Richard Feynman worked on the Manhattan
Project that built the atomic bomb. He uncovered what caused the space shuttle
Challenger disaster when no one else could. He won a Nobel Prize in Physics. He accomplished all this with an IQ of 125. You might think that’s a pretty high
IQ, considering the standard is 100. However, 1 in 20 people has that IQ. And it isn’t high enough to make it into
Mensa which accepts only the top 2 percent, usually a score of 132 or higher. I was an ordinary person who studied
hard. There’s no miracle people.
He didn’t see himself as anything
special, as he said in this BBC interview. But what set him apart was his curiosity. Growing up in Far Rockaway,
a neighborhood in Queen’s, New York, his dad encouraged
him to learn how things worked. Young Richard had a knack for fixing radios. His father expected him to become a scientist.
His sister Joan followed the same path. Richard gained his sense of humor from his
mum. He was a real character, and it showed. Now I’m going to discuss how we’ll look for
a new law. In general, we look for a new law by the following process. First, we guess it.
(Laughter) Well, don’t laugh, that’s really true. Feynman seriously considered
becoming a mathematician but felt the discipline was too abstract,
and eventually switched to physics. He applied to Columbia University
but was rejected. Columbia had a discriminatory policy limiting the
number of Jewish students it admitted. He enrolled at MIT and graduated
with a Bachelor’s degree in 1939. He received a scholarship to Princeton for grad
studies on the condition that he remain unmarried. The stipulation may have been intended to ensure
he fully focus on his studies. He did become engaged to his high school sweetheart, Arline
Greenbaum. But they didn’t have long together. She was diagnosed with tuberculosis, an
incurable disease at the time. They married on a ferry between New York and New Jersey in 1942
before Arline went straight to another hospital. She died three years later, exactly one month before the U.S. detonated the
world’s first nuclear weapon. The U.S. feared that Nazi Germany might
develop a nuclear weapon ahead of them, so the Americans raced to
develop the atomic bomb first. The best and brightest scientists
signed up for the Manhattan Project, where they worked out of a secret
research center in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Physicist Robert Wilson encouraged
Feynman to join the Manhattan Project, as he had a reputation for being
exceptionally gifted at math and physics. He agreed and moved his sweetheart
to a hospital in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he could visit her on weekends. His work on the project included
calculating the energy released from the detonation of a bomb. He and
scientist Hans Bethe produced a formula used to determine the energy
yield of a nuclear explosive. Bethe used to poke fun at Feynman’s New York
accent, thinking it made him sound like a “bum”. During his downtime at Los Alamos, there wasn’t
much to amuse himself with, so Feynman fiddled around with picking locks and cracking safes that
contained the bomb project’s secret documents. The documents were originally
kept in filing cabinets with padlocks which Feynman wrote in his
memoir “were as easy as pie to open.” Cabinets with combination
locks were later installed, but he figured out how to crack those, too. Once, when he visited the plant at Oak
Ridge, Tennessee, that processed uranium ore to be used in the bomb, managers
gathered to discuss a secret report. But the executive who had the
document stored in his safe couldn’t access it because he didn’t know
the combination and his secretary was away. Feynman fiddled around with the safe and
“In 10 minutes, I had opened the safe that contains all the secret documents
about the plant. They were astonished.” The Manhattan Project left a lasting mark
on Feynman’s legacy, even though he only played a junior role because he had a hand in
producing the deadliest weapon known to humankind. The head of the Manhattan
Project, Robert Oppenheimer, was also aggrieved by what scientists
had unleashed on the world. I told of his despair and downfall in another video
which I’ve linked in my description. Feynman watched the detonation from a truck
parked 20 miles away. He claimed to be the only one to watch the Trinity test without
wearing glasses or goggles. He thought the truck’s windshield would protect him from
the harmful ultraviolet radiation, but, at the last moment, he quickly dove onto the
floor as the sky lit up with a tremendous flash. After leaving the Manhattan Project,
he was no longer exempt from the draft, but he avoided compulsory military service
when he was judged to be mentally incompetent! An army psychiatrist who assessed
Feynman wrote these words: Thinks people talk about him.
Thinks people stare at him. Auditory hypnogogic hallucinations. Talks to self.
Talks to deceased wife. Maternal aunt in mental institution.
