Term Papers on The Life Of Richard Feynman

Term Paper Title	The Life Of Richard Feynman
# of Words	1133
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	4.53

The Life of Richard Feynman

     Richard Feynman was a physicist who was born in Far Rockaway, near New York City, in 1918. He lived there until he left to attend university at the Michigan Institute of Technology. He studied there for four years, and then went to Princeton University where he finished his studies. After that, he moved  to Los Alamos, Cornell, and lastly Caltech. During this time, he was married three times.  He died in 1988 from cancer.

Feynman’s Work on the Bomb
     After Feynman had graduated, at 24 years of age, he was recruited as one of the many scientists to work on the construction of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos; he had already developed a reputation for himself as a young genius. Initially, he joined the theoretical physics division as, basically, a calculator. His job was to crunch numbers for the large, complex calculations required to make the bomb. The things that he worked on included calculating the critical mass and the critical radius of the bombs, finding a suitable material for insulating the bomb so the neutrons would not escape, and calculating exactly how  much uranium or plutonium would be needed. He was very successful in this early work, and was quickly promoted to one of the directors of the theoretical division. Feynman had written that there were four main questions that needed to be answered before the work could progress.

1. How big must the bombs be? What is the critical mass and radius for each material?
2. What material would best serve as a tamper?
3. How pure would the uranium or plutonium have to be?
4. How much heat, light, and shock would be created in a nuclear explosion?
This work was very difficult, mainly because the materials (uranium and plutonium) whose properties they were trying to discover were not available in sufficient quantities that they could perform experiments on them. So it was the theorist’s job to calculate the proper way to build a bomb without actually having examined the material they were going to use. It was 6 months after the research had begun that the first sample of plutonium director was Hans Bethe, the head of the Theoretical Division. After Feynman’s arrived. It was so small that it was barely large enough to conduct one experiment.
     Feynman’s promotion, he was assigned to work on diffusion problems. He and Bethe would work on these complex mathematical problems together, each trying to outdo the other in mental math. They both developed amazing skill at doing complex problems in their heads, but this soon became obsolete with the advent of computers. Feynman was quite aware of computers at this time, and he realized their potential, so he devised primitive computing systems. He used mechanical calculators, instructions written on cards, and the wives of the Los Alamos staff to calculate faster. They worked it like an assembly line: one person would divide a number, then pass on the card, then the next would add or subtract and then pass it on. This system that Feynman organized was important in speeding up the theoretical work that had to be done.

Feynman’s Work on the QED

     On October 21, 1965, Feynman was notified by telefax that he had won the Nobel Prize for physics, along with Schwinger and Tomonaga. The award was given to him for his work on the theory of quantum electrodynamics. Basically, the QED explains the way that electrons interact with each other through the electromagnetic force, which is propagated through the photon.  The Q...

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