Richard Feynman
Richard Feynman
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) was an American theoretical physicist known for his work on quantum electrodynamics and for his gift as a teacher. Raised in New York, he was encouraged by his father to look past the names of things and understand how they work, a habit that shaped his approach to science. At Cornell in the late 1940s he developed a new formulation of quantum electrodynamics, introducing the pictorial tools now known as Feynman diagrams. For this work he shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga. As a professor at the California Institute of Technology, he produced The Feynman Lectures on Physics, still widely studied. He anticipated nanotechnology and quantum computing, and in 1986 he served on the commission investigating the Space Shuttle Challenger accident, where he demonstrated how cold temperatures affected the shuttle's O-ring seals.
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Physics from Newton to Feynman
Newton's laws of motion and gravitation framed physics for two centuries. Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism showed that light is an electromagnetic wave, and it guided Einstein toward special relativity in 1905. Planck's quantum hypothesis of 1900 opened quantum theory, which Einstein extended to light itself. Feynman later helped build quantum electrodynamics, the quantum theory of light and matter, sharing the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics.
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