Richard Feynman

• 1. Introduction

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  Richard Feynman's last words, spoken after a long coma, were "This dying is boring." The remark suited an American theoretical physicist who never lost his taste for blunt, irreverent honesty. He was a man who treated authority, ceremony and even his own mortality as things to be poked at and examined. This documentary asks how a restless young man in a postwar slump rebuilt a stalled theory of light and matter. It asks why a scientist so admired as a teacher could also exasperate his rivals. And it asks what stays behind when a man who loved telling stories is no longer there to tell them.

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• 2. A Queens Childhood

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  Richard Phillips Feynman was born on the 11th of May 1918 in Queens, New York City. His father, Melville Arthur Feynman, was a sales manager for a uniform company. His mother, Lucille, was a homemaker who had trained as a primary school teacher. Melville had been born in Minsk in the Russian Empire and emigrated with his parents at the age of five. Lucille's father had come from Poland.

  The boy did not speak until after his third birthday. As an adult he spoke with a New York accent so strong that it sounded like an affectation. His friends Wolfgang Pauli and Hans Bethe once remarked that he spoke like a "bum."

  Melville shaped the way his son thought. He encouraged questions that challenged orthodox thinking and was always ready to teach something new. From Lucille, Richard took the sense of humor he kept for life.

  At home he maintained an experimental laboratory and loved repairing radios. He would analyze a broken set in theory first and then arrive at the fix, an early sign of the theorist to come. In grade school he built a home burglar alarm system while his parents were out running errands for the day.

  The family went to the synagogue every Friday, yet by his youth Feynman described himself as an "avowed atheist." At thirteen, he later wrote, he stopped believing that the Jewish people were in any way "the chosen people." Decades later, at the Jewish Theological Seminary, he met the Talmud for the first time. He admired the way commentary from many hands surrounded the original text on each page. He was disappointed, though, that the rabbis cared only about questions arising from the Talmud itself and showed no interest in nature.

  When Richard was five, his mother gave birth to a boy named Henry Phillips, who died at four weeks. Four years later his sister Joan was born, and the family moved to Far Rockaway, Queens. Their mother thought women lacked the capacity to understand science, but Richard disagreed. He took Joan to see the aurora borealis, and she grew up to become an astrophysicist who helped explain what causes the northern lights.

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• 3. Schoolboy to Princeton

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  Far Rockaway High School also produced two other future Nobel laureates, Burton Richter and Baruch Samuel Blumberg. When Feynman arrived, he was quickly promoted to a higher math class. A high school IQ test estimated his score at 125, which the biographer James Gleick called high but "merely respectable." His sister Joan scored one point higher and later joked to an interviewer that she was the smarter one. Years afterward, Feynman declined to join Mensa International because, he said, his IQ was too low.

  At fifteen he taught himself trigonometry, advanced algebra, infinite series, analytic geometry, and both differential and integral calculus. Before college he was already experimenting with the half-derivative, using notation of his own. He invented special symbols for logarithm, sine, cosine and tangent so they would not look like three variables multiplied together. In his last year of school he won the New York University Math Championship. His directness could unsettle conventional thinkers, as when he asked, while learning feline anatomy, "Do you have a map of the cat?"

  Columbia University rejected his application because of its quota on Jewish students. Feynman went instead to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he joined the Pi Lambda Phi fraternity. He began in mathematics but found it too abstract and moved to electrical engineering. Then he decided he "had gone too far" and settled on physics, which he called "somewhere in between."

  As an undergraduate he published two papers in the Physical Review. One, on the scattering of cosmic rays by the stars of a galaxy, was written with Manuel Vallarta. From Vallarta he learned that in mentor and protege publishing, the senior scientist's name comes first. Feynman got his revenge when Werner Heisenberg ended a whole book on cosmic rays by saying that such an effect was not to be expected according to Vallarta and Feynman. At their next meeting Feynman gleefully asked if Vallarta had seen the book. "Yes," Vallarta replied. "You're the last word in cosmic rays."

  The other paper was his senior thesis, "Forces in Molecules," on a topic assigned by John C. Slater. Slater was impressed enough to have it published, and its main result is known as the Hellmann-Feynman theorem.

