Manhattan Project Race
Richard scored the highest ever MIT entrance exam, and like many of the others in the image, he won the Nobel Prize in Physics. Richard contributed to the Manhattan Project and was known to be the numerical expert there, quite a position to hold, especially when one considers that “Giants” like Fermi (1901-1954), Dirac of Fermi-Dirac statistics fame were also present, Dirac (1902-1984) by the way was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge.
Great Minds of Physics
Bohr (1885-1962) was also in attendance and combined Planck’s (1858-1947) ideas of quanta to explain the spectral lines of hydrogen (regrettably, his theory did not work for elements further in the Periodic table, i.e., with the higher atomic number), or even John Von Neumann (1903-1957, who was also present) and who as the last polymath contributed to modern Computer Science after Turing (1912-1954) and to Game theory after Nash (1928- 2015).
Returning once again to Feynman, I would like to recall a little anecdote about him that I always used to tell when I taught Quantum Electrodynamics (as I often say to my UCL students “during my previous life”). The story goes something like this: once, Feynman and his family were being heckled by some physicists in the US for driving their van with so-called Feynman diagrams painted on the outside of it, and one comment was said, “You can’t drive around with Feynman diagrams drawn on your van,” on exiting the van Richard is reported to have said, “Yes we can, we are the Feynmans.”
Famous C-Clamp Experiment
I particularly like the occasion when Richard determined the cause of the Challenger Disaster in which, during a hearing, Richard demonstrated the famous C-clamp experiment with the O-rings. Remaining with Feynman’s discussions, I also used to use the following lecture when discussing the Scientific Method and the work of Popper (1902-1904). Richard used to do much of his greatest thinking in Physics whilst visiting strip bars in the US, but this might be a good place to stop the discussion. Until next time.
