Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,488

This is the grave of Richard Feynman.

Born in 1918 in New York, Feynman grew up in a middle class Jewish immigrant home that placed a high value on education and never accepting anything as a given. Question everything always is something I can get behind, whether political ideology or wondering why Americans decided on such a bad meat for Thanksgiving. From the time he was a kid, Feynman was a tinkerer and little engineer, working on radios and cool stuff like that. He was a complete atheist and had no interest in the Judaism of his family. He thought the idea of the Jews as a “chosen people” was completely risible. Feynman went to MIT and then Princeton for his PhD, despite the anti-Semitism at that institution that made it difficult for Jews to succeed. He also married a woman deep into a tuberculosis case and she died not long after.

Now, I am not going to be able to really discuss Feynman’s career effectively. I just don’t have any understanding of physics and I would completely garble it. I know that many of you are a lot more fluent in these worlds than I, so just have at it in comments. Obviously the guy was totally brilliant. He was brought out to the Manhattan Project and worked out a spot for his wife in an Albuquerque sanatorium and in fact that is where she died. There was some question in the anti-communist paranoia after the Soviets launched their atomic bomb in 1949 whether he was a communist and maybe a spy, but this was ridiculous. I mean, the guy was a registered Republican for his whole life for god’s sake. He wasn’t really that conservative it should be said, it was probably a family thing. Amusingly, later in the 50s, after a horrible marriage to real right-winger, his now divorced wife wrote a letter to J. Edgar Hoover saying Feynman was a total communist and needed to be investigated. What a way to end a marriage. To be fair though, Feynman’s choices of women after his first wife died were, uh, questionable. There was another case when a girlfriend walked out with his one of his big awards, then told him she was pregnant even though she wasn’t, then took the abortion money to buy herself new furniture. So, well….. Finally, Feynman became a target in the early feminist movement, since he had become the kind of guy who tried to get every woman he met into bed and didn’t hide it. So pretty yucky on his personal life.

What makes Feynman particularly notable in the rest of the world is of course not his physics per se, which very few people who knew the name could really understand. It’s that he was a great popularizer of science and a great self-promoter as well. This is important. The scientific community could with a lot more popularizers taking their ideas and putting them into language that everyday people can understand, even if some nuance is lost. This has been a major problem for scientists for a long time. Many went into science in part because dealing with the public is not their bag. So many are so committed to ideas of objectivity, which are false in science as they are in everywhere else, that they see such things as beneath their profession. Meanwhile, right wingers create false science and push their own narratives that undermine the real science going on. There are exceptions to this of course. James Hansen has done brilliant and brave work on climate science, taking a lot of heat from right-wingers. Then there are scientifically-trained historians and journalists such as Naomi Oreskes, who also do wonderful work. Feynman was a huge exception to this longer trend and if he was a massive self-promoter too, well, so what.

By the 50s, Feynman was one of the top physicists in the nation and he let people know it too. He gave a 1959 lecture about nanotechnology that he published called There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom. Then there was his undergraduate lecturers that became a textbook called The Feynman Lectures of Physics. He also laid out his ways of seducing women at bars in his best-selling autobiography from 1985, Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman. I mean, really dude?

Feyman won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1965 for his work on quantum electrodynamics, whatever that is. He won it jointly with Julian Schwinger and Shinichiro Tomonaga. He also figured out how to draw the behavior of subatomic particles in ways regular people could understand, which were called Feynman diagrams. In 1999, a poll of physicists in the ever-thrilling journal Physics World, named Feynman the 7th greatest physicist of all time.

After the Challenger blew up in 1986 (this is the JFK assassination or Pearl Harbor moment of my generation; everyone knows where they were and it completely transformed the space program permanently in the minds of the public), Feynman was on the Rogers Commission to investigate and it was him who publicized the problems of the O rings in cold weather that had caused the explosion. He was genuinely angry at NASA’s overly optimistic position on safety and was furious that the agency had created a situation that blew up literally just as they had recruited a teacher to be on board.

Beginning in 1978, Feynman had to fight cancer and it finally got him a decade later, in 1988. He was 69 years old.

I completely realize that this post avoided any discussion of his amazing mind for physics but one has to realize their limitations. So have at it my friends. Talk some physics, blow my mind. This is a moment to note that I have been at my university for almost 13 years and have literally never met another professor from either the physics or math departments. So it’s not like I am getting learned here either.

Richard Feynman is buried in Mountain View Cemetery, Altadena, California.

If you would like this series to visit other physicists so I can show my utter ignorance of the field, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Julian Schwinger is in Cambridge, Massachusetts and John Bardeen is in Madison, Wisconsin. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.