69 Fun Facts About Richard Feynman

Feynman shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics with Julian Schwinger and which Japanese physicist?

All three had independently tamed the infinities in quantum electrodynamics; Freeman Dyson later showed their methods were equivalent.

Feynman's Nobel Prize recognised his fundamental work in which theory?

Quantum electrodynamics is the theory of how light and matter interact; his rebuilt version got rid of the meaningless infinite answers the older one kept producing.

Feynman grew up in Far Rockaway, which lies in which New York City borough?

Queens is where Far Rockaway lies; as a boy he kept a laboratory in his room there and rigged up his own burglar alarm.

As a teenager in the Depression, Feynman earned pocket money in his neighbourhood by repairing what?

Radios: people who could not afford a repairman hired the boy instead, and one customer was astonished to watch him fix a set by pacing up and down and thinking.

What did Feynman's father Melville do for a living for most of Richard's childhood?

Sold uniforms, as a sales manager, after his own business ventures had failed; science was his real passion, and he wanted his first son to become a scientist.

Feynman's sister Joan was told as a girl that women's brains couldn't do science; what did she become?

An astrophysicist: one night Richard led her from bed to a golf course to watch the aurora, and she went on to help explain what causes the northern lights.

Asked why a ball rolled to the back of the wagon young Feynman was pulling, his father named which principle?

Inertia: his father told him to look closely, and sure enough the ball was not going backwards at all; the wagon was moving off and its back end caught the ball up.

Why was Feynman turned down by Columbia University?

Its quota on Jewish students was common practice then: when he later applied to Princeton, the physics head wrote to ask 'Is Feynman Jewish?' before taking him.

Where did Feynman do his undergraduate degree?

MIT suited him so well that he asked to stay on for his doctorate; the head of physics refused, telling him he should find out how the rest of the world looked.

Feynman switched from maths to which subject before deciding he had 'gone too far' and settling on physics?

Electrical engineering was his cure for maths that felt too abstract: he wanted to get his hands dirty, then decided within months that physics lay 'somewhere in between'.

Feynman scored perfectly on Princeton's physics entrance exam but did poorly in which sections?

History and English were his weak spots: as an undergraduate he had taken astronomy as his 'humanities' elective. Princeton's committee still let him in on his science scores.

Who was Feynman's PhD advisor at Princeton?

John Archibald Wheeler once phoned his student at the Graduate College to announce why all electrons have the same charge and mass: 'Because they are all the same electron!'

Which three famous scientists were in the audience for Feynman's first Princeton seminar?

Einstein, Pauli and von Neumann all came to hear a graduate student. When Pauli objected and asked 'Don't you agree, Professor Einstein?', Einstein gave a soft, polite no.

Feynman pictured positrons as electrons doing what, an idea he took from a phone call with his Princeton advisor?

Moving backwards in time was his advisor's suggestion on that call, with one electron zigzagging through history. Feynman doubted the rest but kept the positron picture: 'That, I stole!'

Feynman's first wife, Arline Greenbaum, was seriously ill with which disease when they married in 1942?

Tuberculosis made even the wedding cautious: fearing contagion, he kissed her only on the cheek, then drove her straight to a hospital, where he visited at weekends.

Feynman and Arline were married in a city office in which part of New York, witnessed by two strangers?

Staten Island meant a ferry ride across New York Harbor, the only honeymoon voyage they got; no family or friends came, so the witnesses were called in from the next room.

Which physicist recruited Feynman into the atomic bomb effort at Princeton, to work on the isotron?

Robert R. Wilson broke secrecy to recruit him. Feynman refused, went back to his thesis for about three minutes, then turned up at the three o'clock meeting; the isotron itself was later abandoned.

At Los Alamos, Feynman worked in the Theoretical Division led by which physicist?

Hans Bethe wanted someone to argue with, and the newcomer obliged, shouting 'No, no, you're crazy'. It was just what Bethe needed, and it won Feynman a group leader's job.

Feynman helped set up a Los Alamos computation system that ran on IBM what?

Punched cards in a different colour for each problem let his team push two or three calculations through the IBM machines at once, one deck chasing another round the room.

