Being Feynman's Curious Sister - Joan Feynman - 5/11/2018

the first thing I want all of you to understand is that I'm Richard's younger sister so this is a picture of my brother and I my brother I think must have made him out 15 he still had his tie tied and a clean shirt I'm not sure about later is this this is me dressed up in my fencing outfit I never learned defense but like this was shortly after I got married and I wanted to be sure of myself okay next this is a my family my father mother big brother and me we were a very happy family we loved each other very much there was a lot of laughter in a house and Richard and I didn't fight so thinking of those years which always makes me happy you know I want to introduce you all know about Richard I just want to introduce me a little bit I gather PhD in physics in 1957 I had three kids four grandkids I've worked on space science and climate change for more than 50 years and I've published a hundred and eighty five papers give or take twenty ok the nicest places I worked were Lamont which was Columbia University's geophysical laboratory and the Jet Propulsion lab which I think a lot of you are aware of I also worked I always worked in geophysics there are some relationships and climate change I retired in 2017 good health and two weeks later I fell down the stairs and broke my arm which is why I acted I also got awarded a nice NASA exceptional science achievement and I am still as happy about that as it shows in this picture and I don't know if ed stone is around or you know it's down but yeah that's it start made it he was the director at JPL when I was there Richard and I when we were both kids Richard was my first teacher I was his lab assistant my first paid job for four cents a week he had a black of it well it was a magnetic field and electricity lab I had several important things to do he had boxes near the web and I would climb up on the box and when told you I would pull switch well after all it was six seven and okay one day my mother was a housewife which in those days meant she had the afternoons off and she had it was one day having a bridge game and she got the feeling something was wrong so she said to me Joanie would you go see if Richards okay and so I said sure I was six seven and I went down the hall and opened the door and there was my brother Richard with the window open his hand out the window holding a wastebasket full of papers which were burning look like that so I said Richard are you okay and he said yes and I went back and Richard's okay later on Richard showed me all sorts of things in nature and one night I was asleep already and my mother permitted him to come into my room and wake me up because there was an aurora on at the golf course which was two blocks away and so he took me through the golf course and I looked up and it did look like this but it looked like this less so and he said nobody knows how it happens and I thought that was very very interesting and so I ended up studying Aurora much later my brother also taught me to add numbers when I was about three years old he would say the numbers and I would say the answer and if I got it right he had to give me a gift of some sort so he would say one plus four and I would say five and he would say right then it was my I had the privilege of grabbing his hair and pulling it a liability it's terrible places because it hurts so much now it was not until I started writing this address that I tried pulling my hair and discovered it doesn't hurt okay we also listen I lived we lived in Far Rockaway New York which had a lot of thunderstorms and lightning and though if you are at the place where the lightning takes place then the thunder and lightning happened at the same time but if you're a distance away the light travels very fast and the Thunder being sound travels much more slowly so if you if you count the time between the time you see lightning and the time you hear the storm you can estimate the distance it is from you that your vent actually took place and so I learned to count and we used to count lightning one hippopotamus two hippopotamus three hippopotamus if you say one hippopotamus that's one second and we time timed it to make sure and that was right so we we had a method of measuring the distance to the lightning which was very exciting when I learned something my mother was impressed with his teaching ability not my learning my mother warned me women's brains can't do science well I was very sorry about that I cried a bit but that's what my mother told me and in the years since I've had many women come to my office and say my mother told me women can't do science or my counselor told me women can't do science or my rabbi told me women can't do science and I was lucky Richard gave me a book on astronomy and there was a picture in it by a woman named pain grip a chicken and it showed her data and I realized pain grip a chicken a double name like that was a married woman and she had her science data published in a textbook so I knew that you didn't have to be Marie Curie there was only one Marie Curie when it was time to me to go to college my father who became ill with high blood pressure while my mother was pregnant with me well and if you had the high blood pressure in those days they had no medicine they didn't know to tell you not to eat salt they told you to do nothing but my father was making a living and my mother didn't know how to make a living she wasn't taught to make a living so my father continued to work but my when I went to college my father told me to learn to make a living because you never know what life only men made good livings in those days and so I figured I'd better go into a man's profession I chose physics and hope to be some sort of an assistant my brother urged me to work hard to be the very best I could it took courage to be a woman and determinate a woman scientist and determination and hard work I got courage from various things in the Jewish religion after the men go to the sabbath friday night service when they come back to their home they're supposed to say the phrase of a virtuous woman and one of the praises of the line goes she see at the vineyard and buyeth it that's in the Old Testament it's not she sees a vineyard and it looks pretty good to her so she goes and that's her husband whether they should think about buying it my grandmother after whom I was named was a watchmaker and also a milliner making hats and that this is a picture of my grandmother and I think you can see from it she was a determined and wealthy woman so she was part of my gave me courage okay this is a saying of my brother Richard's the job of a scientist is to listen carefully to nature not to tell nature how to behave not to tell nature I have a beautiful theory and you ought to follow it it's up to nature if it doesn't agree with nature it's wrong that's the end of it this last slide is my brother as in the United States postage stamp now there are many Nobel laureates but only four scientists have been depicted on postage stamps and it was a great honor for him to be so the four scientists have been Willard Gibbs who did her thermodynamics in the last century Johnny von Neumann Quinn talk and my brother when Richard went to visit his friends the children just loved to play with him and he if it was breakfast time which thought it was you couldn't get them to the breakfast table so Richard and his companion and devised a song which they drummed and sang to in order to get the kids to the breakfast table it's called orange juice and it will be okay there they go can I hear that I can hear it [Music] can you make it laugh [Music] [Music] it it was fun this last slide sort of says how he lived and died he's there playing the drums with a big smile on his face and those are supposed to be fun Minh diagrams which are used to calculate the way that light electrons and light and protons interact and as you could say he enjoyed he enjoyed his life very much he got he worked on the bomb and he as when he got to be in the 60s he came down with two major rare cancers and so he died when he was on the verge of dying he got more conscious you could see him struggling and what his last words were this dying is boring I wouldn't want to do it again you

Channel: caltech

Views: 136,863

Keywords: Caltech, science, technology, research, Joan Feynman, Richard Feynman, women in science, women in STEM, physics, JPL

Id: fuN8UzQCRWo

Length: 17min 46sec (1066 seconds)

Published: Tue May 22 2018