  In 1939 Feynman received his bachelor's degree and was named a Putnam Fellow. On the Princeton University entrance exams he earned a perfect score in physics, an unprecedented feat, and an outstanding score in mathematics. He did poorly on the history and English portions. Henry D. Smyth, head of the physics department there, wrote to Philip M. Morse to ask whether Feynman was Jewish, because the department had to keep its proportion of Jewish students small. Morse confirmed it, but assured Smyth that Feynman's manner showed no trace of the characteristic.

  Feynman's first seminar at Princeton, on the classical Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory, drew Albert Einstein, Wolfgang Pauli and John von Neumann. Pauli predicted that the theory would be extremely difficult to quantize. Einstein suggested trying the method on gravity in general relativity, which Fred Hoyle and Jayant Narlikar did much later as the Hoyle-Narlikar theory of gravity.

  Feynman received his PhD in 1942 under John Archibald Wheeler. His thesis, "The Principle of Least Action in Quantum Mechanics," applied the principle of stationary action to quantum problems. It laid the groundwork for the path integral formulation and for Feynman diagrams. A key insight was that positrons behaved like electrons moving backwards in time. Gleick wrote that the twenty-three-year-old seemed to have "a frightening ease with the substance behind the equations."

  The Princeton scholarship carried one condition: Feynman could not be married. He nevertheless kept seeing his high school sweetheart, Arline Greenbaum, who had tuberculosis, an incurable disease at the time. She was not expected to live more than two years. On the 29th of June 1942 the couple took the ferry to Staten Island and married in the city office. No family or friends attended, and two strangers served as witnesses. Feynman could kiss her only on the cheek, and afterward he took her to Deborah Hospital, where he visited on weekends.

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• 4. The Secret Mesa

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  In the summer of 1941, with the United States not yet at war, Feynman worked on ballistics problems at the Frankford Arsenal in Pennsylvania. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Robert R. Wilson recruited him to work on producing enriched uranium. Feynman still had no graduate degree. Wilson's Princeton team was building a device called an isotron to separate uranium-235 from uranium-238 electromagnetically. On paper it was many times more efficient than the calutron being developed by Ernest O. Lawrence's team in California. Feynman and Paul Olum struggled to decide whether it was practical, and on Lawrence's recommendation the project was abandoned.

  Early in 1943, Robert Oppenheimer was establishing the Los Alamos Laboratory, a secret site on a mesa in New Mexico. "Like a bunch of professional soldiers," Wilson later recalled, "we signed up, en masse, to go to Los Alamos." Oppenheimer telephoned Feynman long distance from Chicago to say he had found a Presbyterian sanatorium in Albuquerque for Arline. They left by train on the 28th of March 1943. The railroad supplied Arline with a wheelchair, and Feynman paid extra for a private room.

  At Los Alamos, Hans Bethe placed Feynman in the Theoretical Division and soon made him a group leader. Together they developed the Bethe-Feynman formula for calculating the yield of a fission bomb. Feynman also ran the group of human computers. With Stanley Frankel and Nicholas Metropolis, he helped set up a system of IBM punched cards for computation. An avid drummer, he even figured out how to make the machine click in musical rhythms.

  A later assignment took him to the Clinton Engineer Works in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. There he helped engineers devise safety procedures for storing enriched uranium, which became dangerous when it came into contact with water. He insisted on lecturing the rank and file on nuclear physics so they would understand the risks.

  Niels Bohr sought Feynman out for one-on-one discussions. Feynman later learned why: most of the other physicists were too awed by Bohr to argue with him. Feynman had no such inhibitions and pointed out anything he thought flawed. Bohr never warmed to him. Oppenheimer, by contrast, wrote in November 1943 that Feynman was "by all odds the most brilliant young physicist here, and everyone knows this."

  Isolated on the mesa, Feynman amused himself by investigating the combination locks on his colleagues' cabinets and desks. Many physicists left the factory settings, wrote the combination down, or chose easily guessed dates. One cabinet opened to 27-18-28, after the base of natural logarithms, e = 2.71828. The three filing cabinets where one colleague kept research notes all shared a single combination. Feynman left notes inside as a prank, and the colleague, Frederic de Hoffmann, feared a spy had been at his files.

