A short life of the author
Richard Feynman was the most brilliant and most charismatic physicist of the second half of the twentieth century — a Nobel Prize winner whose contributions to quantum electrodynamics, particle physics, and superfluidity placed him among the greatest theoretical physicists of the century, and whose books, lectures, and personal mythology made him the most widely known scientist of his generation. His genius was not merely technical but performative: he was a natural teacher and storyteller whose ability to explain the deepest ideas of physics in simple, vivid language was unmatched, and whose personality — irreverent, curious, endlessly playful, impatient with pretension — made him a figure of genuine popular culture.
From Far Rockaway to Los Alamos
Richard Phillips Feynman was born in 1918 in Far Rockaway, Queens, New York, the son of a uniform salesman. His father, though not a scientist, taught him to think scientifically — to question, to observe, to distinguish between knowing the name of something and knowing something. Feynman studied physics at MIT and received his PhD from Princeton in 1942, where his thesis advisor was John Archibald Wheeler.
At twenty-four, he was recruited to the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, where he worked on the theoretical physics of the atomic bomb. His time at Los Alamos — safecracking, playing bongos, corresponding with his dying first wife Arline in a letters that were both heartbreaking and scientifically precise — became the stuff of legend and the basis for some of his most famous stories.
Quantum Electrodynamics
Feynman’s greatest scientific contribution was the development of quantum electrodynamics (QED) — the theory of how light and matter interact at the quantum level. His approach, formulated independently of Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, introduced “Feynman diagrams,” simple pictorial representations of particle interactions that became the standard tool of particle physics and one of the most important conceptual innovations in the history of physics. The three men shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965.
Feynman also made fundamental contributions to the theory of superfluidity in liquid helium, the theory of weak nuclear forces, and the parton model of the proton (which anticipated the quark model). His path integral formulation of quantum mechanics offered an entirely new way of thinking about quantum phenomena.
The Feynman Lectures on Physics
The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1963–1965, 3 volumes, with Robert B. Leighton and Matthew Sands), based on his introductory physics course at Caltech, is the most famous physics textbook ever written. The lectures were too demanding for the freshmen for whom they were intended, but they became the standard reference for physics students and working physicists worldwide — a set of books that conveyed not just the content of physics but its spirit, its method, and its aesthetic.
The Popular Books
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! Adventures of a Curious Character (1985, as told to Ralph Leighton) was an unlikely bestseller — a collection of anecdotes about safecracking, biology experiments, strip clubs, bongo playing, art, language learning, and scientific discovery that presented Feynman as the most engaging personality in twentieth-century science. The book was enormously popular and established the Feynman myth: the genius who was also a regular guy, the intellectual who despised intellectualism, the physicist who painted, played drums, and picked locks.
What Do You Care What Other People Think? (1988) continued the anecdotes and added the most famous episode of Feynman’s later career: his investigation of the Challenger disaster as a member of the Rogers Commission, culminating in the televised demonstration in which he dropped an O-ring into a glass of ice water to show that the rubber seals became brittle in cold temperatures — a moment of scientific theatre that changed the course of the investigation.
QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (1985), based on lectures at UCLA, is perhaps the finest popular explanation of quantum physics ever written — a book that explains the theory without mathematics while conveying the strangeness and beauty of quantum phenomena.
The Character of Physical Law
The Character of Physical Law (1965), based on his Messenger Lectures at Cornell, is Feynman’s most philosophical work — a series of lectures on the nature of physical law, the relationship between mathematics and physics, and the process of scientific discovery. The lectures are models of clear thinking and elegant exposition.
Collecting Feynman
The Feynman Lectures on Physics (Addison-Wesley, 1963–1965, 3 volumes) in first edition is the most important physics textbook of the twentieth century. Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (W.W. Norton, 1985) in first edition with dust jacket is the most collected Feynman title for general collectors. QED (Princeton University Press, 1985) and The Character of Physical Law (BBC, 1965; MIT Press, 1967) are also collected.