See my Richard Feynman page (wordpress)
This is my meaning of “living a discrete life”:
"If I am not for myself who will be for me, and if I am only for myself who am I and if not now, then when?!"
(Pirkei Avot 1:14). Hillel, Jewish rabbi who lived at Jerusalem in the time of King Herod (c.110 BC - 10 AD).
Unlike Professor Steven Hawking, I couldn’t have had the chance to ever meet Richard Feynman. However his writings, his filmed interviews, his recorded lectures, his drawings, paintings and poems have survived. They were all created by the same mind and can reach us as if still alive.
Helped with pictures or videos available on the Internet, I tried to capture his colourful and engaging personality: intense, deep yet frivolous.
The background looks like the “chaos” of particles collisions. This is no accident. I used here a technique similar to a Jackson Pollock’s “dripping paint”. But unlike Pollock, I didn’t stop there.
In my portrait of Feynman, his body posture has a Y shape. This is my preferred letter. I believe this was his too.
Here is one of his poems:
I wonder why?
I wonder why?
I wonder why I wonder?
I wonder why I wonder why I wonder why I wonder?
(From "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman!")
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In 1965 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics (QED), jointly with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga. He developed a widely used visual representation for the mathematical expressions governing the behaviour of subatomic particles, which later became known as “Feynman diagrams”. Yet Feynman despised honours and “academic” authorities. He even considered refusing his Prize!
Feynman was not just “another scientist”, he was a larger-than-life character.
His contributions were not limited to science but were also artistic. He was indeed a good painter, a poet and an enthusiast bongo player!
His innate "child-like” curiosity and creativity caused him to be “labelled” a “genius”.
His personality was as summed up by General Donald Kutyna: "Feynman had three things going for him. Number one, tremendous intellect and that was well known around the world. Second, integrity…..Third, he brought this driving, desire to get to the bottom of any mystery. No matter where it took him, he was going to get there, and he was not deterred by any roadblocks in the way. He was a courageous guy, and he wasn't afraid to say what he meant."
The Uncertainty of Science - Feynman (PDF) P9:
"Both were important discoveries, but most exciting was that this was one of the most dramatic moments in the history of science, one of those rare moments when two great fields come together and are unified. He (Faraday) suddenly found that two apparently different things were different aspects of the same thing. Electricity was being studied, and chemistry was being studied. Suddenly they were two aspects of the same thing—chemical changes with the results of electrical forces."
"The most dramatic moments in the development of physics are those in which great syntheses take place, where phenomena which previously had appeared to be diíïerent are suddenly discovered to be but different aspects of the same thing. The history of physics is the history of such synthcses, and the basis of the success of physical science is mainly that we are able to synthesize." Feynman Lectures on Physics Volume 1 Chapter 28
Further reading:
The Art of Richard P. Feynman: Images by a Curious Character: Michelle Feynman, Albert Hibbs
"Feynman had three things going for him. Number one, tremendous intellect and that was well known around the world. Second, integrity... Third, he brought this driving, desire to get to the bottom of any mystery. No matter where it took him, he was going to get there, and he was not deterred by any roadblocks in the way. He was a courageous guy, and he wasn't afraid to say what he meant."
http://www.ysfine.com/feynman/feybot.html
!!! all we know are just approximations, views (from different angle) of the sdame thing… eg: torus
INDEED, he shared his Nobel prize with two others who found the solution in different ways… :
Tomonaga and Schwinger took a strictly mathematical approach in their studies of QED, while Feynman took a more easily understood graphical approach. Feynman described the paths of particles through spacetime with what became appropriately known as "Feynman diagrams". Feynman's approach proved the most popular, possibly partly because he was an outstanding lecturer and could sell his ideas much more easily than most other physicists.
Later in the 1950s the British-born American physicist Freeman Dyson (born 1923) would show, not too surprisingly, that the Feynman diagrams could be derived from Tomonaga's and Schwinger's equations.
[…]
* Feynman's sum over histories seems at first glance a ridiculous complication that ought to be carved away by Occam's Razor, the principle that logical excess baggage should be discarded, but Feynman pointed out that the QED approach does have specific implications, giving results that are consistent with experiment.
Suppose Alice, our physics student, looks at her reflection of a point light source in a mirror, with a barrier in the line of sight between her and the light source. By classical physics, the reflected light will arrive by a single path, with the angle of incidence equal to the angle of reflection. By QED, however, the light is reflected from every point on the glass, with the angles being any required to allow the light to reach her eye. The sum of probabilities of these reflections ends up giving the same result as classical physics, with the most probable path being the single path with the same angle of incidence and reflection. This is the "least time" path, the path that takes the least possible time of all those available.
