Some of Feynman's key characteristics are:
- obsession with understanding the experiments well, see also Section "How to teach and learn physics"
- when doing more mathematical stuff, analogous obsession about starting with a concrete example and then generalizing that into the theory
- liked to teach others. At Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman for example he mentions that one key problem of the Institute for Advanced Study is that they didn't have to teach, and besides that making you feel useless when were not having new ideas, it is also the case that student's questions often inspire you to look again in some direction which sometimes happens to be profitableHe hated however mentoring others one to one, because almost everyone was too stupid for him
- interest in other natural sciences, and also random art and culture (and especially if it involves pretty women)
Some non-Physics related ones, mostly highlighted at Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics by James Gleick (1994):
- Feynman was a huge womanizer during a certain period of his life
- he hated pomp, going as far as seeming uneducated to some people in the way he spoke, or going out of his way to look like that. This is in stark contrast to "rivals" Murray Gell-Mann and Julian Schwinger, who were posh/snobby.
Even Apple thinks so according to their Think different campaign: www.feynman.com/fun/think-different/
quantum electrodynamics lectures:
Feynman was apparently seriously interested/amused by computer:
- Video "Los Alamos From Below by Richard Feynman (1975)" see description for the human emulator
- quantum computers as experiments that are hard to predict outcomes was first attributed to Feynman
- www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA Richard Feynman Computer Heuristics Lecture (1986)
Murray Gell-Mann talks about Richard Feynman's intentional anecdote creation
. Source. TODO original interviewer, date and source. Very amusing, he tells how Feynman wouldn't brush his teeth, or purposefully forget to wear jacket and tie when going to the faculty canteen where it was required and so he would use ugly emergency jacket the canteen offered to anyone who had forgotten theirs.Murray Gell-Mann talks about Feynman's partons by Web of Stories (1997)
Source. Listener is likely this Geoffrey West. Key quote:Feynman of course, as usual, put it in a form so that the common people could use it, and experimentalists all over the world now thought they understood things because Feynman had put it in such simple language for them.
Two official websites?
- www.richardfeynman.com/ this one has clearly superior scientific information.
- www.feynman.com/
High level timeline of his life:
In 1948 he published his reworking of classical quantum mechanics in terms of the path integral formulation: journals.aps.org/rmp/abstract/10.1103/RevModPhys.20.367 Space Time Approach to nonrelativistic quantum mechanics (paywalled 2021)
Feynman's first wife, previously his local-high school-days darling. Feynman was like an reversed Stephen Hawking: he married his wife knowing that she had a serious illness, while Hawking's wife married him knowing that as well. Except that in Feynman's case, the disease outcome (tuberculosis) was much more uncertain, and she tragically died in 1945 much earlier while Feynman was at Los Alamos Laboratory, while Hawking, despite his decline, lived much longer.
Feynman first noticed Arline on the beaches on the region of his home in Far Rockaway, in the Queens, New York, near Long Beach. She lived a bit further inland in Cedarhurst. Arline was beautiful and boys competed for her, but Richard persisted, stalking her at an after-school social league sponsored by the local Synagogue and joining an art class she went to, until he eventually won it out. The region was highly Jewish, and both were from Jewish families, as also suggested by their family names.
Reading about her death e.g. at Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics by James Gleick (1994) is a major tearjerker, it's just too horrible. The book mentions on chapter "The Last Springtime" that at last, during the last months of her life, after much hesitation, they did fuck in the sanatorium Arline where was staying at in Albuquerque, the nearest major city to Los Alamos (154 km), despite the risk of Feynman being infected, which would be particularly serious given that Feynman would be in constant contact with students and possibly infect others as part of his career as a researcher/teacher. Feynman would visit her on weekends by bus, and stay in Los Alamos during the week.
Arline finally died on June 16th 1945, exactly one month before the Trinity nuclear test was carried out. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a little later on 6 and 9 of August 1945.
On one of his last trips to Oak Ridge town late 1945, after her death, Feynman walked past a shop window and saw a pretty dress. He thought to himself, "Arline would have liked that", and the reminder made him cry for the first time after Arline's death.
It is even sadder to think that the first antibiotics for tuberculosis, streptomycin, finished its first major clinical trial at around 1948, not long after her death.
Ciro Santilli considers this tragedy a cause of Feynman was a huge womanizer during a certain period of his life.
Richard Feynman with his first wife Arline Greenbaum
. Source. TODO date, location, original source.
Richard Feynman sitting with his first wife Arline Greenbaum reading
. Source. TODO date, location, original source. Seems like in a hospital.The film suggests that Feynman and Arline fucked a lot before the final Los Alamos fuck, that fuck story from book being only "fuck after tuberculosis diagnosis", after which they had to slow it down a bit.
This is likely true given how long they had been together for at that point. Ciro Santilli is such a pure soul for not having thought that! They were not very conservative at all those two.
Also their wedding got slowed down because there was a clause in Feynman's scholarship at Princeton University stating that the recipient could not be married, those were different times altogether.
Good film, it feels quite realistic.
It is a shame that they tried to include some particularly interesting stories but didn't have the time to develop them, e.g. Feynman explaining to the high school interns what they were actually doing. These are referred to only in passing, and likely won't mean anything to someone who hasn't read the book.
