Why richard feynman

Why on ice and not on other things? Because water expands when it freezes, so the pressure tries to undo the expansion and melts it. It goes on and on. There are other forces involved, connected to electrical forces.

It turns out that the magnetic and electrical force with which I wish to explain this repulsion in the first place is what ultimately is the deeper thing that we have to start with to explain many other things that everybody would just accept.

The situation you then have to explain is why, in magnets, it goes over a bigger distance than ordinarily.

For example, if we said the magnets attract like rubber bands, I would be cheating you. So I have cheated very badly, you see. So I am not going to be able to give you an answer to why magnets attract each other except to tell you that they do. All this empowered Feynman to develop his physics on terrain that is hopelessly abstruse for the average person. Show a video of Richard Feynman, and many will recognize him; ask for some of his essential contributions, and few will know how to respond, beyond his participation in the Manhattan Project during the Second World War, which developed the atomic bomb.

In fact, his collaboration in the nuclear program was the most material of his contributions. When he chose a specialty as a young man, he looked for a field halfway between the abstraction of mathematics and the excessive concreteness of electrical engineering.

He found it in theoretical physics, and at the same time he began to exhibit the charisma that revealed his uniqueness. During his stay at the Los Alamos laboratory for the development of the bomb, he entertained himself by opening the safes of his companions, while he was watching impotently as the life of his first wife, Arline, was snuffed out by tuberculosis.

The heart-wrenching impact of that loss was compounded a few months later by the devastating sight of the product of their work, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Henceforth, Feynman would devote his mental machinery to the complex matters that would lead him to fame and the Nobel Prize in , first at Cornell University and then at Caltech. Even decades after the development of quantum physics, he was able to propose a new interpretation, the path integral formulation, which considered all possible trajectories of a particle between two points. In the meantime, he invented the diagrams that bear his name and that represent pictorially the behaviour of particles; thanks to them one can intuitively observe how a positron acts like an electron traveling backwards in time.

However, despite that nod to the intuitive understanding of physics, Feynman never gave up on pure knowledge devoid of metaphors. I always found it incredible. He would start with some problem, and fill up pages with calculations.

And at the end of it, he would actually get the right answer! He always had a fantastic formal intuition about the innards of his calculations. Knowing what kind of result some integral should have, whether some special case should matter, and so on. And he was always trying to sharpen his intuition.

About how it manages to go from that little black square at the top to make all this complicated stuff. And about what that means for physics and so on. I just had a computer try all the possible rules. And I found it. I was worried you had some way to figure it out. Feynman and I talked a bunch more about rule He really wanted to get an intuition for how it worked. He tried bashing it with all his usual tools.

Like he tried to work out what the slope of the line between order and chaos is. And he calculated. Using all his usual calculus and so on. He and his son Carl even spent a bunch of time trying to crack rule 30 using a computer. Feynman and I tried to work together on a bunch of things over the years. On quantum computers before anyone had ever heard of those. On whether all the computation needed to evaluate Feynman diagrams really was necessary.

On what the simplest essential phenomenon of quantum mechanics really is. Yes, I think we thought nobody was noticing that we were off at the back of a press conference about a new computer system talking about the nonlinear sigma model. Although dismissing his status as some kind of a physics God, Gell-Mann genuinely admired Feynman's brilliance and originality - on this count there seems to be unanimous consensus - but his take on Feynman's personal quirks is more revealing.

The main thing about Feynman that really got Gell-Mann's goat was that Feynman seemed to "spend a huge amount of time generating anecdotes about himself". Now that much would be clear to anyone who does even a perfunctory reading of "Surely You're Joking Feynman often used to portray himself as some kind of working class city slicker thrown in the middle of distinguished, Sanskrit-quoting, tea-imbibing intellectuals at Princeton or Los Alamos, but the fact was that he relished being a contrarian among these people.

A more careful reading of "Surely One suspects that much of this was simply the result of boredom, but whatever the reason, it does give credence to Gell-Mann's observation about him trying hard to generate stories about himself. The deliberate generation of these stories could occasionally make Feynman appear like a jerk. A case in point concerns an anecdote when he kept the tip for a meal hidden beneath an inverted glass full of water. He wanted to illustrate to the waitress a clever way of sliding the glass over to the edge of the table, collecting the water without making it spill, and retrieving the tip.

But of course he did not actually tell the waitress this; he wanted to simply play a prank so he left it to her to figure it out. The incident is actually trivial and those who would complain loudly about the poor woman having to mop up the water just to get her tip are exaggerating their case, but it does capture a central thread in the Feynman narrative, the physicist's often casual habit to inconvenience other people simply to prove a point, play a prank or conduct an experiment.

He did this all his life, and a longer view of his life and career gives you the feeling that most of his colleagues put up with it not because they actually enjoyed it, but because they benefited from his brilliance too much to really bother about it. What started bothering me more the deeper I dug into Feynman's life was something quite different: his casual sexism. The latest insight into this comes from Lawrence Krauss's book " Quantum Man " which does a great job explaining the one thing about Feynman that should matter the most - his science.

But Krauss also does not ignore the warts. What startled me the most was the fact that when he was a young, boyish looking professor at Cornell, Feynman used to pretend to be a student so he could ask undergraduate women out.

I suspect that this kind of behavior on the part of a contemporary professor would almost certainly lead to harsh disciplinary action, as it should.

The behavior was clearly, egregiously wrong and when I read about it my view of Feynman definitely went down a notch, and a large notch at that. Feynman's apparent sexism was also the subject of a post with a sensationalist title; the post pointed out one chapter in "Surely Neither were Feynman's escapades limited to bars; more than one of his biographies have documented affairs with two married women, at least one of which caused him considerable problems.

It's not surprising to find these anecdotes disturbing and even offensive, but I believe it would also be premature and simplistic to write off Richard Feynman as "sexist" across the board. People who want to accuse him of this seem to have inadvertently cherry-picked anecdotes; the nude painting in topless bars, the portrayal of a woman in a physics lesson as a clueless airhead, the propensity to lie on the beach and watch girls.

But this view of Feynman misses the big picture. While not an excuse, several of his s adventures were probably related to the deep pain and insecurity caused by the death of his first wife Arlene; by almost any account the two shared a very deep and special bond. It was also during the late 40s and early 50s that Feynman was doing some of his most intense work on quantum electrodynamics, and at least a few of the situations he narrates were part of him letting off steam.

Also importantly, while some of Feynman's utterances and actions appear sexist to modern sensibilities, it's worth noting that they were probably no different than the attitudes of a male-dominated American society in the giddy postwar years, a society in which women were supposed to take care of the house and children and men were seen as the bread winners.

Thus, any side of Feynman that raises our eyebrows is really an aspect of a biased American society. In addition, Feynman's ploys to pick up girls in bars were - and in fact are - probably practiced by every American male seeking companionship in bars, whether consciously or unconsciously; what made Feynman different was the fact that he actually documented his methods, and he was probably the only scientist to do so.