Very peculiar stare. Feynman said most people laughed
when he told them the story. But he wasn’t very amused and said
it was all just a misunderstanding. Instead of enlisting, Feynman accepted a teaching
position at Cornell University for $4,000 a year. He wasn’t particularly motivated there and was
surprised when he got offers to teach at UCLA, UC Berkeley, and the renowned Institute for
Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. But he remained at Cornell and decided to develop
a new attitude. Why not just enjoy physics? And that is when his curiosity
about the world kicked in. One day, when he was eating
in the cafeteria at Cornell, he noticed a student tossing a plate in the air. He noticed that the plate’s motion was similar to how tiny particles move and
interact with each other. In the way that the plate
was affected by gravity and air resistance, tiny particles were
also affected by different forces. This helped him better understand quantum
electrodynamics, or QED, a theory that explains how atoms and light interact with
each other through the electromagnetic force. Imagine a baseball game where the
baseball represents a subatomic particle, and the players represent the
force that acts on the ball. Feynman produced mathematical equations
that are like the rules of the game. They explain how the baseball, or particles, are affected by the players, or force,
and how they interact with each other. He created diagrams that were very helpful for scientists in understanding and
calculating these interactions. His curious nature allowed him to draw
connections between seemingly unrelated things, between a plate and subatomic particles. For his work in quantum electrodynamics,
he won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965. He shared the prize with two other scientists who found their own methods for
the same problem independently. Many believe he could have won the Nobel
Prize again when he and physicist Murray Gell-Mann came up with a theory
that explained the weak force which makes certain atoms change and
give off energy. They found that tiny particles called neutrinos carry the
weak force and make the atoms change. It’s like a game of pool, where the neutrinos
are the cue ball that hits the other balls, or atoms, and makes them move. Weak Force Theory He never really put down roots at Cornell. He moved from student residences to guest houses
to squatting with friends. He reportedly liked to date undergrads, hire prostitutes,
and sleep with the wives of friends. He also didn’t appreciate the weather in
upstate New York and decided to trade the cold, slushy winters for sunny weather by moving
to the west coast to teach physics at the California Institute of Technology in
1950, where he remained until his death. Before heading to Caltech, he spent
a year on sabbatical in Brazil, where he taught physics at a
research center in Rio de Janeiro. He learned to speak Portuguese and played the Brazilian instrument
frigideira which is based on a frying pan. SU He loved playing instruments and also
took up the Bongo and conga drums. Upon returning to America, he
devoted himself to revamping Caltech’s physics curriculum for freshmen. He and two other professors transcribed their
lectures and turned them into a set of textbooks that went on to sell more than a million copies
in English. (The Feynman Lectures on Physics) During his early years at Caltech, he
also provided a mathematical theory that explains the strange behavior of liquid
helium at extremely low temperatures. When liquid helium comes close to absolute zero,
or minus 273 degrees Celsius, it turns into a superfluid that does the impossible, leaking
through this container! -273.15 degrees Celsius He also studied how electrons behave
when they collide at very high speed. He found they act like marbles colliding, in
which they can change direction and velocity. This helped scientists make new discoveries
in the field of high-energy physics. His work was like a brushstroke on canvas, creating a masterpiece of
scientific understanding. He also loved art, and took
courses in painting and drawing, and became really good at portrait sketching. He signed his works with the pen name
Ofey as he wanted the art to speak for itself rather than have people think
it was the work of a famous physicist. He wasn’t only interested in how things looked on the outside but the beauty
that lay beneath the surface. This is the incredible way he
described a flower to the BBC. I have a friend who’s an artist…He’ll hold up a
flower and say “look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree. Then he says “I as an artist
can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a
dull thing,” and I think that he’s kind of nutty. I see much more about the flower than he sees. I
could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty.The fact
that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting;
it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense
also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions
which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower.
It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts. He loved to ask questions
and think outside the box. That led him to get to the bottom of
what caused the Challenger explosion in 1986 that killed the seven astronauts onboard. Feynman was already well-respected
in the scientific community, but it was his investigation of Challenger
that made him famous to the general public. At first, he was hesitant to join the
Commission tasked with investigating the disaster because he preferred
to stay out of anything political, but his third wife Gweneth reminded him
of his usefulness; because he didn’t do things the conventional way, maybe he’d spot
something others couldn’t. She was right. He realized that NASA and its contractors tended to discourage their own employees from
criticizing legitimate safety issues. He saw the same type of thing in Los Alamos involving the security of
those top-secret documents. Engineers at the firm NASA contracted to
make the rocket boosters were concerned that the rubber gaskets that sealed the
boosters would fail in cold weather. However, there was pressure from
NASA, so the launch went ahead anyway. Feynman suspected that rubber
gaskets sealing the rocket boosters, called O-Rings, couldn’t expand quickly
enough in cold weather to fully seal the joints and failed to stop gas from
escaping, leading to the catastrophe. To test his theory, he dunked some rubber
O-rings into a glass of ice water on live TV. In other words, for a few seconds at
least, and more seconds than that, there’s no resilience in this particular material
when it’s at a temperature of 32 degrees. I believe that has some
significance for our problem. By the time of the hearing,
cancer had weakened Feynman. A decade before, he was diagnosed with
abdominal cancer that formed a massive tumor on his abdomen, which crushed
one of his kidneys and his spleen. Surgery removed the tumor,
but he never fully recovered. Near the end of his life, he tried to visit Tuva, a remote region in southern Siberia bordering
Mongolia that was then part of the Soviet Union. He wanted to learn about a
place he knew nothing about. But bureaucratic red tape
prevented him from traveling there. He died before his visa arrived. Richard Feynman passed away on
February 15, 1988, at the age of 69. In 2009, his daughter Michelle made the
journey to Tuva to carry out his dream. Shortly before he died, The
Los Angeles Times interviewed Richard and asked what he was most proud of. He replied: “That I was able to love my first
wife with as deep a love as I was able to.” After Arline died, he wrote her
letters expressing his heartbreak. I find it hard to understand in my mind what
it means to love you after you are dead—but I still want to comfort and take care of you
– and I want you to love me and care for me. I loved you in so many ways so much. And
now it is clearly even more true — you can give me nothing now yet I love you so that you
stand in my way of loving anyone else — but I want you to stand there. You, dead, are
so much better than anyone else alive. P.S. Please excuse my not mailing this
— but I don’t know your new address. While Feynman may have believed that his love
for his wife was his greatest achievement, to the world, his passion and
devotion to science was incomparable. Yet he insisted he was nothing special. There’s no talent, a special miracle ability to
understand quantum physics, or a miracle ability to imagine electromagnetic fields that comes
without practice, and reading, and learning, and study. So if you say, you take an ordinary
person, who is willing to devote a great deal of time and study and work and thinking and
mathematics, then he’s become a scientist. Who knows if he would have scored higher
had he taken another IQ test in school. Regardless, he was undoubtedly a genius thanks to his perpetual curiosity to learn
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