decided when i was asked to do this that what i really wanted to talk about was my friend richard feynman i was one of the fortunate few that really did get to know him and enjoyed his presence
and i 'm going to tell you the richard feynman that i knew i 'm sure there are other people here who could tell you about the richard feynman they knew and it would probably be a different richard feynman richard feynman was a very complex man he was a man of many many parts he was of course foremost a very very very great scientist
he was an actor you saw him act i also had the good fortune to be in those lectures up in the balcony
he was a drum player he was a teacher par excellence
the man had somehow a lot of room at the bottom and what i mean by that is a lot of room in my case i can 't speak for anybody else
and in fact we did sometimes do physics together we never published a paper together but we did have a lot of fun
i remember once he told me a story about a joke that the students played on him they took him i think it was for his birthday they took him for lunch they took him for lunch to a sandwich place in pasadena it may still exist i don 't know
celebrity sandwiches was their thing you could get a marilyn monroe sandwich you could get a humphrey bogart sandwich
the students went there in advance
and without skipping a beat at all he said well
i remember sometime during the eighty s the mid eighty s dick and i and sidney coleman would meet a couple of times up in san francisco at some very rich guy 's house up in san francisco for dinner
and the last time the rich guy invited us he also invited a couple of philosophers these guys were philosophers of mind
their specialty was the philosophy of consciousness
and they were full of all kinds of jargon i 'm trying to remember the words
can you build a machine that thinks like a human being that is conscious
but the amazing thing was feynman had to leave a little early he wasn 't feeling too well so he left a little bit early and sidney and i were left there with the two philosophers
and the amazing thing is these guys were flying they were so happy they had met the great man they had been instructed by the great man they had an enormousamount of fun having their faces shoved in the mud
dick he was my friend i did call him dick dick and i had a certain a little bit of a rapport i think it may have been a special rapport that he and i had we liked each other we liked the same kind of things i also liked the kind of intellectual macho games
sometimes i would win mostly he would win but we both enjoyed them
and dick became convinced at some point that he and i had some kind of similarity of personality i don 't think he was right i think the only point of similarity between us is we both like to talk about ourselves
but he was convinced of this and he was curious the man was incredibly curious and he wanted to understand what it was and why it was that there was this funny connection
and one day we were walking we were in france we were in la zouche we were up in the mountains one thousand nine hundred and seventy six we were up in the mountains and feynman said to me he said leonardo the reason he called me leonardo is because we were in europe and he was practicing his french
and i said well my real hero was my father he was a working man had a fifth grade education
he was a master mechanic and he taught me how to use tools he taught me all sorts of things about mechanical things he even taught me the pythagorean theorem he didn 't call it the hypotenuse he called it the shortcut distance and feynman 's eyes just opened up he went off like a light bulb
and he said he had had basically exactly the same relationship with his father in fact he had been convinced at one
time that to be a good
being dick he of course wanted to check this he wanted to go out and do an experiment so well he did he went out and did an experiment he asked all his friends that he thought were good physicists
was it your mom or your pop that influenced you and to a man they were all men to a man every single one of them said my mother
but he was very excited that he had finally met somebody who had the same experience with my father as he had with his father and for some time he was convinced this was the reason we got along so well i don 't know maybe who knows but let me tell you a little bit about feynman the physicist
most elementarysolution to a problem that was possible if it wasn 't possible you had to use something fancier but
in the one thousand nine hundred and fifty s people were trying to figure out how superfluid helium worked
there was a theory it was due to a russian mathematical physicist and it was a complicated theory i 'll tell you what that theory was soon enough it was a terriblycomplicated theory full of very difficult integrals and formulas and mathematics and so forth
and it sort of worked but it didn 't work very well the only way it worked is when the helium atoms were very very far apart the helium atoms had to be very far apart and unfortunately the helium atoms in liquid helium are right on top of each other
guided by a small number of simple principles the small number of simple principles were very very simple the first one was that when helium atoms touch each other they repel the implication of that is that the wave function has to go to zero it has to vanish when the helium atoms touch each other
the other fact is that the ground state the lowest energy state of a quantum system the wave function is always very smooth has the minimum number of wiggles
so he sat down and i imagine he had nothing more than a simple piece of paper and a pencil and he tried to write down and did write down the simplest function that he could think of which had the boundary conditions
the thing was that that simple thing that he wrote down explained everything that was known at the time about liquid helium and then some
i 've always wondered whether the professionals the real professional helium physicists were just a little bit embarrassed by this
they had their super powerful technique and they couldn 't do as well incidentally i 'll tell you what that super powerful technique was it was the technique of feynman diagrams
moving real fast because they 're moving real fast
relativity says the internal motions go very slow
the electron hits it suddenly it 's like taking a very sudden snapshot of the proton
what do you see you see a frozen bunch of partons they don 't move and because they don 't move during the course of the experiment you don 't have to worry about how they 're moving you don 't have to worry about the forces between them
you just get to think of it as a population of frozen partons
this was the key to analyzing these experiments extremelyeffective it really did somebody said the word revolution is a bad word i suppose it is so i won 't say revolution but it certainly evolved very very deeply our understanding of the proton and of particles beyond that
well i had some more that i was going to tell you about my connection with feynman what he was like but i see i have exactly half a minute so i think i 'll just finish up by saying
i actually don 't think feynman would have liked this event i think he would have said i don 't need this but
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