1918: Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
Last month we lost one of our most lovely physicist Stephen William Hawking. Mr. Hawking is a splendid and interesting physicist. He had some guest appearances in Star Trek: The Next Generation, Big Bang, and The Simpsons. In his autobiography, Hawking has also written that one of the greatest regrets of life is the failure to squeeze Mrs. Thatcher's toes. Besides sorrow for his death, these anecdotes give me a vivid imagination of Hawking. Also, that reminds me another lovely and funny physicist born 100years ago, Richard Phillips Feynman who born on May 11, 1918, dead on February 15, 1988.
Feynman was an American theoretical physicist known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965. In 1986, after the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, Feynman was commissioned to investigate the cause of the accident. Feynman made the famous O-ring demonstration experiment, using only a glass of ice water and a rubber ring, revealing the fundamental causes of the challenger crash to the public – rubber at low temperatures lose elasticity.
Besides, be thought as one of the most excellent physicists in the world, Feynman maybe is the only scientist who has been asked to paint nude pictures, secretly open the bomb's secret files, and play drummer in the Brazilian samba band. He likes to study in the bar. When the bar which he usually went was accused of the immoral offense, he went to court to defend. Feynman decoded the Top Secret America documents just for fun, and then tell the government they should improve the code. He used to talk about physics question with Einstein and Boyle, but he had studied the odds of winning and losing with professional gamblers in the gambling house. Since the childhood, Feynman is maverick, in a thoughtful, and funny way. These funny things that Mr. Feynman did let people can’t help shouting: " Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!"
Physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi said, "the physicist is the Peter Pan in humanity, they never grow up, they never grow up." Richard Feynman's surely is Peter Pan. Surely, we miss you, Mr. Feynman!
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To see more Ricard Phillips Feynman Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman
Thanks for sharing! Feynman was truly one of a kind and an amazing educator: http://www.richard-feynman.net/videos.htm
Check out the video series on the pleasures of finding things out.
I was reading in one of Hawking's books about how the trajectory of a large object differs from a small object. Newtonian physics vs quantum physics. I believe they used the example of someone kicking soccer balls through slits in a wall and recording where they landed.
Then imagined shooting a smaller particle through the same slits and noticing the difference in dismemberment.