Richard Feynman
1918–1988 1 entry
Biography
Richard Feynman was an American theoretical physicist, one of the most original scientists of the twentieth century. Born in New York in 1918, he studied at MIT and Princeton, and during the Second World War he worked at Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project, where he became known for picking the locks of the safes that held atomic secrets. After the war he taught at Cornell and, from 1950, at the California Institute of Technology.
His new formulation of quantum electrodynamics, the theory of how light and matter interact, earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965, shared with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, and the simple drawings he invented for it, Feynman diagrams, are used by physicists everywhere. A brilliant teacher, he left The Feynman Lectures on Physics, and the stories collected in “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” made him famous far beyond science. In 1986, on the commission investigating the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger, he showed on television, with a glass of ice water, why a rubber seal had failed. He played the bongo drums, loved puzzles and died in Los Angeles in 1988.
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