FEYNMAN, RICHARD PHILLIPS

FEYNMAN, RICHARD PHILLIPS (1918–1988), U.S. theoretical physicist. Born in New York City, Feynman was the son of an immigrant garment salesman and frustrated scientist whose curiosity and understanding of natural phenomena was a lifelong inspiration to his son. Educated at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (B.S. 1939; he had originally preferred Columbia but was apparently kept out by the Jewish quota) and Princeton (Ph.D. 1942), Feynman worked on the Manhattan (atomic bomb) Project from 1942 to 1946 in Princeton and at Los Alamos, New Mexico, where he was a computational group leader. He taught physics at Cornell University from 1946 to 1950 and at the California Institute of Technology from 1951 until his death. Feynman won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1965 (jointly, with Julian Schwinger and Shinichiro Tomonaga) for the fundamental theoretical work that led to the development of quantum electrodynamics (from the quantum mechanics of the 1920s and 1930s). In the course of this work he also developed "Feynman diagrams," a widely used visual analytical technique. He also did important work on superconductivity and, in collaboration with his Cal Tech colleague (and rival) murray gell-mann , on quarks and other subatomic particles. Near the end of his life Feynman served on the commission investigating the Challenger space shuttle disaster in 1986, creating a public sensation when he conducted, at a public hearing, a simple experiment that revealed the cause of the explosion. He also exposed the institutional management deficiencies that had made the disaster possible. Feynman was early recognized as one of the most brilliant physicists of his generation and was widely respected as a teacher as well. His published lectures on physics are regarded as classics. He also had a reputation as a "character" – he was famous for his bongo drumming, his womanizing, and his general unconventional demeanor – and for his extreme individualism (said Gell-Mann, "I found that he had difficulty thinking in terms of 'us'"). In addition to publications in journals, he was the author of several popular books. Among his published works, both professional (mainly transcribed and edited lectures) and popular, are The Theory of Fundamental Processes (1961), Quantum Electrodynamics (1961), The Feynman Lectures on Physics (3 vols., 1963–65, with Robert B. Leighton and Matthew Sands), The Character of Physical Law (1965), Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals (1965, with A.R. Hibbs), Photon-Hadron Interactions (1972), QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (1985), "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman\!": Adventures of a Curious Character (1985, with Ralph Leighton), Elementary Particles and the Laws of Physics: the 1986 Dirac Memorial Lecture (1987, with steven weinberg ), and "What Do You Care What Other People Think?": Further Adventures of a Curious Character (1988, with Ralph Leighton). A biography, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (1992, by James Gleick);Selected Papers of Richard Feynman, with Commentary (2000, edited by Laurie M. Brown); and a collection of letters, Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track (2005, edited by his daughter Michelle Feynman), have been published. Feynman's life has inspired countless memoirs, a film, and two plays. (Drew Silver (2nd ed.)