![]() ![]() In the 1980s, his friend and fellow drummer Ralph Leighton collected some of them in two bestselling volumes: Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman loved telling stories about himself and observing the reaction - the more stunned, amused or horrified the better. His pranks, including safe-cracking and sneaking through security fences, and his passion for playing the bongos, were arguably as memorable as his science. Robert Oppenheimer and head of the theoretical division Hans Bethe, were stunned by his computational abilities. His colleagues and supervisors, including scientific director J. ![]() Yet, his results - equivalent to more systematic, rigorously expounded mathematical techniques independently proposed by co-laureates Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga - matched atomic-physics data beautifully.ĭecades before his 1965 Nobel Prize, Feynman was already a legend of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico, where he helped develop the atomic bomb. His Nobel-prizewinning work on quantum electrodynamics included methods that even he saw as a sleight-of-hand for removing infinite terms from calculations. He crafted a lexicon for particle interactions: iconic squiggles, loops and lines now known as Feynman diagrams (see D. A mathematical whizz with exceptional intuition, he seemed to pull solutions out of thin air. His popular books shattered readers’ preconceptions of scientists as lab-coated nerds and replaced them with a hipper image of a wild non-conformist his scholarly tomes introduced researchers to revolutionary methods of grappling with modern physics.įeynman was a master conjuror of physics. As the centenary of his birth rolls around on 11 May, a look at his scientific and cultural legacy recalls his restless multidimensionality. Credit: Kevin Fleming/Corbis via GettyĪ pre-eminent twentieth-century physicist and a Nobel laureate: Richard Feynman was certainly those. ![]() Richard Feynman shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics. ![]()
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