Chapter 1: What updates are there about Richard Feynman's life?
Hey there, Stephen Dubner. A couple years ago, we made a three-part series about the physicist Richard Feynman, and we heard from so many of you that we have decided to replay it now. This is part two. We have updated facts and figures as necessary. The biggest update you'll want to keep in mind as you listen today is that both the Feynman family home and Zorthian Ranch were destroyed in the L.A.
wildfires last year. As always, thanks for listening. On July 16th, 1945, a team of U.S. scientists based in Los Alamos, New Mexico, conducted what their leader, J. Robert Oppenheimer, had named the Trinity Test. They were detonating a new kind of bomb way out in the desert, a couple hundred miles from the secret lab at Los Alamos where they had created it. The U.S.
president, Harry Truman, seemed to fully grasp the magnitude of this moment.
It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe.
Oppenheimer had put together a dream team of experienced physicists, many of them recent refugees from Nazi Germany. Also playing a minor but important role was a 24-year-old physicist from Queens, New York, named Richard Feynman. Years later, here is how Feynman described watching the Trinity test. Okay, time comes.
And this tremendous flash, so bright, and I see this purple splotch on the floor of the truck. And I says, that ain't it. That's an afterimage. So I turn back up, and I see this white light changing into yellow and into orange. The clouds form, and then they disappear again. And then finally, a big ball of orange has started to rise.
and billow a little bit and get a little bit black around the edges. And then you see it's a big ball of smoke with flashes on the inside of the fire going out, the heat. And all this took about one minute. Finally, after about a minute and a half, suddenly there's a tremendous noise. Bang! And then rumbles like thunder. And that's what convinced me.
Nobody had said a word during this whole minute. We were all just watching quietly. But this sound released everybody because the solidity of the sound at that distance meant that it really worked. The man who was standing next to me said, what's that? I said, that was the bomb.
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Chapter 2: How did Richard Feynman's experiences during the Trinity Test shape his perspective?
Yes, that was the bomb. Just a few weeks later, the U.S. dropped one of these new atomic bombs on Japan. President Truman.
A short time ago, an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima and destroyed its usefulness to the enemy. That bomb has more power than 20,000 tons of TNT. With this bomb, we have now added a new and revolutionary increase in destruction.
Hiroshima was destroyed. Tens of thousands of Japanese were killed. Three days later, the U.S. dropped a second bomb on the port city of Nagasaki. Again, the carnage was extreme. Six days later, Japan surrendered, putting an end to World War II. The U.S. victory was, of course, welcome. But Richard Feynman was among those who wondered about the cost of the victory.
My first reaction after I was finished with this thing was, it's useless to make anything. Feynman thought that with the existence of nuclear weapons, it was only a matter of time before we humans would wipe ourselves off the earth.
I remember being in New York with my mother in a restaurant right after, immediately after. I would see people building a bridge and I would say they don't understand. I really believe that it was senseless to make anything because it would all be destroyed very soon anyway.
He would take in a view, and he would automatically visualize destruction from a bomb.
That's Michelle Feynman, his daughter.
His entire being was permeated by his effort at the war, and I don't think that it was a happy time at all. His father had died. His wife had died. He would look at people building things and think, why bother?
For five years after the war, Feynman taught physics at Cornell University. He was depressed and restless. He had a hard time engaging in his work, a problem he'd never had before. Winters in upstate New York were long and cold. He needed to get away.
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Chapter 3: What was Richard Feynman's teaching style like at Caltech?
The seats would go flat so somebody could sleep there and then my brother could sleep in the back. And then I had a hammock that was in the front and curtains. And so we were good to go. And then, funny enough, they had this van decorated in a custom paint job and they decided to put Feynman diagrams on it.
And what is a Feynman diagram?
So symbols that my father came up with to express, I don't know, light. I'm not sorry, you'd have to talk to a physicist about that.
I'm John Preskill. I am the Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology. So picture this diagram. There are these two lines, both with arrows on them. And then there's a line connecting the two. So it looks like one rung of a ladder. And the line going across is the wiggly line.
That's the photon that's being emitted by one particle and absorbed by the other. Now, we could have more photons. So now add another rung to the ladder. Now we've got the one line with an arrow on it, solid line, let's say, going up. And now another line with the arrow going down. That's the electron and the positron. Now there are two rungs. There's a wiggly line and then another wiggly line.
And that's another Feynman diagram. The electron and the positron can collide with one another, and that can give rise to particles of light, photons, but then those photons convert to other particles like quarks and anti-quarks, and those interact with other particles. like gluons and so on.
And to keep track of all those things that can happen and how to quantitatively evaluate how all those different processes contribute to the total rate, that's a pretty complicated problem. Feynman diagrams can help you organize that type of computation.
These visual simplifications made quantum electrodynamics easier to work with, even for trained physicists. Here is the science writer Charles C. Mann.
These are incredibly difficult and unwieldy for 99.999% of the human race. And that 0.001% that could work with them was Julian Schwinger.
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Chapter 4: What impact did World War II have on Richard Feynman's outlook and career?
It's the same man for him.
To be clear, Richard Feynman did not refuse or reject his Nobel Prize. He attended the ceremony in Stockholm. And by the looks of the many photographs in the archives at Caltech, he very much enjoyed himself. We visited those archives with his daughter, Michelle. She came across something else that was interesting.
So I love this. Everything that he was sort of like, I don't like honors and I, you know, can I return this prize? All of that. This is so like, it's such a lovely, lovely thank you.
Chapter 5: How did Richard Feynman balance his professional and personal life?
This paper she found is her father's Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Some background. Feynman had been outwardly cranky about the award, even complaining about the fact that he'd have to rent a tuxedo. But apparently he had a change of heart.
Your Majesty, your Royal Highnesses, ladies and gentlemen, the work I've done has already been adequately rewarded and recognized. Imagination reaches out repeatedly trying to achieve some higher level of understanding until suddenly I found myself momentarily alone before one new corner of nature's pattern of beauty and true majesty revealed. That was my reward.
Then, having fashioned tools to make access easier to the new level, I see these tools used by other men straining their imaginations against further mysteries beyond. There are my votes of recognition.
Then comes the prize and a deluge of messages from friends, from relatives, from students, from former teachers, from scientific colleagues, from total strangers, formal commendations, silly jokes, parties, presents, a multitude of messages in a multitude of forms.
but in each i saw the same two common elements i saw in each joy and i saw affection you see whatever modesty i may have had has been completely swept away in recent days the prize was a signal to permit them to express and me to learn about their feelings each joy though transient still
repeated in so many places amounts to a considerable sum of human happiness, and each note of affection released thus one upon another has permitted me to realize a depth of love for my friends and acquaintances which I had never felt so poignantly before. For this, I thank Alfred Nobel and the many who worked so hard to carry out his wishes in this particular way.
And so, you Swedish people, with your honors and your trumpets and your king, forgive me, for I understand at last such things provide entrance to the heart. Used by wise and peaceful people, they can generate good feeling, even love among men, even in lands far beyond your own. For that lesson, I thank you.
After the break, what was Feynman like as a professor? Not in the catalog.
No grades. What was it? It was Feynman standing in front of the blackboard saying, ask me anything.
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