Entire World Celebrates Birth of Richard Feynman!
A tribute to 100 years of a genius
On May 11, the international scientific community is honoring the 100th anniversary of Feynman’s birth with events at Caltech, where he taught for decades, and around the world. They will be paying tribute to someone who revolutionized theoretical physics through his brilliant methods and reshaped how science is taught through his vivid explanations full of simple, common-sense rules. Feynman was a true scientific genius, albeit not the kind we typically imagine.
When we think of a theoretical physicist, we picture someone otherworldly like Einstein, with his unruly mop of hair, thick German accent, and esoteric interests. Richard Feynman — a clean-cut, all-American kid from Queens who felt much more at home in a diner or bar than in any fancy faculty club — was nothing like that stereotype. Full of zest, he loved banging on bongo drums, sketching models as part of his amateur interest in art, and acting in outrageous musical productions at Caltech. His teaching style was truly frantic, funny, and always memorable. Luckily many videos of his lectures persist and are easily available online.
Feynman’s remarkable abilities manifested themselves at a young age. His father, who was a businessman fascinated by the workings of nature, vowed that he would grow up to be a scientist. Even in his student days, Feynman made headlines for his extraordinary mathematical talent. While in high school and college, his high scores in math competitions were featured in newspaper accounts. On the basis of one such national contest, Harvard offered him acceptance to its PhD program, along with free graduate tuition. Nevertheless, the lure of being in a physics department with a particular collider in the basement of its building drew him to Princeton, where he was mentored by the visionary physicist John Wheeler.
Soon after receiving his PhD, Feynman married Arline Greenbaum, a young woman inflicted with tuberculosis. They had been sweethearts for many years before she became afflicted with the then-incurable illness nicknamed the “white plague.” Feynman’s parents, especially his mother, urged him not to take on the burden of a wife with a serious, contagious disease. While realistic about her prognosis, on the contrary he saw their marriage as a joy, not a hardship. Even though their years together might be limited, he reasoned, their potential to enrich each other’s lives through the sharing of confidences, fun times, and ideas seemed boundless.
Spurred by patriotic duty, Feynman contributed to military efforts during World War II by participating in the Manhattan Project to build the first atomic bombs. His years at Los Alamos, where he worked, were marked by exceptional talent in making computations and assembling hardware, along with mischievous humor directed at finding security flaws. He prided himself in circumventing secrecy measures by picking key locks and cracking combination safes.
Despite her illness, Arline has a sparkling sense of humor. Much to his amusement, on May 11, 1945, to celebrate Richard’s 27th birthday, she had a mock newspaper made and distributed at Los Alamos with the headline:
Entire Nation Celebrates Birth of R. P. Feynman
Arline and Richard enjoyed just three years of marriage before she died on June 26. Shortly thereafter, his father, with whom he was very close, passed on. In between, he participated, as part of the Manhattan Project, in the design of the first atomic bombs, which were launched on Japan. For a time, he remained outwardly chipper, but then it hit him. Not only were two of his love ones gone forever, the world itself might end in nuclear destruction.
Despite those tragedies, Feynman exhibited a remarkable, inspiring resilience. In the late 1940s, he was appointed to a professorship at Cornell, where his post-traumatic stress distracted him from his research and thus threatened to stymie his career. Yet, rather than feel sorry for himself, he looked for ways to distract himself until inspiration knocked on his door once again. The turning point was observing a plate being thrown in the university cafeteria, watching it spin, and calculating its motion. That led him to step back into the waters of particle physics and complete his Nobel-Prize-winning contributions. The strange-looking diagrams he developed at that time to solve quantum puzzles — full of squiggles, arrows, and loops — have become ubiquitous tools of modern particle physics.
Recruited by Caltech, Feynman soon made a name for himself as a masterful lecturer. Well before the age of Carl Sagan, he was invited to participate in television broadcasts about science. Characteristically, his explanations were blunt and straightforward — clear as crystal, when Feynman felt a simple explanation was warranted, but mysterious on other occasions when Feynman felt, as in the case of quantum electrodynamics, that nature had not yet revealed the ultimate explanation.
Students in their freshman year were delighted to see Feynman’s zeal for orientation events such as kayaking and scavenger hunts. He developed a unique course, called Physics X, in which he invited first year students to ask him anything about physics. He loved being forced to think on his feet, and expected students to be able to do the same.
Friends of Feynman, such as his partner in bongo-drumming Ralph Leighton, were accustomed to the wild stories he told about his life, including antics from his college days and during the war. When Leighton persuaded Feynman to let him write down many of those tales and published them in the book, “Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman!” it quickly became a bestseller. Its success led to two strands of criticism about Feynman — that he was self-promoting and that he harbored sexist attitudes, reflected in some of his recollections about encounters with women in bars. Feynman tried to address the latter critique by pointing out his strong support of women in science, including his encouragement of his younger sister Joan to become an astrophysicist. (Joan, who led a successful career at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is now in her early 90s and is participating in the Feynman celebrations). Leighton has recently expressed regret that the offending passages weren’t edited out of the book.
By 1978, when Feynman had reached the age of sixty, he was generally happy, reveling in the southern California lifestyle. Continuing to enjoy Caltech, he was practically worshiped by its adoring students who loved his teaching style and quirks. He was married to a lovely English woman, had two kids, and lived in a comfortable house within a short drive from mountains and beaches.
Soon after his birthday, however, he was diagnosed with a rare form of stomach cancer, conceivably a result of radiation exposure when he observed the bomb being tested years earlier. When he researched his condition, he realized that he might only have a few more years left to live. Indeed, he would live for only nine more years, enduring several major operations to remove the growing tumors. In one of the procedures, he almost bled to death, and was rescued by a monumental campus blood drive.
Feynman’s debilitating cancer put his optimism and resilience to a severe test. Yet, rather than shut down and cut himself off from the world, he embraced life even more. He performed in numerous campus musicals acting and performing bongo drums. Even after his near-fatal surgery he got a standing ovation by appearing as a chief in a university production of South Pacific. He took on a famous role as part of the Rogers Commission investigating of the space shuttle Challenger disaster, and won kudos for his independent research into its cause and subsequent testimony to Congress.
All the while, he and his friend Ralph Leighton planned a trip to a remote part of the Soviet Union called Tuva that happened to interest him because he had seen its postage stamps years earlier. In short, rather than give up, he made the best of his remaining time on the Earth. When he died in 1988 at the age of 69, his testimony was fresh in the public mind and his books were still flying off the shelves. While he scarcely resembled Einstein, Feynman had enlightened the world with his own special brand of genius.
Paul Halpern is a University of the Sciences physics professor and the author of fifteen popular science books, including The Quantum Labyrinth: How Richard Feynman and John Wheeler Revolutionized Time and Reality.
