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.

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.

He and John Archibald Wheeler presented the Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory.

Bibliography:

The mantra of the computer simulation engineer.

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.

Hume's Fork is a philosophical concept attributed to the Scottish philosopher David Hume, primarily found in his work "An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding." It distinguishes between two types of knowledge: "relations of ideas" and "matters of fact." 1. **Relations of Ideas**: These are propositions that are necessarily true and can be known a priori, meaning they can be understood without relying on experience. Examples include mathematical truths and logical statements.

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:

Critique of Harvard by Sean Carroll. Applies to basically all universities.

Maybe they did try once though: Harvard Project Physics.

web.archive.org/web/20120414075927/http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/03/30/how-to-get-tenure-at-a-major-research-university/

While learning black-hole stuff is not on top of Ciro Santilli's priorities, Hawking's spirit is to be admired.

To never give up even when everything seems lost, and still have a sense of humour is respectable.

An ex-physicist colleague who had met Hawking told an anecdote. Hawking was around in the department one day, they said hi and all. But then Hawking wanted to tell a joke. It took like 5 minutes of typing, and you can imagine that things were pretty awkward and the joke's timing was "a bit off". But Hawking did tell the joke nonetheless.

This is also suggested in the The Theory of Everything (2014) film, and therefore likely the biographies.

Ciro Santilli feels a bit like this guy:

One big divergence: obsession with translating every page into every language.

His Mathematics Genealogy Project entry: www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=56185

Old French website: spoirier.lautre.net/

singlesunion.org/ so cute, he's looking for true love!!! This is something Ciro often thinks about: why it is so difficult to find love without looking people in the eye. The same applies to jobs to some extent. He has an Incel wiki page: incels.wiki/w/Sylvain_Poirier :-)