What did Feynman dare his wife and father to send him at Los Alamos, alarming the military censors?

Letters in code were a game: he dared them to send ciphers he couldn't crack, with no key. The censors demanded a key be enclosed, then agreed to remove it before the letter reached him.

Feynman opened one Los Alamos cabinet by guessing a combination based on the digits of which constant?

Euler's number, e, gave him 27-18-28: he guessed the colleague was just the type to use a mathematical constant, and the same setting opened the man's other filing cabinets too.

Feynman borrowed a car to visit Arline from which colleague, later exposed as a Soviet spy?

Klaus Fuchs was a dormitory friend, and his car carried Feynman to Albuquerque the day Arline was dying. In 1950 Fuchs confessed to passing bomb secrets to the Soviet Union for years.

Feynman claimed to watch the Trinity test without dark glasses, looking through what instead?

A truck windshield, he reasoned, would stop the ultraviolet that really harms eyes. The flash still made him duck, and the purple splotch he then saw was only an afterimage.

Which senior physicist sought Feynman out at Los Alamos because everyone else was too awed to argue with him?

Niels Bohr told his son that the 'little fellow in the back' was the only one not afraid of him, so the pair tried their ideas on Feynman first, before they would 'call in the big shots'.

After Los Alamos, Feynman left for which university in 1945, years before his long career at Caltech?

Cornell moved first: his Los Alamos division chief had urged the hire back in 1943, while Berkeley stalled for two years despite Oppenheimer's pleas, until it was too late.

Which university gave Feynman a wartime assistant professorship that he held on leave and never took up?

Wisconsin held the post for him on unpaid leave while he worked on the bomb; on a later visit he is said to have called it the only university with 'the good sense to fire me'.

What did Feynman come away with after Army psychiatrists examined him at his post-war draft physical?

A 4-F mental exemption followed when one examiner noted that he heard voices and talked to his dead wife; an officer saw the 'D' for deficient and stamped him rejected without a word.

What tossed cafeteria object set Feynman analysing rotation, work that fed into his Nobel Prize?

A dinner plate wobbled as it spun, and working out the two-to-one ratio of wobble to spin purely for fun pulled him out of a post-war slump.

At which 1948 conference did Feynman first show his diagrams to Dirac, Teller and Bohr?

Pocono was a flop for him: after Schwinger's long, polished talk, Teller and Dirac kept interrupting, and Bohr rose to lecture him on the uncertainty principle.

Who convinced Oppenheimer that Feynman's formulation was easiest, publishing rules for it in 1949?

Freeman Dyson had driven across America with Feynman the summer before, then caught a bus back east. His paper united the rival methods, and he became a professor without ever earning a doctorate.

Julian Schwinger, who shared Feynman's Nobel Prize, dismissed Feynman diagrams as what?

'Pedagogy, not physics' was Schwinger's verdict as papers citing his rival multiplied; he added, with no compliment intended, that the diagrams were 'bringing computation to the masses'.

Feynman spent his 1951-52 sabbatical teaching in which country?

Brazil appealed after a girlfriend said South America would be safer if nuclear war came. He had started learning Spanish, then switched to Portuguese when a Brazilian physicist invited him.

Feynman learned to play the frigideira, a tinkling percussion instrument based on what everyday object?

A frying pan, toy-sized and beaten with a little metal stick, is all a frigideira is. He drilled the wrist-twist with two sticks on beach walks until he was good enough for paid jobs.

The title Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! echoes a dean's wife after he asked for what in his tea?

Both cream and lemon was his flustered reply at his first Princeton tea, when the dean's wife offered one or the other. Lemon curdles cream, hence her laugh: 'Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman!'

Feynman's second wife won a divorce after testifying about his noisy hobby and his habit of constantly doing what?

Calculus in his head, she testified, began the moment he woke and went on while he drove, sat in the living room and lay in bed. The court granted the divorce for extreme cruelty.

Feynman met his third wife, Gweneth Howarth, on a lakeside beach in which country in 1958?

Switzerland's Lake Geneva was cold, she told him as he laid his towel near hers. An au pair from England, she later accepted his offer of a housekeeping job in California, and they married in 1960.