From http://www.vectorsite.net/tpqm_13.html = Elementary Quantum Physics (book)
+ http://www.ysfine.com/feynman/feybot.html (Book review by Yuval Ne'eman) <- ***!
At a conference in the Poconos Mountains, in Pennsylvania, in March 1948, Schwinger gave a marathon presentation that exhausted but impressed his audience. A frustrated Feynman, however, failed during his talk to convince the attending physicists of the soundness of his methods. Elder statesmen such as Paul Dirac and Niels Bohr concluded that the young American simply did not understand quantum mechanics.
But Feynman was able to solve complex problems far more quickly than those using the Schwinger formulation. Clarification came from Freeman Dyson, of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, who showed in a classic paper that the Schwinger, Tomonaga, and Feynman methods were equivalent. ([2] F. J. Dyson, "The Radiation Theories of Tomonaga, Schwinger, and Feynman,"Phys. Rev. 75, 486 (1949).)
From http://www.physicscentral.com/explore/action/feynman-1.cfm
Schwinger and Feynman
As a famous physicist, Schwinger was often compared to another legendary physicist of his generation, Richard Feynman. Schwinger was more formally inclined and favored symbolic manipulations in quantum field theory. He worked with local field operators, and found relations between them, and he felt that physicists should understand the algebra of local fields, no matter how paradoxical.
By contrast, Feynman was more intuitive, believing that the physics could be extracted entirely from the Feynman diagrams, which gave a particle picture. Schwinger commented on Feynman diagrams in the following way,
“Like the silicon chips of more recent years, the Feynman diagram was bringing computation to the masses.[1]”
Schwinger disliked Feynman diagrams, because he felt that they made the student focus on the particles and forget about local fields, which in his view inhibited understanding. He went so far as to ban them altogether from his class, although he understood them perfectly well and was observed to use them in private.
Despite sharing the Nobel Prize, Schwinger and Feynman had a different approach to quantum electrodynamics and to quantum field theory in general. Feynman used a regulator, while Schwinger was able to formally renormalize to one loop without an explicit regulator. Schwinger believed in the formalism of local fields, while Feynman had faith in the particle paths. They followed each other's work closely, and each respected the other. On Feynman's death, Schwinger described him as
“An honest man, the outstanding intuitionist of our age, and a prime example of what may lie in store for anyone who dares to follow the beat of a different drum.[2]
from http://www.answers.com/topic/julian-schwinger
Dyson recounted the journey years later in “Disturbing the Universe,” contrasting Feynman’s Beat-like soliloquies on particles and waves with the mannered presentations (“more technique than music”) he heard later that summer from the Harvard physicist Julian Schwinger. On a Greyhound bus crossingNebraska— Dyson had fallen in love with the American highway — he had an epiphany: his two colleagues were talking, in different languages, about the same thing. […]In “The Scientist as Rebel,” a new collection of essays (many of them reviews first published in The New York Review of Books), he sounds content with his role as a bridge builder. “Tomonaga and Schwinger had built solid foundations on one side of a river of ignorance,” he writes. “Feynman had built solid foundations on the other side, and my job was to design and build the cantilevers reaching out over the water until they met in the middle.” […]
//Plato-Aristotle Dyson: “In the history of science,” he writes, “there is always a tension between revolutionaries and conservatives, between those who build grand castles in the air and those who prefer to lay one brick at a time on solid ground.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/07/books/review/Johnson.t.html
+ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman_Dyson
This was Richard Feynman nearing the crest of his powers. At twenty-three ... there was no physicist on earth who could match his exuberant command over the native materials of theoretical science. It was not just a facility at mathematics (though it had become clear ... that the mathematical machinery emerging from the Wheeler-Feynman collaboration was beyond Wheeler's own ability). Feynman seemed to possess a frightening ease with the substance behind the equations, like Albert Einstein at the same age, like the Soviet physicist Lev Landau—but few others.
– James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman
From http://www.answers.com/topic/richard-feynman
This Feynman "visual method" could be compared to what a Carl F. Gauss, one of the greatest mathematicians, once said:
"I have had my results for a long time: but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them."
From: A Arber The Mind and the Eye 1954.
- Richard Feynman, circa 1985. By Shelley Gazin/Corbis
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