Feynman Born: Physics Gets Its Greatest Communicator

Richard Feynman played bongo drums, picked locks, sketched nudes, and in between assembled some of the most elegant explanations of quantum physics ever committed to paper or blackboard. Born in Far Rockaway, Queens on May 11, 1918, to a Jewish family, he showed mathematical talent early enough that his father, a uniform salesman, began teaching him to think scientifically before he started school. He earned his undergraduate degree at MIT and his doctorate at Princeton under John Archibald Wheeler at 24. He joined the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, where he was the youngest group leader. While working on the bomb, he drove to Albuquerque on weekends to visit his first wife, Arline, who was dying of tuberculosis in a sanatorium. She died in June 1945, weeks before the Trinity test. He later wrote her a letter that began: "I adore you, sweetheart. I know how much you like to hear that." His central contribution to physics was the reformulation of quantum electrodynamics (QED), a theory describing how light and matter interact at the quantum level. His approach used Feynman diagrams, intuitive visual representations of particle interactions that allowed physicists to calculate processes that had been nearly intractable. He shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga. His undergraduate lectures at Caltech, published as The Feynman Lectures on Physics, remain among the most celebrated textbooks in the field. He taught with such clarity and enthusiasm that students described his lectures as performances. His popular books, including Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, sold millions. His final public act was diagnosing the Challenger disaster. He conducted his own investigation parallel to the Rogers Commission, speaking directly to engineers who had warned NASA about the O-ring problem. During a televised hearing, he dipped a piece of O-ring rubber into a glass of ice water, showing that it lost flexibility at low temperatures. His appendix to the commission's report concluded: "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." He died of kidney cancer on February 15, 1988, at 69.