After being elected to the prestigious and highly selective National Academy of Sciences, he withdrew from the organization, saying that its main function was only to elevate people to its exalted ranks. Feynman hated pomp and authority of all kinds. He then practiced jumping up steps backward, using both feet at once. When he was preparing to accept the Nobel Prize in the presence of the king of Sweden, Feynman worried that it was forbidden to turn one’s back on a king he might, he was told, have to back up a flight of stairs. At Los Alamos, when he was working on the Manhattan Project, the young Feynman continually alarmed other scientists and the military brass by cracking their safes, which were filled with atomic secrets. thesis adviser, John Wheeler, pointedly placed his pocket watch down on a table during their first meeting, Feynman came to their second meeting with a cheap pocket watch of his own and placed it on the table next to Wheeler’s. As a graduate student at Princeton, for example, Feynman would spend long afternoons leading ants to a box of sugar suspended by a string, in an attempt to learn how ants communicate. Feynman, and others passed along by word of mouth from one physicist to another, like beheld visitations passed from one disciple to another. There are hundreds of “Feynman stories,” some told by Feynman himself in his popular book Surely You’re Joking, Mr. He was stubborn, irreverent, unrefined, uncultured, proud, playful, intensely curious, and highly original in practically everything he did.
Scientific genius alone would not have explained Feynman’s legend.
An ordinary genius is a fellow that you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better.” But for the second kind, “even after we understand what they have done, the process by which they have done it is completely dark….” He called Feynman “a magician of the highest caliber.” The mathematician Mark Kac has said that “there are two kinds of geniuses, the ordinary and the magicians. When a colleague, after perhaps months of calculations, walked into Feynman’s office with a new result, he would often discover that Feynman already knew not only that result, but a more sweeping one, which he had kept in his file drawer and regarded as not worth publishing. When he did, he would read only far enough into an article to see what the problem was, fold up the journal, and then derive the results on his own. In 1960, in his early forties, restless and unable to find a physics problem worth working on, Feynman taught himself enough biology to make an original discovery of how mutations work in genes.įeynman rarely read the scientific literature. Then he would let out a loud sigh.” At twenty-three, he amazed a Princeton colleague when he worked out at the blackboard a proof of an important proposition of physics that had been only loosely conjectured eight years earlier by the Nobel Prize winner Paul Dirac. One of his teammates on the high school math team in Far Rockaway, Long Island, recalls that Feynman “would get this unstudied insight while the problem was still being read out, and his opponents, before they could begin to compute, would see him ostentatiously write down a single number and draw a circle around it. His intellectual leaps, seemingly weightless, defied explanation. Your time and consideration are greatly appreciated.Richard Feynman was the Michael Jordan of physics. So, if you can, after enabling javascript, clearing the cache and disabling extensions, please open your browser's javascript console, load the page above, and if this generates any messages (particularly errors or warnings) on the console, then please make a copy (text or screenshot) of those messages and send them with the above-listed information to the email address given below.īy sending us information you will be helping not only yourself, but others who may be having similar problems accessing the online edition of The Feynman Lectures on Physics. This type of problem is rare, and there's a good chance it can be fixed if we have some clues about the cause. which operating system you are using (including version #).
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