The film settings are particularly good, and give what feels like an authentic view of the times. Particularly memorable are the Indian caves shown the film. TODO name? Possibly Puye Cliff Dwellings. Puye apparently appears prominently up on another film about Los Alamos: The Atomic city (1952). It is relatively close to Los Alamos, about 30 km away.
The title is presumably a reference to infinities in quantum field theory? Or just to the infinity of love etc.? But anyways, the infinities in quantum field theory theory come to mind if you are into this kind of stuff and is sad because that work started after the war.
Feynman became a terrible womanizer after his first wife Arline Greenbaum died, involving himself with several married women, and leading to at least two abortions according to Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics by James Gleick (1994).
Ciro Santilli likes to think that he is quite liberal and not a strict follower of Christian morals, but this one shocked him slightly even. Feynman could be a God, but he could also be a dick sometimes.
One particular case that stuck to Ciro Santilli's mind, partly because he is Brazilian, is when Feynman was in Brazil, he had a girlfriend called Clotilde that called him "Ricardinho", which means "Little Richard"; -inho is a diminutive suffix in Portuguese, and also indicates affection. At some point he even promised to take her back to the United States, but didn't in the end, and instead came back and married his second wife in marriage that soon failed.
Richard's third and final wife, Gweneth Howarth, seemed a good match for him though. When they started courting, she made it very clear that Feynman should decide if he wanted her or not soon, because she had other options available and being actively tested. Fight fire with fire.
My brother, Richard: How he came to be so smart interview with Joan Feynman by Web of Stories (2019)
Source. Ah, shame to see Joan so old. Some good stories. The tiles game thing was not mentioned in Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics by James Gleick (1994) I think.From Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman chapter O Americano, Outra Vez!:
The people from the airlines were somewhat bored with their lives, strangely enough, and at night they would often go to bars to drink. I liked them all, and in order to be sociable, I would go with them to the bar to have a few drinks, several nights a week.One day, about 3:30 in the afternoon, I was walking along the sidewalk opposite the beach at Copacabana past a bar. I suddenly got this treMENdous, strong feeling: "That's just what I want; that'll fit just right. I'd just love to have a drink right now!"I started to walk into the bar, and I suddenly thought to myself, "Wait a minute! It's the middle of the afternoon. There's nobody here, There's no social reason to drink. Why do you have such a terribly strong feeling that you have to have a drink?" - and I got scared.I never drank ever again, since then. I suppose I really wasn't in any danger, because I found it very easy to stop. But that strong feeling that I didn't understand frightened me. You see, I get such fun out of thinking that I don't want to destroy this most pleasant machine that makes life such a big kick. It's the same reason that, later on, I was reluctant to try experiments with LSD in spite of my curiosity about hallucinations.
One notable drug early teens Ciro consumed was Magic: The Gathering, see also: Section "Magic: The Gathering is addictive".
He and John Archibald Wheeler presented the Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory.
The mantra of the computer simulation engineer.
Tagged
The first key paper to his approach to quantum electrodynamics apparently.
Published on Physical Review 76.769.
This is a good book.
It has some overlap with Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, which it likely takes as primary sources of some stories.
However, while Surely goes into a lot of detail of each event, this book paints a more cohesive and global picture of things.
In terms of hard physics/mathematics, this book takes the approach of spending a few paragraphs in some chapters describing in high level terms some of the key ideas, which is a good compromise. It does sometime fall into the sin of to talk about something without giving the real name to not scare off the audience, but it does give a lot of names, notably it talks a lot about Lagrangian mechanics. And it goes into more details than Surely in any case.
Amazing talk by Richard Feynman that describes his experiences at Los Alamos National Laboratory while developing the first nuclear weapons.
Transcript: calteches.library.caltech.edu/34/3/FeynmanLosAlamos.htm Also included full text into Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman.
- www.youtube.com/watch?v=uY-u1qyRM5w&t=2881s describes the computing aspects. Particularly interesting is the quote about how they used the typist secretary pool to emulate the IBM machines and debug their programs before the machines had arrived. This is exactly analogous to what is done in 2020 in the semiconductor industry, where slower models are used to estimate how future algorithms will run in future hardware.
Los Alamos From Below by Richard Feynman (1975)
Source. In this chapter Richard Feynman talks about his experiences in Brazil.
"O Americano, Outra Vez!" means "The American, once again!" in Portuguese, which is what one of the samba school boss exclaimed when Feynman was not playing well his instrument, the frigideira, during a rehearsal.
Feynman really enjoyed Brazil's (and notably Rio's) stereotypical "take it easy and enjoy life" attitude.
Key quote that names the chapter:
My friend Matt Sands was once going to write a book to be called Alfred Nobel's Other Mistake.
A friend of mine who's a rich man - he invented some kind of simple digital switch - tells me about these people who contribute money to make prizes or give lectures: "You always look at them carefully to find out what crookery they're trying to absolve their conscience of."
TODO who was he talking about? Robert Noyce or Gordon Moore feel likely candidates:
But do you know what, Cirism is totally fine with taking indulgences to absolve someone from their past sins, so long as they have repented. Everyone deserves a second chance.
