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Richard Feynman Facts & Worksheets

Richard Feynman was one of the best-known physicists during the 20th century. He was a Nobel Prize winner for one of his works.

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Richard Feynman was one of the best-known physicists during the 20th century. He was a Nobel Prize winner for one of his works. Feynman’s contributions to quantum electrodynamics, quantum physics, particle physics, quantum computing, and nanotechnology have brought great inventions in the field of physics.

See the fact file below for more information on the Richard Feynman or alternatively, you can download our 25-page Richard Feynman worksheet pack to utilise within the classroom or home environment.

Key Facts & Information

FEYNMAN’S EARLY LIFE

  • Richard Phillips Feynman was born in Queens, New York, on May 11, 1918. His parents are Jewish and originated from Russia and Poland.
  • Both of his parents influenced Richard Feynman. Feynman’s father, Melville Feynman, encouraged him to challenge orthodox thinking.
  • His mother, Lucille Phillips, had a sense of humor that he inherited and maintained throughout his works and life.
  • In his early life, Feynman was delighted in radios. He played with the voltages and frequencies. He also took electronics in his room and experimented with them; sometimes causing electrical fires.
  • He became known in his town as a handyman. At around 12 years of age, fixing people’s radios became one of his early jobs.

EARLY EDUCATION

  • Richard Feynman had a talent for engineering at an early age. He excelled in mathematics at Far Rockaway High School in Queens. He also won the New York University Math Championship in his final year at the school.
  • Richard Feynman was rejected as his first choice of school at Columbia University because of the “Jewish Quota.” He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology instead. He received his bachelor’s degree in 1939 and was named a Putnam Fellow. The Putnam is the final part of the story of ambitious mathletes.
  • Feynman was the first to achieve a perfect score on the graduate school entrance exams at Princeton University, although he did poorly on the history and English portions. He studied mathematics and physics together with Albert Einstein, Wolfgang Pauli, and John Von Neumann.
  • He received a Ph.D., under his advisor, John Wheeler, at Princeton in 1942. His thesis developed an original approach to quantum mechanics guided by the principle of “least action,” where the wave-oriented electromagnetic picture developed by James Clerk Maxwell was replaced with the one based entirely on particle interactions mapped in space and time. Feynman’s approach calculated the probabilities of all possible paths a particle could take from one point to another.
  • During Feynman’s time at Princeton, he married Arline Greenbaum, his first wife, who died in 1945 due to tuberculosis. He had a second marriage to Mary Louise Bell in June 1952; however, it was only for a short period.

THE MANHATTAN PROJECT

  • During World War II, he was persuaded to become a staff member and to participate in the Manhattan project by Robert Wilson.
  • The Manhattan Project in the U.S. Army atomic bomb project held at Princeton University (1941-1942) and the New secret Laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico (1943-1945). Feynman became immersed in his work and appointed as a group leader under the division of Hans Bethe.
  • Feynman helped develop the system for using IBM punched cards for computation and in calculating neutron equations for nuclear reactors by using a hybrid of new calculating machines. He also observed the Trinity Bomb test in 1945.
  • Later on, he formulated safety procedures for storing atomic materials. He also proposed a theoretical work about the uranium-hydride bomb. It was later proven to be not feasible.
  • During Feynman’s time at Los Alamos, Niels Bohr reached out to him for discussions about physics. He became a close friend of Robert Oppenheimer, the laboratory head who unsuccessfully persuaded him to come to the University of California.
  • Richard Feynman recalled his decision in working for the Manhattan project was justified at the time. However, he had hesitations about the continuation of the project after the defeat of Nazi Germany. He also suffered from depression after the bombing of Hiroshima in Japan.

PROFESSOR OF THEORETICAL PHYSICS

  • Richard Feynman followed Hans Bethe to Cornell University instead of going to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, despite having distinguished members as Albert Einstein, Kurt Gödel, and John Von Neuman.
  • From 1945 to 1950, Feynman taught theoretical physics. Later on, he took the position of Professor of Theoretical Physics at California Institute of Technology. He stayed there for the rest of his career.
  • During his time in California, he married his third wife, Gweneth Howarth, who supported his enthusiasm in life. They had a son, and an adopted daughter, Michelle Feynman. Carl Feynman, born in 1962, inherited the love for mathematics and worked on the use of multiple computers in solving complex problems or Parallel Computing.

THE GREAT EXPLAINER

  • Richard Feynman gained his reputation and became well-known for being capable of explaining complex elements in theoretical physics easily and understandably.
  • He was referred to as “The Great Explainer.” Feynman was a strict professor with unprepared students and also opposed memorization based on repetition.
  • His book, 1964 “Feynman Lectures on Physics,” remains outstanding.
  • The book includes lectures about mathematics, electromagnetism, Newtonian physics, quantum physics, and other relations of physics to other sciences.
  • “The Character of Physical Law,“ “Statistical Mechanics,“ “QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter,“ and “Lectures on Gravity” are his other lectures and talks that were turned into books.
  • In December 1959, Feynman presented a visionary and groundbreaking talk at the California Institute of Technology during an American Physical Society Meeting. The talk was entitled “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom.”
  • He discussed the possibility of building structures of one atom or molecule at a time. It became well-known as Nanotechnology.
  • Feynman suggested two challenges in nanotechnology and personally offered $1000, which were claimed by William McLellan and Tom Newman.

QUANTUM ELECTRODYNAMICS

  • Richard Feynman was one of the first physicists to formulate the possibility of having quantum computers.
  • He also had a significant role in developing the first massive parallel computers, formulating innovative uses for numerical computations, generating neural networks, and physical simulations using cellular automata.
  • During his years at the California Institute of Technology, he worked on quantum electrodynamics. Quantum electrodynamics is the theory about the interaction between light and matter.
  • He began developing it at Cornell University, and it is the study for which he was awarded the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics, together with Julian Schwinger and Sinltiro Tomonaga.
  • The theory is about the interaction between electromagnetic radiation (photons) and charged subatomic particles such as the electrons and antielectrons (positrons).
  • Additionally, in the early 1950s, Feynman formulated the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium and its quantum mechanical behavior.
  • In 1958, Feynman and Murray Gell-Man developed a theory about most of the phenomena associated with the weak force. It is the force at work in radioactive decay.
  • Lastly, in 1968, Feynman formulated a theory of “partons” of the hypothetical hard particles inside the nucleus of the atom. The Parton model helped in the modern understanding of quarks.
  • Feynman developed an important tool during his work on quantum electrodynamics.
  • This tool is known as the Feynman diagrams. The diagrams helped in conceptualizing and calculating interactions between electrons and their anti-matter counterparts, positrons.
  • The Feynman diagrams are easily-visualized graphic analogs of the complicated mathematical expressions needed to explain the behavior of interacting particles system. They penetrated several areas of theoretical physics during the second half of the 20th century.
  • Feynman’s aspiring idea was to use the diagrams in modeling all of physics in terms of particles’ spins and fundamental forces and explaining the strong interactions that govern the scattering of nucleons.

LATER IN LIFE

  • Later on, Richard Feynman was appointed as a foreign member of the Royal Society in 1965. He was especially proud when he was awarded the Oersted Medal for teaching in 1972. Feynman became a member of the American Physical Society – the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Academy of Science. Later on, he turned his mind to studying the theories of quantum gravity.
  • Two years before he died, Feynman was included in the Rogers Commission investigation of the 1986 Challenger Space Shuttle disaster. He died on February 15, 1988, in Los Angeles because of two forms of cancer, Liposarcoma and Waldenström’s macroglobulinemia.

Richard Feynman Worksheets

This is a fantastic bundle which includes everything you need to know about the Richard Feynman across 25 in-depth pages. These are ready-to-use Richard Feynman worksheets that are perfect for teaching students about Richard Feynman who was one of the best-known physicists during the 20th century. He was a Nobel Prize winner for one of his works. Feynman’s contributions to quantum electrodynamics, quantum physics, particle physics, quantum computing, and nanotechnology have brought great inventions in the field of physics.

Complete List Of Included Worksheets

  • Richard Feynman Facts
  • Physicist: The Role Model
  • Timeline of the Explainer
  • Feynman’s Filling
  • Spot the University
  • Interview of the Physicist
  • Feynman’s Questions
  • Persuading a Friend
  • Battle of the Theories
  • The Meeting of the Famous
  • The Jumbled Works

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