'Los Alamos from Below' -- recollections by Feynman

[AdamSmith]

Hijacking my Feynman thread over to The Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, here is some writing about Oppie that I came across just now in googling for an image of him and Feynman together. What I had never read before was Bethe's particular comments about Oppenheimer here.

Oppenheimer in 1947 at the Shelter Island conference where theoretical physicists gathered to discuss the state of their field in the aftermath of World War II. From left to right, standing, are: W. Lamb, K.K. Darrow, Victor Weisskopf, George E. Uhlenbeck, Robert E. Marshak, Julian Schwinger, and David Bohm. From left to right, seated are: J. Robert Oppenheimer (holding pipe), Abraham Pais, Richard P. Feynman (seated, with pen in hand), and Herman Feshbach

In 1921, Oppenheimer graduated from the Ethical Culture School of New York at the top of his class. At Harvard, Oppenheimer studied mathematics and science, philosophy and Eastern religion, and French and English literature. He was admitted to graduate standing in physics in his first year as an undergraduate on the basis of independent study. During a course on thermodynamics taught by Percy Bridgman, Higgins University Professor of Physics at Harvard, Oppenheimer was introduced to experimental physics, which quickly caught his attention. He graduated summa cum laude in 1925 and afterwards went to Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory as research assistant to J. J. Thomson. Uninspired by routine laboratory work, he went to the University of Göttingen, in Germany, to study quantum physics. Oppenheimer met and studied with some of the day's most prominent figures, including Max Born and Niels Bohr. In 1927, Oppenheimer received his doctorate, and in the same year, he worked with Born on the structure of molecules, producing the Born-Oppenheimer Approximation. Subsequently, he traveled from one prominent center of physics to another: Harvard, California Institute of Technology, Leyden, and Zurich. In 1929, he received offers to teach at Caltech and the University of California at Berkeley. Accepting both, he divided his time between Pasadena and Berkeley, attracting his own circle of brilliant young physics students.

“His lectures were a great experience, for experimental as well as theoretical physicists,” commented the late physicist Hans Bethe (1906–2005), who would later work with Oppenheimer at Los Alamos. “In addition to a superb literary style, he brought to them a degree of sophistication in physics previously unknown in the United States. Here was a man who obviously understood all the deep secrets of quantum mechanics, and yet made it clear that the most important questions were unanswered. His earnestness and deep involvement gave his research students the same sense of challenge. He never gave his students the easy and superficial answers but trained them to appreciate and work on the deep problems.”

https://www.ias.edu/oppenheimer-legacy

[AdamSmith]

Physicist Paul Dirac Is 'The Strangest Man'

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113435529

[AdamSmith]

They met in the autumn of 1961 at the Solvay meeting. In the book The Strangest Man by Graham Farmelo, both of them, according to the author, had the following Pinter-esque exchanges:

Feynman:         I am Feynman.
Dirac:               I am Dirac. [Silence]
Feynman:         (Admiringly) It must have been wonderful to be the discoverer of that equation.
Dirac:               That was a long time ago. [Pause]
                        (Editor’s Note: The equation was formulated in 1928)
Dirac:               What are you working on?
Feynman:         Mesons.
Dirac:               Are you trying to discover an equation for them?
Feynman:         It is very hard.
Dirac:               (Concluding) One must try.

Read more: http://www.therakyatpost.com/columnists/2014/11/11/dirac-vs-feynman-two-different-physicists/#ixzz4FNIYFU5q

[AdamSmith]

• When I was a young man, Dirac was my hero. He made a breakthrough, a new method of doing physics. He had the courage to simply guess at the form of an equation, the equation we now call the Dirac equation, and to try to interpret it afterwards. Maxwell in his day got his equations, but only in an enormous mass of 'gear wheels' and so forth.
  • Richard Feynman, "The Reason for Antiparticles"

[AdamSmith]

"There are children playing in the streets who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago."

 

Oppenheimer