We're exploring. We're trying to find out as much as we can
about the world. . . I can live with doubt and uncertainty and
not knowing. I think it's more much interesting to live not
knowing than to have answers that might be wrong.
~ Richard P. Feynman*
Nobelist Richard P. Feynman (1918-1988) was a brilliant physicist, one of a number of esteemed scientists who participated in the Manhattan Project, the work for which resulted in creation of the atomic bomb. The wearer of many hats, he also was a translator of Mayan hieroglyphics, a musician, a teacher, and a story-teller. He remains a source of endless fascination, as a perusal of the News section of the Feynman Website quickly reveals.
Most recently, Feynman's life became the subject of the biographical comic Feynman (First Second Books, August 2011) by Jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick. Here's the trailer for the book, which has received some wonderful reviews:
Read an excerpt.
By chance, I learned that the creator of the much-lauded The Sagan Series, Reid Gower, also turned his attention to Feynman to create a companion project The Feynman Series, the objective of which is to promote scientific education and scientific literacy in the general population. Here's the first of three videos, Beauty (5:11 minutes). The other two are Honours (3:57 minutes) and Curiosity (4:24 minutes) All three are worth the brief amount of time required to view them.
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* Quoted in Beauty, Part I of The Feynman Series
Of Interest
The Sagan Series on YouTube
Feynman's Vision: The Next 50 Years, TEDx Caltech
Symphony of Science — The Poetry of Reality (An Athem for Science): Feynman makes an appearance in this music video, the fifth in a series promoting science through words of wisdom.
Richard Dawkins, The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing (Oxford University Press, 2009): A chapter on Feynman is included in Part III, What Scientists Think.
The Nobel Prize in Physics 1965 (Feynman, Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, and Julian Schwinger were awarded the Nobel jointly "for their fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics, with deep-ploughing consequences for the physics of elementary particles".
The Art of Richard Feynman at Museum Syndicate
Color me physics Coloring Books
Posts
5 comments:
Perhaps then we should call it The Art of Science.
Beautiful video -- love this quote: "I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong."
He caught my fancy a while back. I would loved to have had a conversation with him! Great post by the way.
Very good, thanks! I didn't know about many of these you list here. Feynman would have been my freshman physics professor, but I barely missed him. (He died a year and a half before my freshman year.)
The beauty video is exactly that.
This is so great, Maureen; thanks for sharing. My husband once started a company with one of Feynman's co-workers (John Kemeny) and he's a huge Feynman fan. I came close to divorcing him once back we were living in VT and commuting to work together: He was reading "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman" at the time and kept reading aloud to me in the car; I was ready to shoot him! I am of course sending him a link to this post...
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