70 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?

His pictorial diagrams for the theory's calculations are still used throughout particle physics.

In which borough of New York City was Feynman born in 1918?

The family later moved to Far Rockaway, where he ran a home laboratory and repaired radios.

Feynman was a late talker. He did not speak until after which birthday?

As an adult his New York accent was so strong that Pauli and Bethe said he talked like a 'bum'.

What did Feynman's father Melville do for a living?

He declared 'If it's a boy, he'll be a scientist' before Richard was born, and taught him to question orthodox thinking.

Feynman's younger sister Joan, whose interest in astronomy he encouraged, became what?

He took her to see the aurora in Far Rockaway; she went on to help explain what causes the northern lights.

An IQ test at Feynman's high school put his score at what?

Biographer James Gleick called it 'merely respectable'; his sister scored one point higher, and he later declined Mensa saying his IQ was too low.

Why was Feynman turned down by Columbia University?

Princeton's physics head later asked whether he was Jewish before admitting him for graduate work.

Where did Feynman do his undergraduate degree?

He joined the Pi Lambda Phi fraternity and published two papers in the Physical Review before graduating in 1939.

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

Physics, he said, was 'somewhere in between'.

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

It was described as an unprecedented feat in physics; his maths score was also outstanding.

Who was Feynman's PhD advisor at Princeton?

Their absorber theory of electrodynamics drove Feynman toward the path-integral formulation of quantum mechanics.

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

Pauli warned the theory would be hard to quantize; Einstein suggested trying it on gravity.

A key insight in Feynman's thesis was that positrons behave like electrons doing what?

The idea underlies the arrows in his diagrams and his 1949 paper 'The Theory of Positrons'.

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

It was incurable at the time; he could kiss her only on the cheek at the ceremony and took her straight to hospital afterwards.

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

Neither family nor friends attended; they took the ferry there on June 29, 1942.

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

The isotron was meant to separate uranium isotopes electromagnetically; the project was dropped on Lawrence's advice.

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

Together they produced the Bethe-Feynman formula for the yield of a fission bomb.

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

A drummer, he also worked out how to make the machines click in musical rhythms.

How did Feynman amuse himself in the isolation of Los Alamos?

He left notes inside one colleague's cabinets, convincing him a spy had been at his research.

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

The lock was set to 27-18-28, from e = 2.71828, exactly the sort of number he figured a physicist would choose.

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

Asked who was most likely a spy, Fuchs pointed to Feynman's safe-cracking and frequent trips to Albuquerque.

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

He reasoned the glass would block the ultraviolet; the flash still made him duck to the floor with a purple afterimage.

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

Feynman had no such inhibitions, which may be why the older man never quite warmed to him.

After Los Alamos, Feynman took up a professorship at which university in 1945?

He later said he lived in the shadow of Hans Bethe there and hated the Ithaca winters.

Feynman joked that which university was 'the only university that ever had the good sense to fire me'?

He nominally held an assistant professorship there during the war and never returned to take it up.

What did Army psychiatrists give Feynman at his post-war draft physical?

They diagnosed him with a mental illness, a story he later told with relish.

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

He was working for fun after his father's death, and was surprised when job offers poured in.

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

Schwinger's long presentation had gone first; Feynman failed to get his point across at all.

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

He showed that Tomonaga, Schwinger and Feynman were all saying the same thing, even if nobody else understood any of them.

Julian Schwinger dismissed Feynman diagrams as what?

By 1950 papers using the diagrams were appearing anyway, and they soon became the standard tool.

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

A girlfriend had suggested South America as a refuge from nuclear war; he mostly discovered samba.

In Rio, Feynman learned to play the frigideira, a samba instrument based on what?

He also spent time there with the exiled physicist David Bohm, who failed to convert him to his ideas.

Which instruments was Feynman famous for playing, sometimes in the pit orchestra of musicals?

Sheldon Cooper in The Big Bang Theory copies him by playing them too.

Feynman's second wife's divorce complaint cited his drumming and his habit of constantly doing what?

She said he flew into a rage when she interrupted either; the decree cited 'extreme cruelty'.

Feynman registered and voted for which political party?

His second wife was more conservative still, and her remark on the Oppenheimer hearing offended him.

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

She was working as an au pair; he offered her a job as his live-in maid and married her two years later.

Gweneth Howarth came from Ripponden, in which English county?

