Richard Feynman

Origins and early life

Richard Phillips Feynman was born in Queens, New York City, on 11 May 1918, the son of Lucille Phillips and of Melville Feynman, a sales manager, and grew up in Far Rockaway. Both his parents came from Jewish families, his father born in Minsk and his mother in the United States to Polish immigrants, and the family went to the synagogue every Friday, though by his youth he called himself an avowed atheist. Columbia University turned him away under its quota on Jewish students, so he graduated from MIT in 1939, then took his doctorate at Princeton in 1942 under John Archibald Wheeler.

Work and career

He worked on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos from 1943, then taught at Cornell University from 1945 and at the California Institute of Technology from 1950. In 1948 he helped create a new quantum electrodynamics, the theory of how light and charged particles interact, by introducing the diagrams that bear his name, which ease its calculations and are still widely used.

Recognition

In 1965 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Julian Schwinger and Shin'ichirō Tomonaga, for their fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics, with deep-ploughing consequences for the physics of elementary particles. He also gave a quantum explanation of superfluid helium, built a model of weak decay with Murray Gell-Mann, and in the early sixties gave the course published as The Feynman Lectures on Physics. Asked in 1967 to appear in a book on Jewish Nobel laureates, he declined, writing that to select for approbation elements from a supposedly Jewish heredity opened the door to nonsense on racial theory.

In 1986, on the commission into the loss of the shuttle Challenger, he showed at a televised hearing, with a clamp and ice-cold water, that the material of its O-rings lost its resilience in the cold. He died in Los Angeles on 15 February 1988, at the age of sixty-nine, after ten years of operations for cancer.