  Feynman's monthly salary of $380 covered about half of his modest living expenses and Arline's medical bills, so the couple dipped into her $3,300 in savings. On weekends he borrowed a car from his friend Klaus Fuchs to drive to Albuquerque. Asked who at Los Alamos was most likely to be a spy, Fuchs pointed to Feynman's safe-cracking and frequent trips. Fuchs himself later confessed to spying for the Soviet Union. The FBI compiled a bulky file on Feynman, particularly in view of his Q clearance.

  Told that Arline was dying, Feynman drove to Albuquerque and sat with her for hours until she died on the 16th of June 1945. He then immersed himself in work and was present at the Trinity nuclear test. He claimed to be the only person to watch the explosion without the very dark glasses or welder's lenses provided. His reasoning was that a truck windshield would screen out the harmful ultraviolet radiation. The brightness still made him duck to the truck floor, where he saw a temporary purple splotch. Cornell University, where Bethe had recommended him as early as the 30th of October 1943, was waiting for him.

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• 5. Rebuilding Quantum Electrodynamics

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  Feynman left for Ithaca, New York, in October 1945, one of the first Los Alamos group leaders to depart. He had turned down a May 1945 offer from the University of California, and Cornell matched its salary offer of $3,900 a year. He also nominally held an assistant professorship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, on unpaid leave during the war. That appointment was not extended when he would not commit to returning. Years later he told an audience there, "It's great to be back at the only university that ever had the good sense to fire me."

  No longer working at Los Alamos, he lost his draft exemption. At his induction physical, Army psychiatrists diagnosed a mental illness, and the Army gave him a 4-F exemption on mental grounds. His father died suddenly on the 8th of October 1946, and Feynman sank into depression. On the 17th of October 1946 he wrote a letter to Arline, expressing his love and heartbreak. It was sealed and opened only after his death. "Please excuse my not mailing this," it concluded, "but I don't know your new address."

  Unable to focus on serious research, Feynman turned to physics problems purely for his own satisfaction. One involved the wobbling, spinning motion of a dinner plate that someone tossed in the air in the Cornell cafeteria. His equations of rotation from this period ultimately proved important to his Nobel Prize-winning work. Feeling burned out, he was surprised when professorship offers arrived from the Institute for Advanced Study, UCLA and Berkeley.

  Quantum electrodynamics, the theory of light and charged particles, was in trouble. Its perturbation theory produced infinite integrals, which were clear mathematical flaws that Feynman and Wheeler had tried and failed to work around. "Theoreticians," noted Murray Gell-Mann, "were in disgrace." In June 1947 leading American physicists gathered at the Shelter Island Conference, which Feynman called his "first big conference with big men." Experimentalists stole the show with the Lamb shift, a measurement of the magnetic moment of the electron, and Robert Marshak's two-meson hypothesis.

  Bethe took up work by Hans Kramers and derived a renormalized non-relativistic equation for the Lamb shift. The next step was a relativistic version. Feynman's first attempt did not converge, so he returned to the path integral formulation from his thesis. Like Bethe, he made the integral finite with a cut-off term, and the result matched Bethe's.

  Feynman presented the work at the Pocono Conference in 1948, and it went badly. Julian Schwinger gave a long presentation of his own approach. Feynman followed with "Alternative Formulation of Quantum Electrodynamics," using diagrams for the first time. The audience was puzzled, and Paul Dirac, Edward Teller and Niels Bohr all raised objections.

  Freeman Dyson saw that Shin'ichiro Tomonaga, Schwinger and Feynman understood their subject even if no one else did, yet none had published. He became convinced that Feynman's formulation was easier to follow and persuaded Oppenheimer of this. In 1949 Dyson published a paper adding rules that told how to carry out renormalization. Prompted by this, Feynman published his ideas in the Physical Review over three years. His 1949 paper "The Theory of Positrons" introduced what is now called the Feynman propagator. Papers in 1950 and 1951 supplied the mathematical basis for his methods.

