"The adventure of our science of physics is a perpetual attempt to recognize that the different aspects of nature are really different aspects of the same thing." --Richard Feynman

Richard Feynman was born May 11, 1918 in Queens New York, where he and his family lived in a modest middle-class neighborhood. By the age of fifteen, Feynman had already learned and mastered differential and integral calculus. He was accepted into MIT in 1936 and there he acceled in physics and other scientific subjects. He went on to Princeton as a Graduate but when the Manhattan project began he was asked, at the age of 24, to join the Los Alamos theoretical division. But before going he married his high school sweetheart, Arlene Greenbaum, who was sick with tuberculosis. When Feynman joined the project, the head of the theoretical division, Hans Bethe (pronounced bay-tah) became somewhat of a mentor to Feynman, and the two developed a long lasting friendship. Feynman and Bethe were a good team; Feynman was fast, but made mistakes, and Bethe was slower because he double checked everything. One of Feynman's talents was his speed in solving equations in his head, and finding ways to take large and complex equations and split them into smaller and more manageable pieces. This was very useful with many of the massive formulas used in the project, but even the split up equations were time consuming. Another one of Feynman's tasks was to find the amount of fissionable material it would take for the bomb to explode. Feynman was not just a theoretical physicist at Los Alamos, he was also the life of the party at many of the social events, where he joked and made many friends.

When his wife died (of tuberculosis) and the project ended in 1945, Feynman experienced a depression, but he quickly got his mind working on other things. He went to work on his thesis with Hans Bethe, to solve the mysteries of Quantum Electro Dynamics. To help solve the incredibly complex equations, which took weeks for a computer to solve, Feynman invented "Feynman Diagrams" for theoretical physics, for which he won a Nobel prize in 1965. In 1950, Feynman began teaching at the California Institute of Technology and in 1952 he remarried. He took up painting soon after, which never made a lot of money for him, but he didn't care because it was just a hobby. He stayed out the public eye for many years until in 1985 when he was asked to help find out why the challenger spaceship had exploded. He surprised NASA and the nation when he explained the it was the faulty O- rings on the ship that caused the problem. In 1988 he died from a long bout with cancer.

A Feynman Diagram