They married in Pasadena in 1960, had a son Carl and adopted a daughter, Michelle.

What did the Feynmans buy with the Nobel Prize money?

Their main home was in Altadena, near Caltech.

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

QED and QUARK were already taken.

Which video-game designer, a father of the Xbox, bought Feynman's rusting van in 2012?

Gweneth had sold it for a dollar to Ralph Leighton, who left it in storage.

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

Superconductivity eluded him; that was cracked by Bardeen, Cooper and Schrieffer in 1957.

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

The two models turned out to be describing the same quarks and gluons from different angles.

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

He imagined machines that could build smaller copies of themselves and arrange atoms 'the way we want'.

Feynman credited the idea of 'swallowing the doctor', a tiny surgical robot, to which student and friend?

Hibbs later co-wrote Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals with him.

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

The publishers gave the books plain red covers instead, with a photo of him drumming in the foreword.

Feynman offered two $1,000 prizes for challenges in which field?

William McLellan and Tom Newman each claimed one.

Feynman's 1974 Caltech commencement address warned against what he called what?

'The first principle is that you must not fool yourself,' he told the graduates, 'and you are the easiest person to fool.'

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

It was still there when he died in 1988.

Feynman served on the Rogers Commission investigating which 1986 disaster?

He was reluctant to join and had to be persuaded by his wife.

In a televised hearing, Feynman showed the O-ring lost resilience by dunking it in what?

He squeezed it in a clamp first; the demonstration pointed straight at the cold-weather launch as the cause.

To which fellow member did William Rogers complain that Feynman was 'becoming a pain in the ass'?

Feynman clashed with Rogers repeatedly and wrote his own dissenting appendix to the report.

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

The commission concluded that the primary O-ring failed to seal in the unusually cold weather.

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

The son of his Lectures co-author, he also chronicled the failed Tuva expedition in Tuva or Bust!

Which Caltech colleague threatened to sue over the book's account of their weak-interaction work?

He grumbled that Feynman 'spent a great deal of his effort generating anecdotes about himself'.

Which remote Soviet republic did Feynman long to visit, permission arriving a day after his death?

His daughter Michelle later made the trip for him.

What were Feynman's reported last words?

He was referring to the long coma before his death from complications of cancer in February 1988.

Feynman was diagnosed in 1978 with which rare cancer?

Surgeons removed a tumour that had crushed a kidney and his spleen; a second cancer followed in 1986.

Who played Feynman in the 1996 biopic Infinity?

Alan Alda later played him on stage in the two-hander QED, and Jack Quaid in 2023's Oppenheimer.

Feynman appeared on a 2005 US postage stamp of what denomination?

The 'American Scientists' set also honoured von Neumann, McClintock and Gibbs; his stamp shows eight tiny diagrams.

Two photographs of Feynman were used in which company's 1997 'Think Different' campaign?

Bill Gates, meanwhile, paid to put his 1964 Messenger Lectures online as Project Tuva.

Where was Feynman ranked in a 1999 Physics World poll of 130 physicists on the greatest of all time?

The Gribbins argue nobody else contributed so much to all four fundamental interactions.

Which two other Nobel laureates attended Far Rockaway High School, Feynman's alma mater?

Feynman was promoted to a higher maths class on arrival; his sister Joan scored a point higher on the school IQ test.

What mathematical honour did Feynman receive in 1939, the year he took his bachelor's degree?

Princeton's physics chief Henry D. Smyth still worried about admitting him, for reasons unrelated to his scores.

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

He insisted the engineers understand the physics so criticality accidents could be avoided, especially near water.

Feynman and Hans Bethe developed a formula at Los Alamos for calculating what?

The Bethe-Feynman formula built on earlier work by Robert Serber; Feynman also ran a group of human computers.

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

AEC chairman Lewis Strauss had just stripped Oppenheimer's clearance; Rabi persuaded Feynman to take it anyway.

What conference took Feynman to Geneva in September 1958, where he met his future wife Gweneth?

She was working in Switzerland as an au pair; his previous girlfriend had walked off with his Einstein Award medal.

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

He was among the first scientists to conceive of quantum computers, and his friend Danny Hillis ran the firm.

Which scientists appeared alongside Feynman on the 2005 'American Scientists' stamp set?

Feynman's stamp shows him in his thirties with eight small Feynman diagrams, designed by Victor Stabin.