Studying biology at Princeton, Feynman baffled a librarian by asking for a 'map' of which animal?

The cat featured in a nerve-impulse paper he had to present, and he didn't know where its muscles were. 'A map of the cat, sir?' the horrified librarian replied, 'you mean a zoological chart!'

What did the Feynmans buy with the Nobel Prize money?

A beach house in Baja California, at Playa de la Misión, is where his third of the prize went, though he had told reporters the money would pay his income tax.

What licence plate did Feynman choose for his van decorated with Feynman-diagram murals?

QANTUM was a squeeze: California plates then allowed at most six letters, and tidier choices such as QUARK had already been taken.

Feynman spent years trying to resign from the National Academy of Sciences because he disliked doing what?

Judging other people's merit was the academy's main business, he wrote, and he was unhappy in 'a self-perpetuating honorary society'. He first resigned in a note sent with his dues in 1960; it took until 1970 to stick.

Feynman gave a quantum-mechanical explanation of which Soviet physicist's theory of superfluid helium?

Lev Landau's ideas on liquid helium drew him away from particle physics. Soviet physicists invited him to Moscow in 1955, where he could have met Landau, but US officials overruled his acceptance.

A rival physicist derided Feynman's 'partons' by what mocking name?

'Put-ons' was the jibe of the physicist who had proposed quarks, and he missed no chance to use it. Experiments later showed that the partons were his quarks, plus the gluons that bind them.

Feynman's famous 1959 talk foreseeing tiny machines was called 'There's Plenty of Room at the' what?

Bottom meant the scale of atoms: he asked why all 24 volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica could not be written on the head of a pin, a mere 25,000-fold shrinking.

At Princeton, Feynman's test of a puzzle about which garden device ended with a glass bottle bursting in the cyclotron lab?

A lawn sprinkler made to suck water in: would it spin backwards? His pressurised bottle burst, soaking the lab's photographs, and the professor in charge sent him back to 'the freshman laboratory'.

Feynman wanted the cover of The Feynman Lectures on Physics to show what?

A drum overlaid with diagrams of its vibrating patterns was his idea, since the lectures married mathematics to the real world. The books got plain red covers, with a photo of him drumming in the preface.

In 1960 an engineer claimed Feynman's $1,000 prize by building which device small enough for a 1/64-inch cube?

An electric motor won it within a year: William McLellan built one with a watchmaker's lathe and a sharpened toothpick. Feynman, who had expected the feat to need new techniques, paid up.

What name did Feynman's 1974 Caltech commencement address give to research that merely imitates real science?

Cargo cult science took its name from South Seas islanders who built mock runways and control huts after the war and waited for the supply planes to return: the form was perfect, but no planes landed.

Feynman chalked on his Caltech blackboard: 'What I cannot create I do not' what?

Understand: the line was still on his office blackboard when he died in 1988, beside a second motto he had chalked up, 'Know how to solve every problem that has been solved'.

A playmate mocked young Feynman for not knowing what about a bird, which his father had taught him hardly mattered?

Its name, in any number of languages, tells you only what people call the bird, his father had said, urging him to watch what it does instead. So when the boy sneered, Richard just smiled.

At a televised Challenger hearing, Feynman showed that an O-ring lost its resilience by dunking it in what?

Ice water was all it took: that morning he had bought a small C-clamp at a hardware store, and when he unclamped the chilled rubber on live television it failed to spring back.

To which fellow member of the Challenger inquiry was William Rogers overheard calling Feynman a 'pain in the ass'?

Neil Armstrong, the commission's vice chairman, was standing beside Rogers in the men's room during a break. Minutes later the hearing resumed and Feynman gave his famous O-ring demonstration.

Feynman's Challenger appendix ends: 'reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be' what?

Fooled is the last word of his appendix, which found NASA managers putting the odds of losing a shuttle at 1 in 100,000 while their working engineers said closer to 1 in 100.

Who taped and transcribed Feynman's stories to produce Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!?

Ralph Leighton, the son of a Caltech physicist, began by taping the regular sessions he spent with Feynman, urging him on as 'Chief' and begging to hear the best stories again.

