but wholly rigorous approach to physics. Richard Feynman was one of the most celebrated and colourful US physicists and he played a crucial role in the development of quantum electrodynamics (the quantum field theory of the electromagnetic interaction), the theory of the weak interaction and many other branches of physics. From 1942 to 1945 Feynman worked on the atomic bomb project in Los Alamos.
After the Second World War he went to Cornell University, New York, working with Hans Bethe on quantum electrodynamics (QED) and developing his own way of describing the quantum process using what others have called Feynman diagrams, which furnish a notably simple way of tackling calculations in QED. He shared the 1965 Noble Prize for Physics with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, who independently produced their own versions of QED.
Another of Feynman's influential contributions was the 'path integral approach' to quantum mechanics, in which each quantum process is viewed as the sum over all its possible histories in space-time (analogous to least-time formulations of Newtonian mechanics). Three other examples of Feynman's publications illustrate the breadth of his contributions to physics: in the 1950s, he formulated a theory of superfluidity; in the 1960s, he published his extraordinarily influential undergraduate lectures at the California Institute of Technology; and, in the 1970s, he gave important insights into the structure of protons and neutrons (the parton model). In 1986 Feynman, usually averse to committee work, accepted President Reagan's request to join the team investigating the explosion of the Challenger Space Shuttle. In his final tour de force of science communication, he laid bare the shortcomings of the Shuttle's design to a huge television audience. Feynman will long be remembered as one of the century's greatest exponents of the intuitive but wholly rigorous approach to physics.
Copyright 1997, The Open University