Richard Feynman

Portrait of Richard Feynman

The Great Explainer · Nobel Laureate · Theoretical Physicist · 1918–1988

Nobel Prize physicist, bongo player, safe-cracker, and the greatest science communicator of the 20th century.

Explore the life of Feynman — five chapters

The Difference Between Knowing the Name and Knowing the Thing — A father's teaching in Queens
Los Alamos — Safecracking, computation, and a telegram
Diagrams and the Nobel Prize — Making the infinities go away
The Teacher — The Lectures, Brazil, and the trouble with cargo cults
A Glass of Ice Water — The Challenger inquiry and a last lesson

Richard Feynman has a genuine claim on 2 lessons of the Pearson Edexcel International GCSE science course built into Incandio:

Conservation of Momentum — Physics: Feynman spent a good deal of his teaching life on precisely the question this page raises and rarely answers: what kind of statement is a conservation law? His answer was that it is a number you can compute before and after, which comes out the same, and that this is strange because nothing visibly carries the number across — objects deform, energy turns into heat, and yet the total is untouched. He also insisted that conservation laws are the most reliable things in physics, surviving revolutions that destroyed the theories they were first found in.
Voltage as Energy per Charge — Physics: This page defines voltage in terms of energy, which invites the obvious question, and Feynman is almost the only physicist famous for answering it honestly: we have no knowledge of what energy is. He taught it with a parable about a child's building blocks that always number twenty-eight however cleverly they are hidden — energy is a number you can compute that comes out the same, and the fact that such a number exists is the discovery. For a learner being asked to picture joules riding on coulombs, that is the necessary corrective.