  Papers citing Feynman and using his diagrams appeared in 1950 and soon became prevalent. Students learned the new tool, and computer programs were later written to evaluate the diagrams, allowing high-precision predictions. Marc Kac adapted the idea of summing over possible histories of a particle to a class of differential equations, producing the Feynman-Kac formula. Its use reaches well beyond physics. Schwinger, however, dismissed the diagram as "pedagogy, not physics."

  Feynman looked back fondly on the Telluride House, where he lived for much of his Cornell career. He described it as a group of boys selected for their brains and given free board and lodging, and he said "it's there that I did the fundamental work" behind his Nobel Prize. Yet he was also restless. By 1949 he still had no permanent home and moved between guest houses and student residences. He later wrote that he disliked Ithaca's cold winters and felt he lived in the shadow of Bethe.

  In July 1949 Feynman spent several weeks in Rio de Janeiro. The Soviet Union had just detonated its first atomic bomb, and espionage fears were rising. Fuchs was arrested in 1950, and the FBI questioned Bethe about Feynman's loyalty. David Bohm was arrested on the 4th of December 1950 and emigrated to Brazil in October 1951. With nuclear war on people's minds, a girlfriend told Feynman to consider moving to South America. He spent his 1951-52 sabbatical in Brazil, giving courses at the Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Fisicas.

  In Rio he fell for samba and learned the frigideira, a metal percussion instrument based on a frying pan. He was already an enthusiastic amateur on bongo and conga drums and often played in the pit orchestra for musicals. He spent time with Bohm, but Bohm could not persuade him to look into his ideas on physics. Feynman never returned to Cornell, because Robert Bacher, who had helped bring him there, had lured him to the California Institute of Technology, with the Brazil year written into the deal.

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• 6. Four Forces, Tiny Machines

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  At Caltech, Feynman studied the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, which seems to flow with no viscosity at all. He supplied a quantum-mechanical explanation for the Soviet physicist Lev Landau's theory. Applying the Schrodinger equation showed that the fluid was displaying quantum behavior visible on a macroscopic scale. The related problem of superconductivity eluded him, and it was solved in 1957 by the BCS theory of John Bardeen, Leon Neil Cooper and John Robert Schrieffer.

  With Murray Gell-Mann, Feynman developed a model of weak decay, such as a neutron turning into an electron, a proton and an antineutrino. They showed that the current coupling in the process combines vector and axial currents. E. C. George Sudarshan and Robert Marshak reached the theory almost simultaneously. Even so, the Feynman and Gell-Mann collaboration was seen as seminal. It joined Enrico Fermi's 1933 beta decay theory to an explanation of parity violation.

  Feynman's parton model tried to explain the strong interactions governing nucleon scattering. It emerged alongside the quark model of Gell-Mann, who dismissed partons derisively as "put-ons." In the mid-1960s many physicists thought quarks were only a bookkeeping device for symmetry numbers. The statistics of the omega-minus particle, if read as three identical strange quarks, seemed to make real quarks impossible.

  Then came the deep inelastic scattering experiments at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in the late 1960s. They showed that protons and neutrons contain point-like particles that scatter electrons. Feynman's model interpreted the data without adding extra hypotheses. For example, about 45% of the energy momentum was carried by electrically neutral particles, now understood as the gluons that carry forces between quarks. Their three-valued color quantum number solves the omega-minus problem. Feynman never disputed the quark model. When the fifth quark was found in 1977, he immediately told his students that a sixth must exist, and it was discovered in the decade after his death.

  After the success of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman turned to quantum gravity. By analogy with the photon, which has spin 1, he examined a free massless spin 2 field and derived the Einstein field equation of general relativity. Along the way he discovered "ghosts," particles inside his diagrams with the wrong connection between spin and statistics. They proved invaluable for explaining particle behavior in Yang-Mills theories such as quantum chromodynamics. John and Mary Gribbin wrote that "Nobody else has made such influential contributions to the investigation of all four of the interactions."

