Arnab Nandy profiles Professor Richard Phillips Feynman and says he was a lot more than just a world famous physicist.
“There are two types of genius. Ordinary geniuses do great things, but they leave you room to believe that you could do the same if only you worked enough. Then there are magicians, and you can have no idea how they do it. Feynman was a magician”- Hans Bethe (Theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate).
What sets Professor Richard Phillips Feynman apart from other great physicists is that he was a lot more than just being a physicist. He was an artist, a drummer in a Samba band, a practical joker, an excellent storyteller and (hold your breath!) a self-taught safecracker.
The life of this genius was a set of combustible combinations made possible by his unique mixture blend of high intelligence, extreme curiosity and eternal scepticism. He is also famous for his many adventures, detailed in the books Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, What Do You Care What Other People Think? and Tuva or Bust!
Richard Feynman was, in many respects, an eccentric and a free spirit.
Feynman was born in Far Rockaway, Queens, New York on 11 May, 1918 to Jewish parents, though they did not practice Judaism as a religion. His father, who encouraged him to ask questions in order to challenge orthodox thinking, heavily influenced the young Feynman. His mother instilled in him a powerful sense of humour that he kept all his life. As a child, he delighted in repairing radios and had a talent for engineering. He kept experimenting on and re-creating mathematical topics. His habit of direct characterisation would sometimes disconcert more conventional thinkers; one of his questions when learning feline anatomy was: “Do you have a map of the cat?” When he spoke, it was with clarity. Feynman received a bachelor’s degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1939, and was named Putnam Fellow that same year. He received a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1942.
When Feynman was approached during his final year of research at Princeton to take part in the atom bomb project his first reaction had been a very definite “no” since he was entering the final stages of work for his thesis at the time. But he says, “…I went back to my thesis for about three minutes. Then I began to pace the floor and think about the thing.
The Germans had Hitler and the possibility of developing an atomic bomb was obvious, and the possibility that they would develop it before we did was very much of a fright.” And he joined the Manhattan project at Los Alamos. Los Alamos was isolated; in his own words, “There wasn’t anything to do there”. Bored, Feynman indulged his mischievous sense of humour to mock a self-important director (one of the few non-scientists on site)..
The director’s only important responsibility was for document security. He irritated Feynman and other scientists with petty rules for handling documents. Feynman embarrassed the director by breaking into the document safe and leaving a mischievous note. The Director responded by procuring a series of ever more sophisticated safes, each time thinking finally to have outsmarted Feynman, only to discover in a short while a new note in each new safe. As a drummer, Feynman would find an isolated section of the mesa to drum Indian-style; “and maybe I would dance and chant, a little”.
These antics did not go unnoticed, but no one knew that “Injun Joe” was actually Feynman!
Feynman claimed to be the only person to see the test explosion without the dark glasses provided, looking through a truck windshield to screen out harmful ultraviolet frequencies.
While at Caltech, Feynman was asked to “spruce up” the teaching of undergraduates. After three years devoted to the task, a series of lectures was produced, eventually becoming the famous Feynman Lectures on Physics, which are a major reason that Feynman is still regarded by most physicists as one of the greatest teachers of physics ever.
Feynman later won the ‘Oersted Medal’ for teaching, of which he seemed especially proud. His students competed keenly for his attention; once he was awakened when a student solved a problem and dropped it in his mailbox at home; glimpsing the student sneaking across his lawn, he could not go back to sleep, and he read the student’s solution. That morning another triumphant student interrupted his breakfast, but Feynman informed this student that he was too late.
Feynman’s first wife Arlene Greenbaum died of tuberculosis while he was working on the Manhattan project. He married a second time, to Mary Louise Bell of Neodesha, Kansas in June 1952; this marriage was brief and unsuccessful. Feynman later married Gweneth Howarth from the United Kingdom, who shared his enthusiasm for life. They remained married for life, and had a child of their own, Carl in 1962, and adopted a daughter, Michelle, in 1968.
He learned to play drums (frigideira) in acceptable Samba style in Brazil by persistence and practice, and participated in a Samba band competition too.
Feynman, who died on 15 February, 1988 at the University of California at Los Angeles Medical Center after an eight-year battle with abdominal cancer, despite his illness, continued to teach at the California Institute of Technology until two weeks before his death.
This genius had a large circle of friends from all walks of life, including the arts. He took up painting at one time and enjoyed some success under the pseudonym “Ofey”, culminating in an exhibition final words were “I’d hate to die twice. It’s so boring.” He and his wife Gweneth, who died in 1989, are buried in Mountain View Cemetery, Altadena, California.
Feynman was honoured on a U.S. postage stamp in 2005 as one of four American scientists.
Along with Barbara McClintock, Josiah Willard Gibbs, and John von Neumann, the set of self-adhesive 37-cent stamps were made available on 4 May, 2005 in a pane of 20 stamps with five stamps for each. His stamp, sepia-toned, features a photograph of a 30-something Feynman and eight small Feynman diagrams.
This winner of the Nobel Prize in 1965 was a man so full of life that you tend to feel “What a dull life I have” as you go through the story of his life. And then you realise that it isn’t for nothing that Richard Phillips Feynman is regarded as one of the greatest men of our age.