Richard Feynman, in full Richard Phillips Feynman, American theoretical physicist who was widely regarded as the most brilliant, influential, and iconoclastic figure in his field in the post-World War II era. He made his mark as an original genius, starting with his work on the Manhattan Project in his early twenties, through winning a Nobel Prize for his work in developing an understanding of quantum mechanics, and finally as a much-loved professor of undergraduate physics at Caltech.
Here is a short description of the personal life of one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century. This description is based on the incidents, and the stories described in the semi-autobiography of Richard Feynman named “What Do You Care What Other People Think?”
The book is divided into two parts. First parts highlight the Feynman’s personal life. This part account different stories and the incidents from Feynman’s life ranging from the influence of his father on his personality to the death of his first wife all the way to stories of his excursion to different places around the globe with his third wife. And the second parts accounts his involvement on the Rogers Commission investigating the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. This blog will only focus on a few chapters of part one which helps the reader to draw an image of Feynman’s personality.
Moving on to the book, the writer starts the book by describing childhood Richard Feynman. He described the way Richard’s father influenced Richard’s personality and developed a scientific temperament in a young boy. When Richard was a young boy, his father would read out Encyclopaedia Britannica and would translate all the facts to the daily life so that you boy can relate. One of the incidents on the way his father used to do this as stated in the book is-
We would be reading, say, about dinosaurs. It would be talking about the Tyrannosaurus rex, and it would say something like, “This dinosaur is twenty-five
feet high and its head is six feet across.” My father would stop reading and say, “Now, let’s see what that means. That would mean that if he stood in our front yard, he would be tall enough to put his head through our window up here.” (We were on the second floor.) “But his head would be too wide to fit in the window.
This developed a habit of visualising hard to understand facts in a pictorial manner which even helped him in his career as a scientist (he developed a widely used pictorial representation scheme for the mathematical expressions describing the behaviour of subatomic particles, which later became known as Feynman diagrams). His father also encouraged him to understand the world by asking questions and finding their answers by experimenting. One such occurrence mentioned in the book is when his father “Why do you think birds peck at their feathers?”. It follows like this-
“Why do you think birds peck at their feathers?” I said, “Well, maybe they mess up their feathers when they fly, so they’re pecking them in order to straighten
them out.”
“All right,” he says. “If that were the case, then they would peck a lot just after they’ve been flying. Then, after they’ve been on the ground a while, they wouldn’t peck so much any more—you know what I mean?”
“Yeah.”
He says, “Let’s look and see if they peck more just after they land.
Other than Nobel Prize and Manhatten project, Richard Feynman is also known for his excellent teaching ability. The traces evolution of that skill is found in his childhood. He used to follow the same technique that was used by his father to develop Richard’s interest in science.
In the latter part of his life, he gave some lectures for the freshman at Caltech which were recorded and published as the Feynman Lectures on Physics which fetched his an award by the American Association of Physics Teachers. There is an interesting story associated with the award function stated in the book. He was accused of being anti-women because of two stories noted in his lecture. Those were-
The first was a discussion of the subtleties of velocity, and involved a woman driver being stopped by a cop. There’s a discussion about how fast she was going, and I had her raise valid objections to the cop’s definitions of velocity. The letter said I was making the woman look stupid.
The other story they objected to was told by the great astronomer Arthur Eddington, who had just figured out that the stars get their power from burning hydrogen in a nuclear reaction producing helium. He recounted how, on the night after his discovery, he was sitting on a bench with his girlfriend. She said, “Look how pretty the stars shine!” To which he replied, “Yes, and right now, I’m the only man in the world who knows how they shine.”
He was charged with showing women dumb and incapable of understanding nuclear reactions by a feminist group (Pointless accusation). So members of that feminist group started protesting in the award ceremony calling “FEYNMAN SEXIST PIG“. They were not letting Feynman give his speech. He handled this situation be smartly manipulating them and explaining that there are more serious places to direct one’s attention towards improving the status of women in physics.
There is a big spectrum of the personality of this great man. He was a stubborn, playful, intensely curious, masterful storyteller and highly original in practically everything he did. It is almost impossible to cover every aspect of such an illustrious man in a single blog.
I would like to end with one of his famous quotes-
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