A Far Rockaway boyhood
Richard Phillips Feynman was born on May 11, 1918, in New York City and grew up in Far Rockaway, Queens, the son of Melville Feynman, a uniform salesman, and Lucille, whose sense of humor he credited as the deepest influence on his character. Melville Feynman, though not a scientist himself, taught his son a habit of mind that would last a lifetime: he insisted on the difference between knowing the name of something and actually understanding it, and he taught Richard to look past labels and ask how things really work. The boy repaired radios for neighbors, kept a home laboratory, and delighted in puzzles of every kind. By high school he was a local prodigy in mathematics. He carried out of that childhood not just talent but a temperament, playful, irreverent, and constitutionally unwilling to accept an explanation he could not see for himself.
MIT, Princeton, and a new way to do physics
Feynman studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then went to Princeton for his doctorate, working under the physicist John Wheeler. Even as a graduate student he was reformulating physics from the ground up. His "path integral" formulation of quantum mechanics, the idea that a particle traveling between two points should be thought of as taking, in a sense, every possible path at once, with the paths added together, was a strikingly original way of thinking that would become one of the standard tools of modern physics. He had the rare gift of distrusting received formulations and rebuilding them in a form he could fully grasp. It made him, very early, both brilliant and slightly outside the mainstream, a physicist other physicists watched closely.
Los Alamos
In 1943, at twenty-four, Feynman was recruited to the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, where he led a team performing the enormous numerical calculations the bomb design required, organizing human "computers" and early machines into an efficient system. He was famous there for irreverence, he taught himself to pick the locks and crack the safes that held the project’s secrets, partly to expose how poor the security was. Beneath the high spirits was private grief: his young wife, Arline, whom he had married knowing she was dying of tuberculosis, died in a sanatorium near the site in 1945. Feynman witnessed the first atomic test, and the experience left him, like many of the project’s scientists, with a lasting unease about what they had built.
Quantum electrodynamics
After the war, physics faced a crisis: its theory of how light and matter interact kept producing nonsensical infinite answers. Feynman, working in parallel with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, solved it, producing a consistent and astonishingly accurate theory of quantum electrodynamics, or QED. As part of the work he invented the now-ubiquitous "Feynman diagrams" simple line drawings that turn fearsomely complex calculations into something a physicist can sketch on a napkin. QED became the most precisely tested theory in all of science, its predictions confirmed to better than ten decimal places. For it, Feynman shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics. The diagrams alone changed the daily practice of physics permanently, and are still drawn on blackboards around the world every day.
The great explainer
From 1950 Feynman was based at the California Institute of Technology, and it was there that his second great gift emerged: teaching. In the early 1960s he delivered an introductory physics course whose transcripts, published as The Feynman Lectures on Physics, became one of the most beloved and widely read science books ever written, studied by people who will never sit a physics exam. He believed that if something could not be explained clearly to a first-year student, it was not yet truly understood. His lectures, his books, and his later television appearances conveyed not just facts but a feeling, that understanding the world is one of the deepest pleasures available to a human being, and that it is open to anyone curious enough to try.
A curiosity without borders
Feynman’s curiosity refused to stay inside physics. In a 1959 talk, "There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom," he sketched the possibility of building machines and storing information at the scale of atoms, a lecture now regarded as a founding vision of nanotechnology. He was among the first to propose, in the early 1980s, that a computer built on quantum principles could simulate nature in ways an ordinary computer never could, helping to seed the field of quantum computing. He spent a sabbatical working in biology, taught himself to paint, played the bongo drums with real commitment, puzzled over Maya hieroglyphics for fun, and told the stories of his escapades in two best-selling memoirs. He approached the whole world the way his father had taught him to approach a broken radio.
The Challenger investigation
In 1986 the space shuttle Challenger broke apart shortly after launch, killing all seven aboard, and Feynman, by then seriously ill with cancer, was persuaded to join the presidential commission investigating the disaster. Cutting through official caution, he focused on the rubber O-ring seals in the shuttle’s booster rockets. At a televised hearing he performed an experiment of devastating simplicity: he dropped a piece of O-ring material into a glass of ice water and showed that, when cold, it lost its resilience. It was the cause of the disaster, demonstrated in a minute, in plain sight. His blunt personal appendix to the commission’s report, which concluded that "for a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled" became a famous statement of scientific honesty.
"You must not fool yourself"
If Feynman left a single principle behind, it was about integrity. In a celebrated address he described what he called "cargo cult science" work that has the outward form of science but lacks its essential discipline, and he distilled that discipline into a rule: the first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool. He distrusted pomp, was reluctant to be weighed down by honors, and once seriously considered refusing the Nobel Prize because of the fuss. What he prized was the plain, stubborn habit of checking your ideas against reality and reporting honestly what you find, including, especially, everything that might prove you wrong.
The Feynman the public met
Most people who know the name Feynman never studied physics; they met him through his stories. His memoir "Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!" assembled from tales he told a friend, became an unlikely best-seller, full of safecracking, samba bands, practical jokes, and the relentless curiosity behind them. Later books drawn from his lectures and letters extended the picture. What came through was not the technical physicist but the attitude: a refusal to be impressed by authority or jargon, a delight in figuring things out for their own sake, and an insistence on plain honesty about what one does and does not know. For countless readers, including many who went on to become scientists and engineers themselves, those books were a first encounter with the idea that thinking hard about the world could be the most fun a person could have. Feynman became, in effect, a teacher to people who never sat in his classroom: living proof that the life of the mind, done right, looks less like drudgery than like play.
Impact and legacy
Quantum electrodynamics remains a cornerstone of modern physics, and Feynman diagrams are now as basic to the field as the alphabet. His vision of nanotechnology and his early ideas about quantum computing helped open entire new sciences. The fields he helped seed are now among the most active anywhere: laboratories around the world are racing to build the quantum computers he first imagined, and nanotechnology has become a vast enterprise touching medicine, materials, and electronics. Working physicists still reach for his path-integral methods and his diagrams every day, often without recalling whose mind first drew them. But his largest and most unusual legacy is human: through his lectures and his books, Feynman drew an extraordinary number of people into science, and gave the wider public an enduring image of what a scientific mind looks like, joyful, skeptical, honest, and endlessly curious. More than three decades after his death, his lectures are still assigned to students, his memoirs still sell steadily, and his name still surfaces wherever someone insists that science should be a genuine pleasure rather than a chore, and that the honest pursuit of understanding is among the finest things a person can do with a life. He died in Los Angeles on February 15, 1988, at sixty-nine. Near the end he reportedly remarked that he would hate to die twice, because the whole business was, he said, "so boring" refusing solemnity to the very last, even about himself.
Sources & further reading
Richard Feynman, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.