Wednesday, August 7, 2013

Feynman

As all you do not currently know, I am a student of physics and astronomy and I am working on my Bachelor Degree in the subject. After the difficulty of my last quarter in the Spring, I decided that I would get a head start on my studies before the Fall quarter is to start. Among the courses on my schedule is a subject that tends to have many popular connotations that, at this point in my science career, I now know are erroneous. That subject is called "quantum mechanics".

By some strange free association, the first phrase that floated to my mind after the name of the course was "Feynman".

If you know a moderate amount of physics, the history of science, or great names of the 20th century, you would happen upon prolific physicist Richard Feynman. Now, we've all heard of Isaac Newton, Galileo, Copernicus and Einstein, but Feynman is a name that often isn't as readily spoken in many households. He was a brilliant, fun-loving, and critically-thinking mind who made vast improvements to the field of modern physics, won  the Nobel Prize and worked on the Manhattan Project with many the great names in science.

So who is Richard Feynman to me?

Well I've heard his name quite a lot in my years of studying physics but only until about four months ago did his name really mean anything. I went onto to audible.com and downloaded all of the Feynman Lectures on Physics. And to anyone who wants to know physics...I can't think of a better, more concise explanation of all of the fields up until that point in 1962.

Here is a great BBC documentary on him (I honestly haven't watched the whole thing but I watched the first half before bed last night):

Here are some great Feynman quotes:

"It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil — which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama."
Statement (1959), quoted by James Gleick in Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (1992)

"To those who do not know mathematics it is difficult to get across a real feeling as to the beauty, the deepest beauty, of nature ... If you want to learn about nature, to appreciate nature, it is necessary to understand the language that she speaks in."
The Character of Physical Law (1965) Ch. 2

"The worthwhile problems are the ones you can really solve or help solve, the ones you can really contribute something to. ... No problem is too small or too trivial if we can really do something about it."
Letter from Feynman to Koichi Mano (3 February 1966); published in Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track : The Letters of Richard P. Feynman (2005)

Feynman is a good example of how to see the world like a child but to solve it's mysteries like a scientist.


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