Which Caltech colleague threatened to sue over the account of their weak-interaction work in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!?

Murray Gell-Mann bristled at the claim that only Feynman had known the new law of nature. A later edition conceded that he and two others had the idea too; he still called it 'Dick's joke book'.

Which remote Asian land did Feynman spend a decade trying to visit, with permission arriving just after he died?

Tuva had intrigued him since he collected its stamps as a boy. Cold War paperwork stalled the trip for years, and his daughter Michelle later made the journey in his place.

What were Feynman's reported last words, spoken shortly before he died in hospital in 1988?

'This dying is boring' is his sister Joan's version; his wife recalled 'I'd hate to die twice. It's so boring.' Either way he then fell silent, answering only by squeezing a hand.

During Feynman's 1981 cancer surgery, an urgent appeal for blood donors went out to his university and which laboratory?

Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech volunteers lined up when an artery burst during the 14-hour operation. The tumour was a return of his liposarcoma, the rare cancer surgeons first removed in 1978.

Which actor both directed the 1996 biopic Infinity and played Feynman in it?

Matthew Broderick made it a family project: his mother, Patricia Broderick, wrote the screenplay from Feynman's two memoirs, and Patricia Arquette played Arline.

Hoping to hallucinate, Feynman spent hours at a time shut inside what?

A sensory deprivation tank, built by dolphin researcher John Lilly, was dark, silent and filled with warm salt water; on his third try he felt his sense of self slip an inch to one side, then down into his chest.

Two photographs of Feynman appeared on posters for which company's 1997 advertising campaign?

Apple used him in 'Think Different', a slogan widely read as a dig at IBM's motto, 'Think'. The campaign also honoured Gandhi, Picasso and Amelia Earhart.

Feynman swapped physics lessons with his artist friend Jirayr Zorthian in return for lessons in what?

Drawing was the deal: on alternate Sundays one taught art and the other science. Feynman kept at it for years, selling sketches under the pen name Ofey and earning a one-man show.

On honeymoon in Mexico, Feynman taught himself to decode the astronomical tables of which ancient civilisation?

The Maya kept him busy while his wife climbed pyramids: working from a copy of the Dresden Codex, he traced its recurring 584 to the cycle of Venus, and later lectured on it at Caltech.

Which title did Feynman win in 1939 after his college's maths department drafted him for a national contest?

Putnam Fellow went to each of the top five scorers. He was later told the gap to the other four was sensational, and he turned down a feeler about Harvard's scholarship because he had already chosen Princeton.

Which Manhattan Project site did Feynman visit to devise safe storage procedures for enriched uranium?

Oak Ridge was storing enriched uranium without knowing what made it dangerous. Oppenheimer armed him with an ultimatum: Los Alamos 'cannot accept the responsibility' unless staff were told the physics.

A Los Alamos formula that Feynman devised with his division chief calculates what?

The yield of a fission bomb, its explosive efficiency, was what the formula predicted. It was still classified forty years on, though a spy inside Los Alamos had promptly passed it to Moscow.

Which honour, worth $15,000 and a gold medal, was Feynman reluctant to accept in 1954?

The Albert Einstein Award came by phone from Lewis Strauss, and Feynman answered 'Hot dog!' before it sank in that Strauss was the man stripping Oppenheimer of his clearance. Rabi told him to accept anyway.

Which conference did the State Department ask Feynman to address in September 1958, to offset the Soviet scientists there?

Atoms for Peace was the UN's conference on peaceful nuclear energy, named after Eisenhower's 1953 speech. Uneasy at mixing propaganda with science, Feynman refused the official hotel and found his own walk-up room.

At which company did Feynman spend 1980s summers helping to build early parallel supercomputers?

Thinking Machines got him on day one: he walked in, saluted and said, 'Richard Feynman reporting for duty.' With nothing ready for him, the young founders sent him out to buy office supplies.

Which mathematician, geneticist and thermodynamics pioneer joined Feynman on the 2005 'American Scientists' stamps?

Von Neumann, McClintock and Gibbs shared the four-stamp issue. The first-day ceremony went to Yale, where Gibbs had studied and taught, and Feynman's daughter Michelle joined relatives of the other three there.