Richard P. Feynman :: Physics Biography Biographies

Richard P. Feynman Early Life Richard was born on May 11th, 1918 in New York City, the first son of Melville and Lucille Feynman. He enjoyed science and mathematics from a early age, most of which he took it upon himself to learn before it was taught in school. His primary source for self-learning was the Encyclopedia Britannica and a lab that he set up in his room at home. In this lab he dabbled in electronics, whether it was repairing the radio or just making some circuits. In high school, Feynman was ahead in physics and mathematics, already a master of differential equations, trigonometry, and other high levels of calculus, but he was lacking in his other subjects, such as English and history. Feynman applied to many schools, but was turned down either because of his lacking social science grades, or because he was a Jew. Massachusetts Institute of Technology accepted him readily though, as one would expect being a top scientific school even then, and he set out to major in mathematics, though this changed several times. Feynman was not satisified by doing mathematics without an end purpose, and so he eventually ended up in the field of physics, more specifically interested in quantum physics. Richard received his BS from MIT in 1939, four years after entering college, and went on to receive his PhD at Princeton. World War 2 After college is when Feynman really started to shine in his field. In 1942 he was asked to join the team that developed the atomic bomb in Los Alamos and Princeton. At first, he said no to helping to create a weapon of such mass destruction... until he thought about how Hitler probably would have no qualms in making a atom bomb. Richard was key in developing safe means to separate various radioactive materials and also ways to test what amount of uranium would be needed to achieve critical mass that did not require large scale detonations. Major contributions to Physics After World War II, and a brief respite from doing research, Feynman resumed where he had left off before the war with quantum physics. He worked on several projects over the next few decades, achieving successes in most of them. He and another physicist worked together to test and prove their theory on "weak decay," about how it occurs, what are the results of it, etc. His largest gift was his diagrams that describe the way that particles act in a certain system and tells one how to express this movement in mathematics, thus through a simple diagram one could analyze complex atomic interactions.