  In the 1980s Feynman began spending summers at Thinking Machines Corporation, helping build some of the first parallel supercomputers. He was one of the first scientists to conceive of quantum computers and considered how to build them. Between 1984 and 1986 he also developed a variational method for approximating path integrals. On one Caltech blackboard he chalked, "What I cannot create I do not understand."

  His lecture "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" was given at Caltech in 1959 and published a year later. In it he imagined miniaturized machines that could build smaller copies of themselves. He suggested it should be possible, in principle, to make nanoscale machines that "arrange the atoms the way we want" and carry out chemical synthesis by mechanical manipulation. He also floated the idea of "swallowing the doctor," a tiny surgical robot, which he credited to his friend and graduate student Albert Hibbs.

  To bring publicity to progress in the field, Feynman offered two $1,000 prizes for nanotechnology challenges. One was claimed by William McLellan and the other by Tom Newman.

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• 7. Caltech Life and Lessons

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  In the early 1960s Feynman agreed to a request to spruce up the teaching of undergraduates at Caltech. Three years of work produced the lectures that became The Feynman Lectures on Physics. Accounts of their success vary. Feynman wrote a pessimistic preface just after an exam on which students did poorly. His colleagues David L. Goodstein and Gerry Neugebauer said first-year students found the material intimidating, while older students and faculty found it inspirational. Matthew Sands, by contrast, remembered ordinary attendance for a large lecture course.

  Turning the lectures into books took Sands and Robert B. Leighton, as part-time co-authors, several years. Feynman wanted the cover to show a drum with mathematical diagrams of vibrations drawn on it. The publishers chose plain red covers, though the foreword included a photograph of Feynman playing drums. The books were not adopted as university textbooks, but they keep selling because they give a deep understanding of physics. Other talks became The Character of Physical Law and QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter.

  His time teaching in Brazil had left a sharp opinion. The students' study habits and their Portuguese-language textbooks were so stripped of context and application that, in his view, they were not learning physics at all. Invited to lecture on his experience at year's end, he agreed on condition that he could speak frankly, and he did.

  In 1964 Feynman served on the California State Curriculum Commission, which approved textbooks for the state's schools. He found many mathematics texts full of "New Math" topics useful mainly to pure mathematicians. He pointed out that the elaborate notation for sets almost never appears in theoretical physics, engineering, business arithmetic or computer design. The notation was claimed to be precise, he wrote, but "precise for what purpose?"

  In April 1966 he addressed the National Science Teachers Association on how to make students think like scientists. His account of science began with creatures such as cats that learn from experience, moved to humans who pass knowledge through language, and ended with Galileo and others who started doubting what was handed down. Feynman's 1974 Caltech commencement address on cargo cult science warned that honesty is what separates science from its imitation. The first principle, he said, is that you must not fool yourself, and you are "the easiest person to fool." Across his career he served as doctoral advisor to 30 students.

  In 1977 Feynman backed Jenijoy La Belle, hired in 1969 as Caltech's first female professor, after she sued over being refused tenure in 1974. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled against Caltech that year and found she had been paid less than male colleagues. She received tenure in 1979. Many of Feynman's colleagues were surprised by his support, but he had come to know, like and admire her.

  Feynman first thought of an autobiography in the 1960s. In the 1980s he recorded chapters on audio tape with Ralph Leighton, who transcribed them. Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! appeared in 1985 and became a best-seller. Gell-Mann was upset by its account of the weak interaction work and threatened to sue, which led to a correction in later editions. He remarked that Feynman "was a great scientist, but he spent a great deal of his effort generating anecdotes about himself."

  On the 28th of June 1952, shortly after returning from Brazil, Feynman married Mary Louise Bell in Boise, Idaho. The marriage was stormy, and they separated on the 20th of May 1956. The divorce became final on the 5th of May 1958. That September he traveled to Geneva for the Atoms for Peace Conference, and on the beach at Lake Geneva he met Gweneth Howarth of Ripponden, West Yorkshire, who was working in Switzerland as an au pair. She arrived in Altadena, California, in June 1959, and they married on the 24th of September 1960 at the Huntington Hotel in Pasadena. They had a son, Carl, in 1962 and adopted a daughter, Michelle, in 1968. With his Nobel Prize money they bought a beach house in Baja California.

