Richard Feynman

Some of Feynman's key characteristics are:

Some non-Physics related ones, mostly highlighted at Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics by James Gleick (1994):

Even Apple thinks so according to their Think different campaign: www.feynman.com/fun/think-different/

quantum electrodynamics lectures:

Feynman was apparently seriously interested/amused by computer:

Two official websites?

High level timeline of his life:

In 1948 he published his reworking of classical quantum mechanics in terms of the path integral formulation: journals.aps.org/rmp/abstract/10.1103/RevModPhys.20.367 Space Time Approach to nonrelativistic quantum mechanics (paywalled 2021)

Feynman's first wife, previously his local-high school darling.

Feynman was like an reversed Stephen Hawking: he married his wife knowing that she had a serious illness, while Hawking's wife married him knowing that as well.

Just that in Feynman's case, the disease outcome (tuberculosis) was much more uncertain, and she tragically died in 1945 much earlier while Feynman was at Los Alamos Laboratory, while Hawking, despite his decline, lived much longer.

Reading about her death e.g. at Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics by James Gleick (1994) is a major tearjerker, it's just too horrible. The book mentions on chapter "The Last Springtime" that at last, during the last months of her life, after much hesitation, they did fuck in the sanatorium Arline was staying at in Albuquerque, the nearest major city to Los Alamos, despite the risk of Feynman being being infected, which would be particularly serious given that Feynman would be in constant contact with students and possibly infect others as part of his career as a researcher/teacher.

It is even sadder to think that the first antibiotics for tuberculosis, streptomycin, finished its first major clinical trial at around 1948, not long after her death.

Ciro Santilli considers this tragedy a cause of Feynman was a huge womanizer during a certain period of his life.

Feynman became a terrible womanizer after his first wife Arline Greenbaum died, involving himself with several married women, and leading to at least two abortions according to Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics by James Gleick (1994).

Ciro Santilli likes to think that he is quite liberal and not a strict follower of Christian morals, but this one shocked him slightly even. Feynman could be a God, but he could also be a dick sometimes.

One particular case that stuck to Ciro Santilli's mind, partly because he is Brazilian, is when Feynman was in Brazil, he had a girlfriend called Clotilde that called him "Ricardinho", which means "Little Richard"; -inho is a diminutive suffix in Portuguese, and also indicates affection. At some point he even promised to take her back to the United States, but didn't in the end, and instead came back and married his second wife in marriage that soon failed.

Richard's third and final wife, Gweneth Howarth, seemed a good match for him though. When they started courting, she made it very clear that Feynman should decide if he wanted her or not soon, because she had other options available and being actively tested. Fight fire with fire.

From Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman chapter O Americano, Outra Vez!:

The people from the airlines were somewhat bored with their lives, strangely enough, and at night they would often go to bars to drink. I liked them all, and in order to be sociable, I would go with them to the bar to have a few drinks, several nights a week.

One day, about 3:30 in the afternoon, I was walking along the sidewalk opposite the beach at Copacabana past a bar. I suddenly got this treMENdous, strong feeling: "That's just what I want; that'll fit just right. I'd just love to have a drink right now!"

I started to walk into the bar, and I suddenly thought to myself, "Wait a minute! It's the middle of the afternoon. There's nobody here, There's no social reason to drink. Why do you have such a terribly strong feeling that you have to have a drink?" - and I got scared.

I never drank ever again, since then. I suppose I really wasn't in any danger, because I found it very easy to stop. But that strong feeling that I didn't understand frightened me. You see, I get such fun out of thinking that I don't want to destroy this most pleasant machine that makes life such a big kick. It's the same reason that, later on, I was reluctant to try experiments with LSD in spite of my curiosity about hallucinations.

One notable drug early teens Ciro consumed was Magic: The Gathering, see also: Section "Magic: The Gathering is addictive".

He and John Archibald Wheeler presented the Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory.

Bibliography:

The mantra of the computer simulation engineer.

The first key paper to his approach to quantum electrodynamics apparently.

Published on Physical review 76.769.

This is a good book.

It has some overlap with Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, which it likely takes as primary sources of some stories.

However, while Surely goes into a lot of detail of each event, this book paints a more cohesive and global picture of things.

In terms of hard physics/mathematics, this book takes the approach of spending a few paragraphs in some chapters describing in high level terms some of the key ideas, which is a good compromise. It does sometime fall into the sin of to talk about something without giving the real name to not scare off the audience, but it does give a lot of names, notably it talks a lot about Lagrangian mechanics. And it goes into more details than Surely in any case.

Amazing talk by Richard Feynman that describes his experiences at Los Alamos National Laboratory while developing the first nuclear weapons.

Transcript: calteches.library.caltech.edu/34/3/FeynmanLosAlamos.htm Also included full text into Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman.

In this chapter Richard Feynman talks about his experiences in Brazil.

"O Americano, Outra Vez!" means "The American, once again!" in Portuguese, which is what one of the samba school boss exclaimed when Feynman was not playing well his instrument, the frigideira, during a rehearsal.

Feynman really enjoyed Brazil's (and notably Rio's) stereotypical "take it easy and enjoy life" attitude.

Key quote that names the chapter:

My friend Matt Sands was once going to write a book to be called Alfred Nobel's Other Mistake.

TODO who was he talking about? Robert Noyce or Gordon Moore feel likely candidates:

But do you know what, Cirism is totally fine with taking indulgences to absolve someone from their past sins, so long as they have repented. Everyone deserves a second chance.