Richard Feynman

Amazing guy.

I have had his 3 volume set "Lectures on Physics" on my bookshelf since 1980.

He explains all the theories and why each one doesn't work, for gravity. This lead to my theory on gravity, which then expanded naturally to a grand unification theory.

I sure wish I could have met him when he was alive.

Last Edited by JustmeTX on 12/12/2021 11:28 PM

Very Nice.

I just 'discovered' him last night :)

started reading 'Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!' and had to learn more about this man.

Fantastic mind able to state complex ideas in easy to understand pieces. Fun!

Funny thing about Feynman is that when his IQ was tested it was comparatively low, lower than most university graduates.

Maybe he had a bad day or maybe IQ is actually over valued.

At any rate, he was a high achiever and a fascinating man.

for morning crew

one last bump

He was full of shit, pushing relativistic BS.

is that why he won the Nobel Prize in Physics?

When they brought Feynman to Los Alamos, they gave him a tour of the operation in progress to enrich the uranium.
They went into this underground sort of maze. And at the end of various tunnels, there was a pile of enriched uranium.

The piles of uranium had to be kept apart sufficiently to prevent a spontaneous runaway fission reaction (critical mass).

the people that laid out the tunnel system did something wrong. Toward the end of the tour Feynman mentions that they are very close to critical mass. He had tracked in his head, all of the twists and turns they had taken in the underground labyrinth, and calculated IN HIS HEAD the mass of each pile, the neutrons emitted from each pile, and the interaction of the neutrons from the piles that he located in his head. He then calculated in his head that they were something like 5% away from critical mass.

People just assumed once they went down a tunnel a ways, it was isolated from the other piles.
This genius ran a 3D model in his head, and did some rather fancy mathematics to determine the danger.

If Feynman had been a week later to join the team at Los Alamos, the first nuclear detonation would have been in their work area.

He had memorized the log and trig tables, which he said then made it easy to do the calculations in his head.

People have gifts in different areas. Feynman was an odd fellow. He would think of the things nobody else could think of. And he would perhaps be deficient in some more mundane areas, or in the wild side of theoretical physics.

SO while Einstein and Bohr could likely make him look like an amateur in the theoretical science area, when it came to mathematics and I would say problem solving, Feynman had no equal. And he had the curiosity to study things that most people would ignore. He would spend a day watching ants to figure out why they did everything they did. Because he thought that was fun. And once he explained why he thought it was fun, you had to agree with him.

Well, I never met the guy, but I read a couple goofy books he wrote and his lectures on physics.

they don't really make IQ tests that work on the super intellects of this world. Einstein flunked math if I am not mistaken, but he developed the theories needed to make a bomb that would damn near crack the planet in half, and to generate almost free power. Pretty damn good for a math flunky.

And Feynman might not be able to close his eyes and develop an entire new field of understanding like Einstein, but whatever he did to help, was essential to nuclear science development. Incredible math skills and practical problem solving would be my assessment of his areas of genius.

Last Edited by JustmeTX on 12/13/2021 04:15 PM

Thanks.


Looks like just recently (2013), a similar concern arose and they shut the place down for 4 years!

Lab PF-4 Almost went critical! How have we have become such a nation of idiots?

[link to www.science.org (secure)]

"Neile Miller, who was then the acting head of the National Nuclear Security Administration in Washington, says those experts specifically told her that Los Alamos didn't have enough personnel who knew how to handle plutonium so it didn't accidentally go "critical" and start an uncontrolled chain reaction.

Such chain reactions generate intense bursts of deadly radiation, and over the last half-century have claimed nearly two dozen lives. The precise consequences, Miller said in a recent interview, "did not need an explanation. You don't want an accident involving criticality and plutonium." Indeed, Miller said, criticality "is one of those trigger words" that immediately gets the attention of those responsible for preventing a nuclear weapons disaster."

Last Edited by JustmeTX on 12/14/2021 01:53 AM

What do you care what other people think