  In 1975, in Long Beach, California, Feynman bought a Dodge Tradesman Maxivan with custom Feynman diagram murals on its exterior. He chose QANTUM as the license plate because QED and QUARK were already taken. After his death Gweneth sold the van for $1 to his friend Ralph Leighton, who put it in storage, where it began to rust. In 2012 the video game designer Seamus Blackley bought it.

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• 8. Challenger and Legacy

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  In 1986 Feynman joined the Presidential Rogers Commission, which investigated the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. He had been reluctant to take part and was persuaded by his wife's advice. He clashed several times with chairman William P. Rogers, who complained to fellow commissioner Neil Armstrong that Feynman was becoming "a pain in the ass."

  During a televised hearing, Feynman compressed a sample of the shuttle's O-ring material in a clamp and dropped it into ice-cold water. The demonstration showed that the material became less resilient in the cold. The commission concluded that the primary O-ring failed to seal properly in unusually cold weather at Cape Canaveral. In his appendix to the report Feynman wrote, "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."

  The first public recognition of his work came in 1954 from Lewis Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. Strauss notified him that he had won the Albert Einstein Award, worth $15,000 and a gold medal. Because Strauss had stripped Oppenheimer of his security clearance, Feynman hesitated to accept. Isidor Isaac Rabi cautioned him, "You should never turn a man's generosity as a sword against him." The Lawrence Award followed in 1962. Schwinger, Tomonaga and Feynman shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics for fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics. That year Feynman also became a Foreign Member of the Royal Society. He received the Oersted Medal in 1972 and the National Medal of Science in 1979. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences but ultimately resigned. Schwinger called him "an honest man, the outstanding intuitionist of our age."

  In 1978 Feynman sought treatment for abdominal pains and was diagnosed with liposarcoma, a rare cancer. Surgeons removed a very large tumor that had crushed one kidney and his spleen. Doctors found another cancer, Waldenstrom macroglobulinemia, in 1986, and further operations followed in October 1986 and October 1987. He entered the UCLA Medical Center on the 3rd of February 1988. A ruptured duodenal ulcer caused kidney failure, and he declined the dialysis that might have extended his life by a few months. He died on the 15th of February 1988 at age 69, with his wife Gweneth, his sister Joan and his cousin Frances Lewine at his side. He was buried at Mountain View Cemetery and Mausoleum in Altadena.

  Near the end, his friend Danny Hillis told him he was sad because Feynman was going to die. Feynman sighed that it bugged him too, but not as much as Hillis might think. "When you get as old as I am," he said, you realize "you've told most of the good stuff you know to other people anyway."

  One dream went unfulfilled. Feynman had long hoped to visit the Tuvan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in the Soviet Union, but Cold War bureaucracy thwarted him. The letter from the Soviet government authorizing the trip arrived the day after he died. His daughter Michelle later made the journey, and Ralph Leighton chronicled the attempt in Tuva or Bust!, published in 1991.

  In a 1999 poll of 130 leading physicists by the journal Physics World, Feynman ranked as the seventh-greatest physicist of all time. Matthew Broderick played him in the 1996 film Infinity. Alan Alda starred as Feynman in the play QED, which premiered at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in 2001 and later reached Broadway. In 2013 William Hurt portrayed him in a BBC drama about the Rogers Commission, and in the 2023 film Oppenheimer he was played by Jack Quaid. On the 4th of May 2005 the United States Postal Service issued a 37-cent stamp showing Feynman in his thirties with eight small Feynman diagrams. Apple Computer used two photographs of him in its "Think Different" campaign, launched in 1997. Fermilab named its Feynman Computing Center for him, as did Los Alamos with its Richard P. Feynman Center for Innovation.

  Bill Gates called Feynman "The Best Teacher I Never Had" in an article from the 27th of January 2016. That admiration led Gates to create Project Tuva, a website that places Feynman's Messenger Lectures on The Character of Physical Law online for anyone to watch. Its name borrows the very place Feynman never reached.

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