Growing Up Feynman - Michelle Feynman - 5/11/2018

what a great evening this has been thank you to Caltech for organizing and hosting such a fantastic event Caltech was home to my father for some 38 years and so it's especially meaningful to pay tribute to him from this stage tonight there's one more speaker after me but I thought I would use my time to share a few stories about what it was like growing up as a Fineman my father had a unique sense of humor this is a button he liked it reads if you can't read it genius is genetically determined you inherit it from your children you know he didn't take himself too seriously perhaps because he didn't take the universe at face value and was always looking at ways to understand and appreciate the world from different points of view Omni magazine once made the assessment that Richard Phillips Fineman was the smartest man in the world he was born in Queens New York in 1918 and was the son of a military uniform salesman his mother was funny pragmatic and sharp she was in my life until I was 13 and I remember her well his father had no formal scientific training but taught Richard scientific method and my father in turn inspired his younger sister Joan who we've heard from tonight to become a physicist which was not the usual course of events for women in those days he attended MIT as an undergraduate and received his PhD from Princeton University he married his childhood sweetheart Arlene Greenbaum despite the fact that she was ill with tuberculosis which at the time was incurable a death sentence in 1942 he was asked by the United States government to join the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos and he became a group leader on the atomic bomb project on the weekends he would borrow a friend's car and drive to Albuquerque and spend time with Arlene and he was with her when she died June 16th 1945 after the war he became a professor of theoretical physics at Cornell University and in 1950 he was offered a job at Caltech and spent the remainder of his career here in 1960 he married my mother Gweneth and in 1962 my brother Carl was born hey Carl you want to stand up so this next picture is a picture of baby Carl my mom and my dad with one of the many awards my dad won and this so so I know I need to explain this picture it represents a very busy and happy week where he literally won an award the day after my brother was born and so they decided to set this picture up I don't think it was his idea but they set it up in the hospital he won the Nobel Prize in 1965 with julian schwinger and Shinichiro tomonaga for their independent work on quantum electrodynamics I was born three years later in 1986 he was again asked to serve his country this time investigating the space shuttle Challenger explosion when I was very young we had a lot of games that we played he had one that I loved called the grip of Steel and it required me to wriggle out of a frozen embrace of his arms the grip of Steel I remember running downstairs and grabbing a roll of paper towels that I used to replace myself and his still frozen embrace and he pretended to be completely outfoxed by my clever thinking and I delighted in his fame confusion another one of my favorite games worth where he pretended to be a radio and I would sit on his lap and twist his nose and he would make up songs from different radio stations on Sunday mornings he would often forgo reading the paper in bed for a wild hour of storytelling and drumming and loud music with my brother and me and sitting and swinging on my brother's bed because it was suspended from the ceiling by ropes I was convinced we were having the best of all possible times when it was his turn to drive the carpool to elementary school he would start to go the wrong way or drive to a different school or or even start to drive himself to work and all the kids would say no not that way dodo I know I can't believe they called him dodo either and I need to say oh all right is it this way and he would turn the wrong way again and and we'd say no absolutely terrified that we were going to be late somehow we always made it on time thinking back now as a parent myself I don't know how he did that I couldn't have done half the stuff he did he loved to cause mischief when we were in a restaurant and putting our name on a list he would spell the name B J Oh with a line through it RK and gleefully wait for the name to be called when when we or when we were at a restaurant they would he would order coffee and when it was brought to the table he'd say it's for the children he would pretend to speak Italian an Italian restaurant and converse with our waiter much to our dismay it's funny now but you know when you're a teenager it's it's pretty embarrassing to have a parent who enjoys such public games when he was introduced to someone at a party who spoke a foreign language he pretend to be fluent in their native language the amazing thing is that his resolute confidence and full commitment to the prank often fooled them into into thinking that this gibberish was somehow an unfamiliar regional dialect and and they would say what a shame it was they didn't speak the same version of the language suffice to say my father had a unique perspective on life that made his approach to most things unconventional my mother was fiercely independent and a passionate world traveler so it's no surprise that I grew up in a family of adventurers it's one of our favorite things to do was to take our Dodge van and go camping we spend a lot of time in California visited Oregon and even made it to Canada one summer we often didn't say it at campgrounds I know it's a picture of a campground but we often didn't say at campgrounds because the van had room for us to sleep inside so we didn't have to worry about rain or cold and with that van we would put ourselves go to great lengths to put ourselves in the middle of nowhere at every fork in the road we would take the one in the worst condition the most interesting one the van was inconspicuous low-key no actually it had Fineman diagrams painted all over it [Applause] my father loved teaching in 1972 he won the Oersted medal the highest award of American Association of physics teachers for his contributions to the teaching of physics ten years later he won an award from the Associated Students of Caltech for excellence in teaching and in his response to the students he said he was very pleased to be honored for doing something he's so thoroughly enjoyed once someone asked him about teaching children based on his experiences with my brother and me and he was unable to have a definitive answer because our personalities were so different my brother liked it when my dad made up stories about tiny people who would walk around the house and Carl would have to guess where they were based on the details in the story it required some imagination because the scale was completely unfamiliar you know what was trees - these people were actually stalks of the carpet I didn't like these stories I went to here the ones have a book over and over again they were closed while Carl was growing up and somewhere during my brother's teenage years they became more like collaborators than father and son they would go on long walks and discuss technical ideas I know because I tagged along sometimes and regretted it it's the next picture is a picture of Carl graduating from MIT following in my father's footsteps it was one of the deep joys in our father's life to have a son like Carl who spoke his language to say he was proud of Carl is an understatement my more grounded interests served me well as later much said me to help them with reminders of tasks they had to accomplish well my father realized I was the you know responsible and reliable sort he tried to teach me how to do their income taxes I was 12 my mother told him to stop torturing me and I should say I didn't become the family accountant but I have enjoyed being the family historian I've curated three books about my father and I've really relished the time hearing his voice and laughing at his wit in closing I'd like to show one picture that to me encapsulate how encompassing his love for physics was I know it looks like a scrap of paper yeah it is a scrap of paper it's the Time magazine subscription insert postcard thing as you can see it's completely covered by equations this happened during leisure reading right so he's reading along and still thinking about physics this is how we worked he covered covered newspaper margins and placemats and restaurants even Kleenex boxes with calculations I don't think he considered it work because he enjoyed it so much but I think if my father is a very hard worker Richard Feynman's legacy will probably always be distilled reduced to a single word genius my hope is that generations from now at least some people know that in addition to the genius who could peer into the quantum realm he was also my irrepressible fun-loving lovable dad happy birthday papa [Applause]

Channel: caltech

Views: 529,277

Keywords: Caltech, science, technology, research, Michelle Feynman, Richard Feynman, Carl Feynman

Id: GnSvy3nH7l0

Length: 11min 48sec (708 seconds)

Published: Wed May 30 2018