Theoretical physicist — Richard Feynman (New York 1918 – Los Angeles 1988) was an American theoretical physicist, among the most brilliant and original of the twentieth century. Trained at MIT and Princeton, he took part while still very young in the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, then taught at Cornell and Caltech. His greatest contribution was quantum electrodynamics (QED), the theory of the interaction between light and matter, for which he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965. He introduced Feynman diagrams and the path-integral formulation of quantum mechanics, tools that remain central to particle physics today. He was also a legendary teacher: his Lectures on Physics remain a model of clarity.
Trivia
In 1986, on the inquiry commission into the Challenger shuttle disaster, he demonstrated live on television the fragility of the O-ring seals by dunking a piece of one in a glass of iced water; he also loved to play the bongos.
Theories and contributions
- Quantum electrodynamics (QED) — Quantum and relativistic theory of the interaction between charged particles and the electromagnetic field, verified with extremely high precision.
- Feynman diagrams — Graphical representation of the terms in the perturbative expansion of interactions between particles.
- Path integrals — Formulation of quantum mechanics in which the amplitude is the sum over all possible trajectories: .
Appears in chapters
Linked atoms
6 linked atoms.