When Feynman was studying at Princeton, he was encouraged to be a junior physicist on the Manhattan Project, where the United States hurried to create an atomic weapon before the Germans got a chance to do the same thing.
He was hired to Hans Bethe's theoretical division and impressed Bethe enough to be made a group leader. He and Bethe developed the Bethe-Feynman formula for calculating the yield of a fission bomb.
During his years at CalTech, Feynman developed a theory of quantum electrodynamics that described the interaction of electrons, positrons, and photons, providing physicists a new way to work with electrons. He reconstructed quantum mechanics and electrodynamics in his own terms, formulating a matrix of measurable quantities visually represented by a series of graphs knows as the Feynman diagrams. Feynman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965. He won a third share of $55,000 which he of course spent on a beach home in Baja, California like any other sensible person would.
Feynman had two rare forms of cancer which were liposarcoma and Waldenstrom's macroglobulinemia, dying shortly after a final attempt at surgery for the former in 1988, when he was 69 years old. His last recorded words were, "I'd hate to die twice. It's so boring."
He was hired to Hans Bethe's theoretical division and impressed Bethe enough to be made a group leader. He and Bethe developed the Bethe-Feynman formula for calculating the yield of a fission bomb.
During his years at CalTech, Feynman developed a theory of quantum electrodynamics that described the interaction of electrons, positrons, and photons, providing physicists a new way to work with electrons. He reconstructed quantum mechanics and electrodynamics in his own terms, formulating a matrix of measurable quantities visually represented by a series of graphs knows as the Feynman diagrams. Feynman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965. He won a third share of $55,000 which he of course spent on a beach home in Baja, California like any other sensible person would.
Feynman had two rare forms of cancer which were liposarcoma and Waldenstrom's macroglobulinemia, dying shortly after a final attempt at surgery for the former in 1988, when he was 69 years old. His last recorded words were, "I'd hate to die twice. It's so boring."