Face to face with Feynman

Personally the entire idea of looking up to a role model never seemed attractive or worth appreciating to me. One's journey should be independent and an unguided walk towards a self chosen horizon on a self contained highway.. But then along the way you do come across people and get to know about their stories and every once in a blue moon you do come to admire a few of them truly and get deeply inspired by them. 
One of those few people for me is Richard Feynman.

Feynman was a theoretical physicist of mid 20th century. Nobel laureate for his theory on Quantum Electrodynamics and an eternal figure in physics for many other contributions; Feynman, apart from being one of the most gifted scientists of his times was also a very colorful person- a bongo player, a nude artist, a womanizer n yet a dedicated lover, an eternal enthusiast, a safe cracker, a humorous show-offer, a truly talented lecturer and so much more...
Every physicist like every footballer or every musician has his own style. Feynman was known for his intuition, his very visual imagination and his capability of mathsifying them to equations that in turn could speak for his thoughts loud and clear..

Interesting thing is I came to know of Feynman long after i started pursuing physics. Truth is my entry into physics was very mathematical. As a kid back in school i guess the only thing that i tried and did was mathematics. Even though school maths was pretty trivial and stupid but i still had my own times with classical geometry and algebra. And when i entered in my higher secondary and got into physics, it was truly enlightening in the sense that i got to know that all those lines and circles, xs and ys weren't just little games i used to play on white sheets but those were 'real' as in i could use them to understand things going on in the real world! I guess thats when i got hooked for good. It was only after i finished school, entered iit and while chatting with a friend in fb (i guess Ojas) that he told me that there's this guy called Feynman and " dude's lectures are actually pretty great! " :D

 
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I wanted to talk about Feynman's path integral formulation of quantum mechanics but then i figured the man truly needs to get a sexy intro! I appreciated Feynman before as a great historical figure but his science was beyond me then so i never could truly appreciate him as a scientist... but a few days back i reached the chapter on path integrals and the Lagrangian formulation in Shankar's QM book and i finally came to see Feynman's work. One word -' amazing ' 

So that's why I dropped by here today to talk about it but then may be many of you dont know about him which is of course not required to appreciate his work but still... dude was awesome so i guess its okay to waste a post just like that and get back to path integrals on the next post! : )

and here are some photos.... enjoy! ;-)

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the 3 vol.s of Feynman's lectures are still very famous amongst physics students... 

That's Arline, Feynman's colg. time girl friend. She had Tuberculosis. Nevertheless he did marry her even after knowing that she would die soon so that he could take care of her... she died n he went into 'bang everyone phase'

 'lets get banging, shall we??' ;-)

Feynman playing bongos! 
' On the infrequent occasions when I have been called upon in a formal place to play the bongo drums, the introducer never seems to find it necessary to mention that I also do theoretical physics.'







These are some of his sketches.....

that's i guess one of his rough notes... every physics student ends up with a huge collection of these of his own... apparently his doodles were of the same quality as his work unlike us of course! :D














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' A poet once said, "The whole universe is in a glass of wine." We will probably never know in what sense he meant that, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe. '

' I have a friend who's an artist and he's sometimes taken a view which I don't agree with very well. He'll hold up a flower and say, "Look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree, I think. And he says - "you see, I as an artist can see how beautiful this is, but you as a scientist, oh, take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing." And I think that he's kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me, too, I believe, although I might not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is; but I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time I see much more about the flower than he sees. I can imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside which also have a beauty. I mean it's not just beauty at this dimension of one centimetre, there is also beauty at a smaller dimension, the inner structure. Also the processes, the fact that the colours in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pllinate it is interesting - it means that insects can see the colour. It adds a question: Does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kins of interesting questions which shows that science knowledge only adds to the excitement and mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds; I don't understand how it subtracts. '