First Thing.
You all know about the 100 things challenge? Basically it's a way of increasing traffic to the sadly dying lj community, you do 100 posts on a certain subject. It can be any subject you want but you have to do 100 posts on it and tag them 100 posts. I don't know how well it'll rejuvinate lj in this 140 character world but I like the idea and I like lj so I'm doing it.
{Take the 100 Things challenge!}
I've thought long and hard about what to post about, what of my interests could I do 100 posts on? I was thinking something cool and geeky about films or TV or something but I can never think of things when I want to so that's out. I've decided that it'd be nice to attempt some entertaining education, so I'm going for 100 Scientists, a bit about them and how fucking incredible they were in an easy to understand and (hopefully) amusing way. There will be no order to the Scientists.
To start with I thought I'd tell you a bit about the person in my profile picture (and who is likely to be my profile picture for all of these posts), a daunting task considering the sheer volume of important contributions Richard Feynman (1918-1988) made to physics. So I think it's best I start with the bongos:
(55 seconds long). That's some pretty epic bongo playing there, and not what you might expect from one of the worlds greatest physicists. This is a man who taught himself trigonometry, advanced algebra, infinite series, analytic geometry, and differential and integral calculus at the age of fifteen. This is a man whose second marriage failed because "He begins working calculus problems in his head as soon as he awakens. He did calculus while driving in his car, while sitting in the living room, and while lying in bed at night." He also uses a titty bar as his second office, making sketches or writing physics equations on paper placemats. It's this strange dichotomy between the incredibly analytical physicist and the adventurous boisterous artist that makes Feynman such an interesting man.
So why was he such an important figure in the world of science? Well for on he was perhaps the greatest ever populariser of science. Sure 'A Brief History of Time' is a massive best seller but how many layman really understood it? Yes Brian Cox makes entertaining and passionate science programmes but how deeply into the science does he go? Richard was an amazing lecturer and writer, working in the still relatively new and completely counter-intuitive realm of quantum mechanics he somehow made bizarre concepts understandable - even though many mathematicians still had trouble understanding it in any other way than pure numbers. He loved to teach and made it a matter of moral principle to make sure quantum theory was accessible, his guiding principle was that if a topic could not be explained in a freshman lecture, it was not yet fully understood. He also invented what are now known as 'Feynman diagrams' which are a pictoral way of describing the bizarre and complex behaviour of subatomic particles, without which I'm sure many people would have flunked their degree and is now fundamental in work with string theory and M-theory. So for example this:
Could be expressed like this:
Makes a difference right?!
His real masterpiece though was surely his part in the developing of Quantum Electrodynamic theory (QED) for which he won the 1965 Nobel Prize for with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga. QED mathematically describes all phenomena involving electrically charged particles interacting by means of exchange of photons. It was the first time a theory achieved full agreement between quantum mechanics and special relativity, two undeniably accurate descriptions of our universe that seemed to be alarmingly at odds with each other. And then of course there's his work on superfluidity, weak decay, quantum gravity, variational perturbation theory, parallel computing and the challenger disaster investigation.
Richard Feynman - Bongo Genius.
{Take the 100 Things challenge!}
I've thought long and hard about what to post about, what of my interests could I do 100 posts on? I was thinking something cool and geeky about films or TV or something but I can never think of things when I want to so that's out. I've decided that it'd be nice to attempt some entertaining education, so I'm going for 100 Scientists, a bit about them and how fucking incredible they were in an easy to understand and (hopefully) amusing way. There will be no order to the Scientists.
To start with I thought I'd tell you a bit about the person in my profile picture (and who is likely to be my profile picture for all of these posts), a daunting task considering the sheer volume of important contributions Richard Feynman (1918-1988) made to physics. So I think it's best I start with the bongos:
Click to view(55 seconds long). That's some pretty epic bongo playing there, and not what you might expect from one of the worlds greatest physicists. This is a man who taught himself trigonometry, advanced algebra, infinite series, analytic geometry, and differential and integral calculus at the age of fifteen. This is a man whose second marriage failed because "He begins working calculus problems in his head as soon as he awakens. He did calculus while driving in his car, while sitting in the living room, and while lying in bed at night." He also uses a titty bar as his second office, making sketches or writing physics equations on paper placemats. It's this strange dichotomy between the incredibly analytical physicist and the adventurous boisterous artist that makes Feynman such an interesting man.
So why was he such an important figure in the world of science? Well for on he was perhaps the greatest ever populariser of science. Sure 'A Brief History of Time' is a massive best seller but how many layman really understood it? Yes Brian Cox makes entertaining and passionate science programmes but how deeply into the science does he go? Richard was an amazing lecturer and writer, working in the still relatively new and completely counter-intuitive realm of quantum mechanics he somehow made bizarre concepts understandable - even though many mathematicians still had trouble understanding it in any other way than pure numbers. He loved to teach and made it a matter of moral principle to make sure quantum theory was accessible, his guiding principle was that if a topic could not be explained in a freshman lecture, it was not yet fully understood. He also invented what are now known as 'Feynman diagrams' which are a pictoral way of describing the bizarre and complex behaviour of subatomic particles, without which I'm sure many people would have flunked their degree and is now fundamental in work with string theory and M-theory. So for example this:
Could be expressed like this:
Makes a difference right?!
His real masterpiece though was surely his part in the developing of Quantum Electrodynamic theory (QED) for which he won the 1965 Nobel Prize for with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga. QED mathematically describes all phenomena involving electrically charged particles interacting by means of exchange of photons. It was the first time a theory achieved full agreement between quantum mechanics and special relativity, two undeniably accurate descriptions of our universe that seemed to be alarmingly at odds with each other. And then of course there's his work on superfluidity, weak decay, quantum gravity, variational perturbation theory, parallel computing and the challenger disaster investigation.
Richard Feynman - Bongo Genius.