.What would be your message?
If, in some cataclysm, all scientific knowledge were destroyed but we had the opportunity to pass on a single sentence to the next generations of creatures, what should that sentence be?
That is the question that physicist Richard Feynman posed on the shoulders of some undergraduate students one day in 1961, in one of his legendary lectures given at the California Institute of Technology or Caltech.
If you are taking pity on the poor students, put aside the pity.
Not only did Feynman himself answer the question immediately, but they were fortunate enough to stand before who is widely regarded as the most influential physicist since Albert Einstein.
On top of that, he was the most charismatic, fun and irreverent teacher they could have had.
In short, one of the most extraordinary scientists of the 20th century and someone to whom it hurts to compare.
He was born in 1918, during the Depression, into a working class family outside of New York, USA and, at age 17, he won a math contest in which his talent in that subject was clear .
That same year, he went to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, and then moved to Princeton, achieving a top score on the mathematics and physics entrance exam, an unprecedented feat.
But soon after, he received sad news: Arline Greenbaum, his girlfriend, had tuberculosis, a disease for which there was no cure at the time. Feynman decided to marry her so that he could take care of her.
Science Photo LibraryRichard and Arline married in 1942, when he was 24 years old and she, 22, under the shadow of a disease that was incurable at the time.
Soon, another threat loomed over the couple: A few months before Richard and Arline were married, the United States was embroiled in World War II, after the Pearl Harbor bombing.
Feynman was asked to join a top-secret project based at a government laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Code-named Manhattan, their goal was to build an atomic bomb.
Germany was the intellectual center of theoretical physics and we had to make sure that they did not rule the world. I felt like I should do it to protect civilizationFeynman said.
Extraordinary physicists of the stature of Julius Robert Oppenheimer, Niels Bohr, and Enrico Fermi combined their intellectual abilities, but the challenge of developing an atomic bomb so quickly was a titanic task.
A fundamental problem was the large volume of calculations required. Without computers, everything had to be done manually, greatly hampering progress.
Science Photo LibraryAs part of the Manhattan Project, Feynman made human computer equipment work at an inhuman pace.
Feynman devised a way to do calculations in parallel, reducing problem solving time exponentially.
He became a key member of the team, but he also made a name for himself by playing tricks like opening locks behind which top-secret documents were kept just to show that he could.
When he was in Los lamos, he received the sad news that his wife, who was confined to a nearby sanitarium, died.
She was 25 years old. He, 27 and a broken heart.
Shortly after, he was forced to face the reality of what he had helped create.
.The devastation left behind by the bomb he had helped create.
The bomb exploded over the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. It killed more than 80,000 people. Three days later, a second bomb was detonated, in Nagasaki.
Feynman was deeply disturbed to have contributed to the deaths of so many.
In the months after the double trauma, was plunged into a dark depression.
In the fall of 1945, Feynman was invited to become a professor in the Physics Department at Cornell University.
He was still shocked by the events of that summer, but reflected and remembered that I used to enjoy physics and mathematics because I played with them, so I decided that I was going to do things just for fun.
Science Photo LibraryHaving fun was a priority.
While Feynman was rediscovering the fun in physics, science was in crisis.
New discoveries about atoms had caused confusion in physics.
The old assumptions about the world were wrong and there was a new problem area called Quantum Mechanics.
Quantum mechanics, in many ways, was the most profound psychological shock that physicists have had in all of history.
Isaac Newton was not right: you can know everything there is to know about the world, and yet you cannot predict with perfect precision what will happen next.
Quantum mechanics had revealed the problems of anticipating the behavior of atoms and their electromagnetic forces.
And since they are the fundamental building blocks of nature, everything else was also in doubt.
.Electromagnetism is one of the four fundamental forces of the known universe and it is everywhere.
Think about it: everything that happens around you, apart from gravity, is due to electromagnetism.
When two atoms come together to form a molecule, that is electromagnetism, so all chemistry is electromagnetism. And if all chemistry is electromagnetism, then all biology is electromagnetism.
Literally everything around us is a manifestation of electromagnetism in one way or another.
To greatiwe show features
To try to make sense of electromagnetism and subatomic matter, a new field called quantum electrodynamics or QED, for its acronym in English.
The problem was that while sometimes it seemed to work, other times it didnt make any sense. He was confusing the smartest physicists on the planet, even QEDs father Paul Dirac.
Science Photo LibraryEnglish theoretical physicist Paul Dirac (left) conversing with Feynman in 1962 at the International Conference on Relativistic Theories of Gravitation in Warsaw, Poland. Dirac and Feynman won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933 and 1965, respectively.
Feynman had read a book by Dirac, describing problems that no one knew how to solve.
