Feynman suspected that despite NASA's claims, the O-rings were unsuitable at low temperatures and lost their resilience when cold, thus failing to expand and maintain a tight seal when rocket pressure distorted the structure of the solid fuel booster.

In 1985, Tom Newman, a Stanford graduate student, successfully reduced the first paragraph of A Tale of Two Cities by 1 / 25, 000, and collected the second Feynman prize.

Although Richard Feynman noted that a simplistic interpretation of the relativistic Dirac equation runs into problems with electron orbitals at Z > 1 / α = 137, suggesting that neutral atoms cannot exist beyond untriseptium, and that a periodic table of elements based on electron orbitals therefore breaks down at this point, a more rigorous analysis calculates the limit to be Z ≈ 173, but also that this limit would not actually spell the end of the periodic table.

Feynman continued to investigate the lack of communication between NASA's management and its engineers, and was struck by management's claim that the risk of catastrophic malfunction on the shuttle was 1 in 10 < sup > 5 </ sup >; i. e., 1 in 100, 000.

Investigating the claim further, Feynman discovered that the 1 in 10 < sup > 5 </ sup > figure was stating what they claimed that the failure rate ought to be, given that it was a manned vehicle, and working backwards to generate the failure rate of components.

Secondly, Feynman was bothered not just by this sloppy science but by the fact that NASA claimed that the risk of catastrophic failure was " necessarily " 1 in 10 < sup > 5 </ sup >.

Feynman found that the bulk of the engineers ' estimates fell between 1 in 50 and 1 in 100.

Feynman was not uncomfortable with the concept of a 1 / 100 risk factor, but felt strongly that the recruitment of laypeople required an honest portrayal of the true risk involved.

Feynman's suspicions were corroborated by General Kutyna, also on the commission, who cunningly provided Feynman with a broad hint by asking about the effect of cold on O-ring seals after mentioning that the temperature on the day of the launch was far lower than had been the case with previous launches: below freezing at 28 or 29 Fahrenheit (− 2. 2 to − 1. 6 ° C ); previously, the coldest launch had been at 53 ° F ( 12 ° C ).

Feynman did the first quantitative analysis of the device in 1962 using the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution, showing that if the temperature of the paddle T < sub > 1 </ sub > was greater than the temperature of the ratchet T < sub > 2 </ sub >, it would function as a heat engine, but if T < sub > 1 </ sub > = T < sub > 2 </ sub > there would be no net motion of the paddle.

* In 1959, Richard Feynman bet $ 1, 000 ( equivalent to about $ in present day terms ) that no-one could construct a motor no bigger than 1 / 64 of an inch on a side.

To make the connection to diagramatical techniques ( like Feynman diagrams ) clearer, it's often convenient to split the action S as S = 1 / 2 D < sup >− 1 </ sup >< sub > ij </ sub > φ < sup > i </ sup > φ < sup > j </ sup >+ S < sub > int </ sub > where the first term is the quadratic part and D < sup >− 1 </ sup > is an invertible symmetric ( antisymmetric for fermions ) covariant tensor of rank two in the deWitt notation whose inverse, D is called the bare propagator and S < sub > int </ sub > is the " interaction action ".

Untriseptium, element 137, is sometimes called feynmanium ( symbol Fy ) because Richard Feynman noted that a simplistic interpretation of the relativistic Dirac equation runs into problems with electron orbitals at Z > 1 / α = 137, suggesting that neutral atoms cannot exist beyond untriseptium, and that a periodic table of elements based on electron orbitals therefore breaks down at this point.

* Feynman, R. P., Leighton and Sands ( 1970 ) The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Volume 1, Addison Wesley Longman, ISBN 0-201-02115-3.

Untriseptium, element 137, is sometimes called feynmanium ( symbol Fy ) because Richard Feynman noted that a simplistic interpretation of the relativistic Dirac equation runs into problems with electron orbitals at Z > 1 / α = 137, suggesting that neutral atoms cannot exist beyond untriseptium, and that a periodic table of elements based on electron orbitals therefore breaks down at this point.

* Feynman R. P. Progress in Low Temperature Physics Vol. 1, edited by C. Gorter ( North Holland, Amsterdam ) 1955.

In 1965 Richard Feynman examined the Fatio / Lesage mechanism, primarily as an example of an attempt to explain a " complicated " physical law ( in this case, Newton's inverse-square law of gravity ) in terms of simpler primitive operations without the use of complex mathematics, and also as an example of a failed theory.

