IT'S NO USE ARGUING, I'M JUST TRYING TO TELL YOU THIS THING - Richard Feynman, Astrophysicis
- Astroknowloger
- Apr 16, 2016
- 3 min read
Dr. Richard Feynman was born in New York in 1918, at a time when physics was going through something of a quantum revolution. More was being understood about the atomic and sub-atomic world that is the foundation of matter.
A man who achieved a lot in his short life, Richard Feynman was and is most notably recognized for his contribution to the atomic bomb. He worked on bomb theory during WWII and observed the first nuclear bomb detonation in New Mexico in 1945 – a moment which he described as being ecstatic, but which would later cast anxious doubt about the frightening power he had released into the world. Feynman also made contributions in the field of quantum mechanics, developing a principle of least action, and computing the possibilities of particles that they take a particular course, out of all the options available, predicting their transition from one state to another. This lead to an approach which examined the quantum world as an interaction of particles, and he even made diagrams of these interactions, which became known as the Feynman diagrams. He applied his contributions to quantum mechanics to the physics of quantum electrodynamics (QED), the theory of the interaction between light and matter, and picked up a Nobel Prize in physics for this. Ever the scientist and explorer, Richard Feynman also made scientific contributions in his observations of the frictionless behavior of liquid helium, adding to the theory of superfluidity, and also applying this to the similar behaviors of superconductivity. He also examined the idea of radioactive decay known as “weak decay.” Later in his life, in the 1950s, Richard Feynman taught a course of new physics at Caltech, and his lectures were translated into a series of books called “Feynman Lectures of Physics”. Even in his old age he was to continue to use his intellect, and when the NASA Challenger was destroyed in 1986, it was Feynman who found the cause – the elastic properties of the O-rings at low temperatures, combined with NASA's lack of communication and safety concern for those at the bottom. It is often the case that great scientists communicate in a language that is unreadable to everyday people, both in the words they use and in the complex mathematics of theory that forms a language of its own. However, Richard Feynman, for all his theoretical ingenuity, was known as “The Great Explainer”, and had a love of communicating the beautiful ideas of scientific order to everyday folk. His ideas, though true to scientific principle, are related to life. Perhaps the best example, and one associated with his fame as a contributor to the nuclear bomb is his quote: “Scientific knowledge is an enabling power to do either good or bad — but it does not carry instructions on how to use it.” He related this to a Buddhist idea from his life experience: “To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell.” This idea we come to understand – that knowledge is knowledge, and that what we do with that knowledge is another matter entirely. As our understanding of the laws of nature and the observable universe increase, so too does our responsibility to use that knowledge correctly, both politically, and on an individual level in our lives.
Though most would not associate the relevance of Feynman's work with spirituality, his constant search for scientific truth blazed a path to the discovery of our connection to the universe and began a period of great spiritual awakening with the introduction of the nuclear era.
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