sciencenetlinks: Happy Birthday, Richard Feynman! Physicist, Nobel Prize winner, and popular scien

sciencenetlinks:

Happy Birthday, Richard Feynman!

Physicist, Nobel Prize winner, and popular science author Richard Feynman was born on this day in 1918.

A pioneer in quantum mechanics, Feynman grew up in New York and was educated at MIT and Princeton. During World War II, he was invited to join the Manhattan Project and moved to Los Alamos, New Mexico, to work on developing the atomic bomb. After receiving his PhD and the end of the war, Feynman went to work at Cornell, where he spent five years. He then moved to CalTech, where he taught and worked from 1950 until his death in 1988.

Feynman’s greatest scientific contributions lie in the areas of quantum mechanics and of quantum electrodynamics, for which he collaboratively won the 1965 Nobel Prize for Physics with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga for their work on the physics of elementary particles. He also made significant contributions to the discovery of quarks, predicted the advent of nanotechnology, and developed the Feynman diagrams, which are pictorial representations of the math behind the behavior of subatomic particles.

Sometimes referred to as the Great Explainer, Feyman believed in communicating complex ideas in a way that the general public could understand. He was a popular lecturer and wrote a number of books, including his memoir,Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman, and The Feynman Lectures on Physics, which Discover named as one of the 25 greatest science books of all time in 2006.

One of his final public milestones came as part of the commission assembled to investigate the 1986 Challenger explosion. Feynman was able to decisively demonstrate that it was a failure of the material comprising the shuttle’s O-ring due to cold weather that led to the accident.

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Image Credit: Photo of Richard Feynman, taken in 1984 in the woods of the Robert Treat Paine Estate in Waltham, MA. Copyright Tamiko Thiel 1984 (OTRS communication from photographer) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons