Feynman (Feynman) in the field of physics. Who knows his profile?

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Feynman

Richard Philip Feynman ( Richard Phillips Feynman, May 11, 1918 - February 15, 1988, was a famous American physicist. In 1965, he won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his achievements in quantum electrodynamics.

Biography

Feynman was born on May 11, 1918, in Far Rockaway, a small town in Queens, New York, to a Russian immigrant Jewish family.

Entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1935, studying mathematics first and then physics. He graduated as an undergraduate in 1939, and his graduation thesis was published in Phys. Rev., which contained a quantum mechanics formula that was later named after him.

In September 1939, he was a graduate student of J. Wheeler at Princeton University, dedicated to studying the difficult problem of quantum mechanics: the divergence difficulty. In 1941, Feynman married Arlene Greenbaum. In June 1942, he received a doctorate in theoretical physics from Princeton University.

In 1943, he entered Los Alamos National Laboratory and participated in the Manhattan Project.

On June 16, 1945, Feynman’s first wife Arlene died. That same year Feynman began teaching at Cornell University. Transferred to Caltech in 1951. During his time at Caltech, Caltech was very popular among students for its humorous, lively and eclectic lecture style.

In 1965, Feynman, Julian Schwinger, and Shinichiro Tomonaga won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their contributions to quantum electrodynamics.

In 1986, Feynman was commissioned to investigate the Space Shuttle Challenger crash, and used a glass of ice water and a rubber ring to prove the cause of the accident before Congress.

On February 15, 1988, Feynman died of cancer.

[Main Achievements]

In the 1940s, Feynman developed a method of expressing quantum amplitudes using path integrals, and in 1948 he proposed a new theoretical form, calculation method and method for quantum electrodynamics. renormalization method, thus avoiding divergence difficulties in quantum electrodynamics. At present, the "Feynman amplitude", "Feynman propagator", "Feynman rule", etc. in quantum field theory are all named after his surname.

Feynman diagrams were first proposed by Feynman in the late 1940s. They are used to express the interaction between fields and can concisely reflect the essence of the process. Feynman diagrams have long been widely used. , is still the basic expression form of electromagnetic interaction in physics. It changes the way physical processes are conceptualized and mathematicalized.

Feynman always approached physics in his own unique way. He was not limited by the two existing methods, Schr?dinger's wave function and Heisenberg's matrix, and independently proposed using the space-time description of the transition amplitude to deal with probability problems. He started from the basic assumption of probability amplitude superposition and used the expression form of action to sum the amplitudes of all possible paths from one space-time point to another space-time point. This method is simple and clear, and it has become the third expression of quantum mechanics.

In 1968, Feynman proposed a hadron structure model in high-energy collisions based on electron deep inelastic scattering experiments and J.D. Bjorken's scale independence. This model believes that hadrons are composed of many point particles, which are called partons. The parton model is relatively successful in explaining high-energy experimental phenomena. It can better describe high-energy processes such as deep inelastic scattering of leptons to nucleons, electron pair annihilation, hadrons, and high-energy hadron scattering. In explaining these processes The physical image of hadron structure has been gradually enriched.

In addition to his outstanding contributions to quantum electrodynamics, Feynman also established a mathematical theory to solve the superfluid phenomenon of liquid helium. After that, he and Morey Gell-Mann did some foundational work in the field of weak interactions, such as beta decay. Feynman played an important role in the development of quark theory by proposing the stratoton model of the collision process of high-energy protons.

Feynman had a special ability to express complex ideas in simple language, which made him a fruitful educator. Among the many awards he was particularly proud of was the Alster Medal for Education in 1972. "Feynman's Lectures on Physics", originally published in 1962, was praised by Scientific American: "Although this textbook is difficult to understand, it is rich in content and enlightening. Twenty-five years after its publication, it has become "Become a study guide for lecturers, professors, and outstanding junior students." Feynman himself wrote in the preface: "The main purpose of my teaching is not to help you cope with exams, nor to help you serve industry or national defense." What it does is make you appreciate this amazing world and the way physics observes it."

In order to promote the general public's understanding of physics, Feynman wrote "Characteristics of the Laws of Physics" and "Quantum Electrodynamics: A Strange Theory of Light and Matter". At the same time, he also published many profound professional papers and books, which have become classic documents and textbooks for researchers and students.

Feynman was also a constructive public figure. In 1986, after the Challenger crash, Feynman conducted the famous O-ring demonstration experiment. Using only a glass of ice water and a rubber ring, he revealed to the public in Congress the root cause of the Challenger crash - the loss of rubber at low temperatures. elasticity. In the 1960s, Feynman also worked on the California Curriculum Design Committee to oppose the mediocrity of textbooks.

In addition to being a physicist, at various times in his life he was a radio repairman, a safecracker, an artist, a dance enthusiast, a tambourine player, and a decipherer of Mayan hieroglyphs. who. Among the widely circulated anecdotes are his frequent chats with Las Vegas strippers and gamblers. His world is full of curiosity and he is a typical empiricist.

Feynman often made shocking remarks, such as the following two famous quotes:

"Physics is to math what sex is to masturbation." "Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it." : Yes, it may produce some real results, but this is not our original intention of doing it.

Physics works

* Elementary particles and the laws of physics: 1986 Dirac Recollections Lectures

* The Feynman's Lectures on Physics (The Feynman's Lectures on Physics) Physics)

(It was not written by Feynman himself, but compiled and edited based on the recordings of Feynman’s lectures at the California Institute of Technology from September 1961 to May 1963) "Feynman Lectures on Physics" is the author of this book Excerpted version) 3 volumes 1964, 1966.

* Quantum Electrodynamics ISBN 0-8053-2501-8

* QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter

* Statistical Mechanics ISBN 0-8053-2509-3

* Fundamentals of Process Theory ISBN 0-8053-2507-7

* Quantum Mechanics and Line Integrals (with Albert Hibbs) ISBN 0-070-20650-3

* Lecture Notes on Gravity 1995 ISBN 0-201-62734-5

* Lecture Notes on Computation ISBN ********* **

* Feynman’s final lecture: The Sun’s Planets ISBN ***********

* The Feynman Processor?: Quantum Entanglement and the Computational Revolution ISBN 0-7382-0173-1

Publications

* The Character of Physical Law

* Quantum Electrodynamics (Q.E.D.: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter)