Unit 6: More People Connected with Feynman

Donald Kutyna: USAF;served at NORAD and with US Space Command

Ralph Leighton: Feynman's biographer, apologist, hagiographer, friend and fellow drummer. He's the son of a CalTech physicist (Robert B Leighton) and a "friend of Tuva".

William Rogers: Chair of commission that investigated the Challenger disaster. (See: http://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/genindex.htm for details on the reports issued by the commission.)

Unit 5: More Feynman-related People and Things

Feynman Diagrams: These are graphic expressions Feynman used to visualize quantum field theory problems.

Faustin Bray: A musician and documentarian. (Click here for link to media company.)

Richard Davies: A physicist at JPL and a friend of Feynman

Ed Fredkin: A physicist and inventor. (Click here for website and here for the wikipedia entry.)

Murray Gell-Mann: Nobel laureate (1969, physics, for his work on elementary particles); credited with the term "quark", author of The Quark and the Jaguar. (Click here for a link to his website.)

David Goodstein: Physics professor at CalTech. (Click here for link to his page at CalTech.)

Al Hibbs: A PhD student of Feynman's; worked at JPL. (Here is a link to his obituary.)

Danny Hillis: The Thinking Machine Company (Link will take you to wikipedia article on the former super computer company.)

Richard Sherman: A PhD student of Feynman

Tom Van Sant: Founder of the Geo Sphere Project (a mapping project), Santa Monica.

Jirayr Zorthian: Born in Armenia in 1911; artist; friend of Feynman (For interesting article on Zorthian, as well as link to a website about the artist, go to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jirayr_Zorthian )

Kathleen McAlpine-Myers: Teacher and artists's model; modelled for Feynman

Unit 4: Scientists and Others

Some of the people discussed in connection with Unit 4 and Feynman:

Hans Bethe: born is Strasbourg in 1906; left Germany in 1933 and wound up at Cornell. Worked at Los Alamos. In 1967, he received a Nobel Prize for his discoveries on the processes that drive the Sun and the stars.

Freeman Dyson: English; born in 1923. Came to Cornell in 1947 and became a professor at Princeton in the '50s. (See his homepage here and another interesting site here.)

Joan Feynman: Richard Feynman's sister; astrophysicist; retired from JPL in 2003.

Werner Heisenberg: The German Nobel laureate and founder of Quantum Mechanics. Famous for his "Uncertainty Principle". He was also the head of the German nuclear energy program during WWII. (link here to Copenhagen Interpretation w/ Bohr)

Marvin Minsky: A pioneer in Artificial Inteligence; MIT (Click here for web link.)

Robert Oppenheimer: The physicist who was director of the Manhattan Project

John von Neumann: Born in Hungary; worked on Manhatten Project and went on to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.

John Wheeler: Studied with Bohr at Copenhagen before coming to Princeton in 1938. Credited with the term "black hole". He was Feynman's thesis advisor at Princeton.

Concepts in Unit 4

The following is a list of concepts, terms, etc. that were discussed in Unit 4:

Dual Particle/Wave Nature of Matter: Given that we can't know both and object's velocity and its position (See Uncertainty Principle), when we consider the minute constituents of matter we can see how they exhibit both the properties of particles (if we look for their location) and those of waves (if we measure their energy/momentum).

Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle: We can't measure both the exact location of an object and its momentum at the same time.

Determinism: A mechanical view of the universe in which future events can be predicted on the basis of past events.

Quantum Theory: The quantum theory of atoms describes an electron as a probability cloud in the atom, rather than as a discreet particle (as in the Bohr model).

Sum-over-histories: Feynman's approach to quantum theory. The example given in the lecture involved a photon emitted from a candle's flame. Rather than thinking of it as having traveled a straight path from the flame to the observer's eye, consider that what we see is the sum of all of the possible paths that the photon could/did take.

Quantum Electrodynamics (QED): In the electrical force that exists between charges, the process by which virtual photons are exchanged. (QED is not to be confused with Q.E.D. "quod erat demonstratum". I am soooo much more familiar with the Latin phrase that it used to confuse the daylights out of me when I worked at a bookstore and kept seeing QED used in Physics titles. I kept thinking "What nerve!")

Nuclear Fission: The method by which nuclear energy is produced. For example: If Uranium is split into two unstable daughter elements, both will need to find a more stable state. In the process of which, energy is released.

Chain Reaction: When the Uranium is split (see above) you get the two daughter elements plus energy plus a few extra neutrons. If each of these neutrons can cause another fission (and so on) in a sustainable fashion, you'd have a critical chain reaction of the type used for nuclear power. If you were to get more than one additional fission reaction, it would be super-critical and that's when the Manhattan Project comes into the picture.

Nuclear Fusion: This is the process that runs our Sun. The idea is that two light nuclei are fused together, forming one heavy nucleus and a lot of energy.

Nuclear Weapon Design: The Manhattan Project resulted in two different designs used against the Japanese. "Little Boy" was a gun-type, with one sub-critical mass being fired at another and the fission process set off by neutrons introduced by an initiator. The design of "Fat an" had a hollow Pu core and this was compressed by using the explosive charges arrayed around it.

Unit 4: Feynman

Ran across this video of "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out", over at Google.

We're doing a few units on Feynman, so the next few postings will (likely) be related to him and the material we're looking at.

Here's a short bio from the Nobel site, which is also the source of the photo.