Richard Phillips Feynman Biography

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World of Physics on Richard Phillips Feynman

Richard Feynman was born in New York City on May 11, 1918. He was educated in the public schools of New York City and rapidly impressed his teachers with his remarkable grasp of difficult concepts. It is reported that his high school physics teacher allowed Feynman to sit in the back of the room and solve assigned problems using calculus while other students struggled along with simple algebra.

Feynman attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, from which he received a bachelor's degree in 1939. His doctoral work was completed at Princeton University in 1942. Along with nearly all physicists of the time, Feynman spent World War II working in the Manhattan Project on the development of the first nuclear weapons. After the war, he accepted a teaching position at Cornell University. In 1950, Feynman became professor of theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology, where he remained until his death.

Feynman's special field of interest was quantum electrodynamics . That term refers to the study of the interactions among electrons, positrons, and photons. During the 1920s, a great deal of effort was expended on the application of modern quantum mechanics to classical electromagnetic theory. A number of leading physicists, including Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, and Enrico Fermi , all looked for ways to salvage James Clerk Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism by incorporating quantum principles.

Many of these efforts were at least partially successful. However, they too often failed to account for detailed phenomena, such as the specific energy levels observed for electrons in the hydrogen atom. There was some concern that either classical theory or its modern modifications might have to be totally abandoned.

While at Princeton University, Feynman attacked this problem. He developed a program for "renormalizing" some of the fundamental terms in equations that had been giving troublesome results. This program eliminated many of the nonsensical answers obtained from the equations. It became apparent that existing theories could be modified and successfully applied. For his work on quantum electrodynamics, Feynman shared the 1965 Nobel Prize for physics with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga. Schwinger and Tomonaga had independently developed methods of analysis similar to those of Feynman's.

Feynman was widely known and admired outside the field of science. His autobiography, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, became a best-seller. On another level, his Feynman Lectures on Physics is widely regarded as a lucid explanation of some fundamental ideas in modern physics.

Feynman died in 1988 after a long battle with cancer .