Hans Bethe

Female portrait

Bob Sadler, 1980

Michelle Feynman, adopted daughter of a scientist, 1981

Michelle Feynman, 1981

Heather Neely and Michelle Feynman 1981

Lisa Pumpelly Van Sant, 1981

After graduating from high school in 1935, F. entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and graduated in 1939 with a bachelor's degree in physics. At MIT, F. later recalled, he realized that “the most important problem of that time was the unsatisfactory state of the quantum theory of electricity and magnetism (quantum electrodynamics).” Quantum electrodynamics deals with the study of interactions between elementary particles and between particles and an electromagnetic field.

Many provisions of the then existing theory, created by Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli and P.A. M. Dirac, received brilliant confirmation, but in its structure there were also not entirely clear points, for example, the infinite mass and infinite charge of the electron. F. began to develop radically new theoretical approaches to solving these problems. He called the assumption of the action of an electron on itself (namely, this was the source of the appearance of infinities, or divergences) “stupid” and proposed to consider that electrons experience action only from other electrons, and with a delay due to the distance separating them. This approach made it possible to eliminate the very concept of a field and thereby get rid of other infinities that caused a lot of trouble. Although F. was unable to achieve satisfactory results, he retained his unconventional thinking for all subsequent years.

In 1939, F. entered graduate school at Princeton University and received a Proctor Scholarship. In graduate school, he continued to experiment with different approaches to quantum electrodynamics, learning from mistakes, discarding unsuccessful designs, and trying many new ideas, some of which emerged from conversations with his supervisor, John A. Wheeler. F. sought to preserve the principle of the delayed action of one electron on another: an electron experiencing action from another electron, in turn, acts on it with a certain additional delay, like light reflected back to its source. On the advice of Wheeler, F. suggested that such a reflection consists of the emission of not only an ordinary retarded wave, but also an “advanced” one, reaching the electron before its disturbing effect on another electron begins. The paradoxical passage of time, flowing not only forward, but also backward, did not bother him, as F. later admitted: “By that time, I had already become sufficiently a physicist so as not to say: “Oh no, this is impossible!”

After many months of mathematical calculations, failures and attempts to find new approaches, F. succeeded in transforming concepts and equations from various points of view. He managed to find original ways to incorporate quantum mechanics into classical electrodynamics and develop methods that make it possible to simply and quickly obtain results that would require cumbersome calculations in the traditional approach. One of his most successful ideas was the application of the principle of least action, based on the assumption that nature chooses the most economical path to achieve a certain goal. Although F. was not satisfied with his achievements, he was aware that he had made significant progress in solving the problem, and his work had received recognition. F. published his dissertation “The Principle of Least Action in Quantum Mechanics” and in 1942 received a doctorate in physics.

Shortly before completing his dissertation, F. received an invitation to work from a group of Princeton physicists involved in the separation of uranium isotopes for the needs of the Manhattan Project, i.e. to create an atomic bomb. From 1942 to 1945, F. headed a group in Los Alamos (New Mexico) working in the department of Hans A. Bethe. Even during these years, he found time to think during bus rides, making the necessary calculations on scraps of paper, on the further development of the version of quantum electrodynamics he proposed. In Los Alamos, F. communicated with Niels Bohr, Ore Bohr, and Enrico Fermi. Robert Oppenheimer and other leading physicists. He was among those present at the first atomic bomb tests in Almogordo, New Mexico.

After the end of the war, F. spent the summer of 1945 working with Hans A. Bethe at General Electric in Schenectady (New York). He then became an associate professor of theoretical physics at Cornell University. Meanwhile, new questions arose for quantum electrodynamics. Thus, in 1947, Willis E. Lamb, using precision experiments, showed that two energy levels, which, according to Dirac's theory, should correspond to the same energy value, are in fact slightly different (“Lamb shift”). Another discrepancy between theory and experiment was established by Polycarp Kusch, who discovered that the intrinsic magnetic moment of an electron is more than 0.1% greater than its orbital magnetic moment.

Based on the fundamental work of Bethe, F. began to solve these fundamental problems, but soon he experienced a period of stagnation, caused, in his own opinion, by the fact that physics ceased to give him pleasure as an intellectual game. After some time, he accidentally witnessed someone in the cafeteria at Cornell University having fun throwing a plate into the air, and became interested in the relationship between the speed of rotation of the plate and its “yaw.” F. managed to derive equations describing the flight of the saucer. This exercise allowed him to regain his mental strength, and he resumed his work on quantum electrodynamics. “What I did did not seem to have much significance,” F. later wrote, “but in reality there was great meaning in it. The diagrams and everything else for which I received the Nobel Prize originated in that seemingly pointless tinkering with the flying saucer.”