I didnt understand the book very well. But there, in the last paragraph of the book, it said: Some new ideas are needed hereso I started thinking of new ideas, Feynman recalled in an interview.
Typically, Feynman approached the matter in an unconventional way: with drawings.
He found a pictorial way of thinking, inventing a brilliant way to bypass the complicated calculations necessary for QED.
The result were Feynman diagrams, which put the finishing touches on QED, the most numerically accurate physical theory ever invented.
The diagrams turned out to be so useful that today they are applied in completely different fields to particle physics, such as calculating the evolution of galaxies and large-scale structure in the Universe.
Drawing, in fact, would later become another of his hobbies, in addition to playing bongos, which for him were what the violin for Einstein and the piano for Werner Heisenberg.
He decided to learn to draw in his fourth decade of life, helped by an artist friend, and was so enthusiastic that he adopted a topless bar as his secondary office, where he sketched the girls and physics equations.
But it was the QED related drawings that made him deserving of the Nobel Prize in Physics, which he shared with Julian Schwinger and Shinichiro Tomonaga, in 1965.
.Although he accepted the Nobel Prize and had fun at the gala dancing with Gweneth Howarth, his third wife and mother of their two children, Feynman always said that the true award was the pleasure of discovery and seeing that it is useful to other people.
Among those who live in the quantum world, Feynman is also known for works that amaze us, such as the theory of quantum electrodynamics and the physics of superfluidity of subcooled liquid helium.
Let us stay with knowing that he was one of the pioneers in the field of quantum computing and that introduced the concept of nanotechnology.
And his involvement in 1986, when he was already fatally ill, in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster investigation, when he revealed what NASA was reluctant to accept: the cause of the ships disintegration 73 seconds after its launch put him in the center of public attention.
The phrase with which he summarized his conclusions became famous: For a successful technology, reality must prevail over public relations, since you cant fool nature
But it was his solution to another problem related to physics, this time in university classrooms, that would reveal his gift for spreading the science that would make him famous in the outside world.
In the early 1960s, Caltech was struggling as it failed to attract students to physics classes. Looking for ways to get them excited about the subject, they asked Feynman to redo the curriculum.
His work was a series of lectures that were so engaging that they were edited and published under the title The Feynman Lectures of Physics, one of the most popular physics books in history.
It was in the first of those classes that, after confirming that if they wanted to be physicists, they would have a lot to study (200 years on the fastest developing field of knowledge that exists) and warn them that it would take many more years to learn it (Theyll have to go to graduate school!), He wondered where to start and asked them that question.
But, What was for Feynman the statement that would contain the most information in the fewest words?
BBCCaltech made all of Feynmans legendary lectures available to the public on the website The Feynman Lectures on Physics http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/.
I think it is the atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact, or whatever you want to call it) that all things are made of atoms: small particles that move in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are within walking distance, but repelling when trying to press them against each other
Why?
In that single sentence there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if only a little imagination and thought is applied
If you know that all matter is made of atoms that are constantly moving, you can start to understand phenomena like temperature, pressure and electricity.
They all have to do with the speed at which the atoms are moving and how many and / or what parts of them are doing it.
ANDit can only lead you to discover, for example, the power of steam, the pressure of gases, weather patterns and inventing things like motors, telephones and electric light.
Science Photo LibraryWith his lively and lucid explanations, Feynman made abstract concepts tangible, and his warm presence inspired (and continues to inspire thanks to books and films) the interest and wonder of even the most science-averse.
The final part of his sentence, which refers to the way atoms interact with each other (attracting and repelling each other) reveals the chemistry to you.
Once you understand how Atoms come together to form molecules, you can do it to create antibiotics, vaccines, gasoline and air mixed together form an explosive mixture (combustion engines), batteries, asphalt, steel and even the essence of life: amino acids, carbohydrates, DNA.
For all that Feynman chose that phrase as a legacy for creatures to start again, after everything was lost (and to spark his students interest in physics).
Of course, that is not the only answer.
In fact, there are those who criticize it, such as neuroscientist Daniel Toker who pointed out in an article that strictly speaking, the atomic hypothesis turns out to be false, because according to the theory of the quantum field, a discipline in which Feynman played a key role in development, () subatomic particles are not actually particles, but simply local excitations of quantum fields.
Fortunately, science is not a dogma and as it develops it constantly throws up new possibilities.
Six decades later, the question remains intriguing. And the spirit of the second part of Feynmans answer, eternal.
It will always be urgent to bequeath to the new generations clues so that, with a little imagination and thought, they can discover the world.
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What is the most important phrase in all science according to the Nobel Prize for Physics Richard Feynman and why - Explica