To denote a failure in any criterion is to show how it " disagrees with experiment " ( Feynman ) and / or " does not work " ( Hocking ).

Just as Z is interpreted as the generating functional ( aka characteristic function ( al )/ moment-generating function ( al ) of the probability distribution function ( al ) e < sup >− S </ sup >/ Z ) of the time ordered VEVs / Schwinger function ( aka moments ) ( see path integral formulation ), E ( a. k. a. the second characteristic function ( al )/ cumulant-generating function ( al )) is the generator of " connected " time ordered VEVs / connected Schwinger functions ( i. e. the cumulants ) where connected here is interpreted in the sense of the cluster decomposition theorem which means that these functions approach zero at large spacelike separations, or in approximations using Feynman diagrams, connected components of the graph.

Thanks to the somewhat brute-force, clanky and heuristic methods of Feynman, and the elegant and abstract methods of Tomonaga / Schwinger, from the period of early renormalization, we do have the modern theory of quantum electrodynamics ( QED ).

The Foresight Institute has several running prizes, including the annual Feynman Prizes given in experimental and theory categories, and the $ 250, 000 Feynman Grand Prize for demonstrating two molecular machines capable of nanoscale positional accuracy and computation.

As the figure itself was beyond belief, Feynman questioned exactly what " necessarily " meant in this context — did it mean that the figure followed logically from other calculations, or did it reflect NASA management's desire to make the numbers fit?

One of the editors, David L. Goodstein, stated that at first without the photographs, it was very hard to figure out what diagrams he was referring to in the audiotapes, but a later finding of his own private lecture notes made it possible to understand completely the logical framework with which Feynman delivered the lecture.

In the 1950s – 1970s, Caltech was the home of Murray Gell-Mann and Richard Feynman, whose work was central to the establishment of the Standard Model of particle physics.

Feynman was also widely known outside the physics community as an exceptional teacher and colorful, unconventional character.

Dyson was the first person ( besides Feynman ) to appreciate the power of Feynman diagrams, and his 1949 paper ( written in 1948 ) was the first paper using them.

The scheme is named for its inventor, Nobel Prize-winning American physicist Richard Feynman, and was first introduced in 1948.

During the Manhattan project, future Nobel laureate Richard Feynman was the supervisor of human computers who understood the use of differential equations which were being solved for the war effort.

This has been demonstrated in the famous Lamb-Retherford experiment and was the starting point for the development of the theory of Quantum electrodynamics ( which is able to deal with these vacuum fluctuations and employs the famous Feynman diagrams for approximations using perturbation theory ).

Toumey found that the published versions of Feynman ’ s talk had a negligible influence in the twenty years after it was first published, as measured by citations in the scientific literature, and not much more influence in the decade after the Scanning Tunneling Microscope was invented in 1981.

There was also a version of this talk, with the same name, that Feynman gave to high school students.

Feynman was also known for his talks in low level science classes.

The field of quantum computing was first introduced by Richard Feynman in 1982.

Based on Bethe's intuition and fundamental papers on the subject by Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, Julian Schwinger, Richard Feynman and Freeman Dyson, it was finally possible to get fully covariant formulations that were finite at any order in a perturbation series of quantum electrodynamics.

Even though renormalization works very well in practice, Feynman was never entirely comfortable with its mathematical validity, even referring to renormalization as a " shell game " and " hocus pocus ".

In 2009, Freitas was awarded the Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology for Theory.

As Feynman noted, an idea or theory "... could never be proved right, because tomorrow's experiment might succeed in proving wrong what you thought was right.

Consequently, it was thought a small number of people in the world, at that time, could fully understand the theory in detail, but this was discredited by Richard Feynman on video recording available on YouTube.

:(" Richard Feynman was annoyed by an astronomer friend who was boasting about the practicability of his

The Copenhagen interpretation was traditionally the most popular among physicists, next to a purely instrumentalist position that denies any need for explanation ( a view expressed in David Mermin's famous quote " shut up and calculate ", often misattributed to Richard Feynman.

The metaphorical use of " cargo cult " was popularized by physicist Richard Feynman at a 1974 Caltech commencement speech, which later became a chapter in his book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman !, where he coined the phrase " cargo cult science " to describe science that had some of the trappings of real science ( such as publication in scientific journals ) but lacked a basis in honest experimentation.