"Everything Else" was a new version of the theory in which quantum electrodynamic interactions were considered from a new point of view - trajectories in space-time. The particle is said to propagate from the initial point of the trajectory to the final point; possible interactions along the way are expressed in terms of their relative probabilities. These probabilities are summed up in series (sometimes complex), for the calculation of which F. developed rules and graphical techniques (Feynman diagrams). Superficially simple, but extremely convenient, diagrams are widely used in many areas of physics. F. was able to explain the “Lamb shift”, the magnetic moment of the electron and other properties of particles.

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Independently from F. and from each other, based on other theoretical approaches, Julius S. Schwinger and Shinichiro Tomonaga almost simultaneously proposed their own versions of quantum electrodynamics and managed to overcome the main difficulties. The mathematical procedure they used was called renormalization. The divergences that caused so much trouble were avoided by postulating positive and negative infinities, which almost completely compensate each other, and the remainder (for example, the electron charge) corresponds to the experimentally measured values. Quantum electrodynamics of Feynman–Schwinger–Tomonaga is considered the most accurate of the currently known physical theories. Its correctness has been confirmed experimentally over a wide range of scales - from subatomic to astronomical.

Together with Schwinger and Tomonaga, F. was awarded the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics “for fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics, which had profound consequences for particle physics.” In his speech at the award ceremony, Ivar Waller of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences noted that the laureates brought new ideas and methods to an old theory and created a new one that now occupies a central position in physics. It not only explains previous discrepancies between theory and experiment, but also allows for a deeper understanding of the behavior of the mu meson and other particles in nuclear physics, problems solid and statistical mechanics.

F. remained at Cornell University until 1950, after which he moved to the California Institute of Technology as a professor of theoretical physics. There in 1959 he took an honorary position established in memory of Richard Chace Tolman. In addition to work on quantum electrodynamics, F. proposed an atomic explanation of the theory of liquid helium, developed by the Soviet physicist Lev Landau. Helium, which turns into a liquid state at 4°K (–269°C), becomes superfluid at about 2°K. The dynamics of superfluid helium contrast sharply with the laws that ordinary liquids satisfy: as it flows, it cools rather than heats up; flows freely through microscopically narrow holes, “disregarding” the force of gravity, creeps up the walls of the vessel. F. derived rotons postulated by Landau to explain the unusual behavior of superfluid helium. This explanation is that very cold helium atoms aggregate into rotons, forming something like smoke rings.

Together with his collaborator Murray Gell-Mann, F. made a significant contribution to the creation of the theory of weak interactions, such as the emission of beta particles by radioactive nuclei. This theory was born from physical diagrams, which make it possible to graphically represent the interactions of elementary particles and their possible transformations. F.'s latest works are devoted to strong interaction, i.e. the forces that hold nucleons in the nucleus and act between the subnuclear particles, or “partons” (for example, quarks), of which protons and neutrons are made.

F.'s originality of thinking and artistry as a lecturer influenced an entire generation of physics students. His method of intuitively guessing a formula and then proving its correctness finds more imitators than critics. The influence of both his theories and his personality is felt in every branch of modern particle physics.

F. was married three times. Arlene H. Greenbaum, whom he married in 1941, died of tuberculosis in 1945 while F. was at Los Alamos. His marriage to Mary Louise Bell, concluded in 1952, ended in divorce. In 1960 he married Gweneth Howarth in England. They had a son and daughter. Sincere and disrespectful of authority, F. was part of the presidential commission that investigated the circumstances of the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle in 1986. He wrote his own thirteen-page report, in which he criticized the responsible employees National Administration Aeronautics and Space Research (NASA) for being “fooled” by not noticing significant flaws in the spacecraft design. A man of indefatigable curiosity and varied interests, F. enjoyed playing the bongo drums, studied Japanese, drew and painted, took part in the decipherment of Mayan texts and showed a keen interest in the wonders of parapsychology, treating them, however, with a fair amount of skepticism.

In addition to the Nobel Prize, F. was awarded the Albert Einstein Prize of the Lewis and Rosa Strause Memorial Foundation (1954), the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Prize in Physics of the Atomic Energy Commission of the United States of America (1962) and the Niels Bohr International Gold Medal of the Danish Society of Civil and Electrical Engineers and mechanics (1973). F. was a member of the American Physical Society. Brazilian Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society of London. He was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences but later retired.

I'm not a physicist
Victor 21.05.2019 03:42:30

Mr. Feynman is an incredible person! His books inspire you to learn something new. His lectures open up the world of physics. They are so interesting and easy to explain that textbooks need to be written on them.