Poster
PHYS 110
Yonghui Liao, YanFeng Li
4/18/2019
Richard Feynman
Institution
Richard Feynman was born on the eleventh day of May 1918, in Queens, New York City. His parents were Lucille nee Philips and Melvin Arthur Feynman who was a homemaker and a sales manager respectively, and they were both Lithuanian Jews. He attended Far Rockaway High School in Queens and enrolled in Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Princeton University as an adult. Feynman was a late bloomer, in other words, he was not able to talk until his third birthday, and when he did speak, and he developed a New York accent even as an adult. However, some of his friends teased him about this and also called him a "bum." He had a strict and straight to the point father who often urged him to think outside the box and challenge conventional thinking.
Furthermore, the father was always there for him, ready to teach him new things and test his intellect. The mother, on the other hand, was a calm and collected woman. Feynman gained a sense of humor from her which he maintained most of his adult life.
As a young kid, Feynman had a liking for engineering. He had an experimental laboratory built in his home where he repaired broken radios. At one point, Feynman created an alarm burglar system. Several years later, in 1941, Feynman was involved in the Manhattan project where he aided the engineers working there by devising safety procedures for material storage (Kelly, 2009). The Manhattan Project was an experiment done by Robert R. Wilson who sought to produce enriched Uranium for use in an atomic bomb.
The liquid helium is in the superfluid phase. A thin invisible film creeps up the inside wall of the cup and down on the outside. A drop forms.
Feynman also had a hand in quantum gravity. Here, he explained the analogy of the photon, which has spin 1, by examining the consequences of a free massless spin two field (Feynman, 2010). He further derived the Einstein field equation of general relativity which was used later during the experiment. Feynman found a computational device that would prove invaluable when explaining the quantum particle behavior of the Yang-Mills theories such as the electro-weak theory and the quantum chromodynamics. Additionally, he also worked on the forces of nature; the strong force, electromagnetic, weak force, and gravity.
In conclusion, Feynman received many awards, one of them being the Albert Einstein Award in 1954. He later accepted the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award in 1962. However, Feynman marked his glittering career with a Nobel Prize in Physics which he won for his work in quantum electrodynamics, especially when he and his colleagues deep-plowed the consequences of elementary particles. Lastly, he was a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1965 where he won the Oersted Medal in 1972 and the National Medal of Science in 1979. He died on 15th February 1988 at the age of 69.
References
Feynman, R. (2010). Richard Feynman. Quantum Algebra and Symmetry, 680.
Gribbin, J., & Gribbin, M. (2018). Richard Feynman: A life in science. Icon Books.
Kelly, C. C. (2009). Manhattan Project: The Birth of the Atomic Bomb in the Words of Its Creators, Eyewitnesses, and Historians. Black Dog & Leventhal.