Les Prix Nobel En 1965: The Development of the Space-Time View of Quantum Elektrodynamics Nobel Lecture

FEYNMAN, RICHARD P.

Published by The Nobel Foundation, Stockholm, 1966

About this Item

EXTREMELY RARE SIGNED FIRST EDITION OFFPRINT OF FEYNMAN S NOBEL PRIZE LECTURE. Feynman fancied himself a man who could see through the fluff. When asked by the BBC whether his findings deserved a Nobel Prize, Feynman classically responded: "I ve already got the prize. The prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out, I don t believe in honors." This attitude what Feynman himself coined, "a disrespect for the respectable," was a product of his upbringing. As a young boy, Feynman s father, a uniform salesman, would often attempt to teach the young Feynman a lesson, opening a photo in the New York Times and showing Feynman an image of the Pope or a politician, surrounded by bowing admirers. He would then ask Feynman what made the Pope different from the ordinary people around him. The answer, his father explained, was in the man's uniform, his title, and his prizes. [Sykes, "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out"]. This early disrespect for the respectable was intertwined with Feynman's approach to knowledge. He detested false certainty: those who used big words without knowing their meanings, or theorized without understanding basic principles. This attitude is reflected in his scientific approach. Colleagues recalled how, when they presented theories to him, Feynman would make them explain their ideas from the ground up. Starting with elementary questions, he would force them to build their arguments from the simplest foundations. Inevitably, at some point, a hole in the theory would appear revealed by Feynman s method of thinking from bedrock knowledge [Sykes; Leighton]. Perhaps Feynman disliked awards because he understood them as working as an opposite process: creating differences not on bedrock, but on the basis of status conferred by, what he saw as, detached ceremonies in far off lands. It s also difficult to gauge if this attitude was wholly genuine. Feynman was a showman. Stories abound of Feynman s muted reaction to the Nobel. When awoken by a reporter at 3:00 AM, told of his award, and asked if he was pleased, Feynman responded, "I could have found out later in the morning." When, at a more reasonable hour, a reporter asked if there was a simple explanation of what he had discovered, Feynman who never lacked for words responded that, "there certainly must be… but I don t know what it is"[Douglas Smith]. For all of his public lack of concern in titles and distinction, by the time of his 1965 Nobel ceremony, Feynman seemed to have experienced a shift. In his acceptance speech, Feynman remained deeply critical of false knowledge. But he also expressed that honors "can generate good feeling, even love among men, even in lands far beyond [their] own." As Feynman identified it, after the joy of discovery, comes a more personal occurrence: "the prize, and a deluge of messages from friends, from relatives, from students, from former teachers, from scientific colleagues, from total strangers….The prize was a signal to permit them to express and me to learn about their feelings. Each joy, though transient still, repeated in so many places, amounts to a considerable sum of human happiness. And each note of affection, released thus one upon another, has permitted me to realize a depth of love for my friends and acquaintances, which I had never felt so poignantly before." As part of his Nobel acceptance, Feynman delivered a much-awaited lecture on his winning research, titled "The Development of the Space-Time View of Quantum Electrodynamics". Perhaps unsurprisingly, Feynman took a personal tone in this address, tracing his personal and intellectual relationship with Quantum Electrodynamics (QED). Feynman reflected that, as an undergraduate at MIT, he had been most inspired by reading German-Jewish Physicist Walter Heitler, and English Physicist and Mathematician Paul Dirac. What stood out most to him in Dirac s texts were not his calculations but Dirac s motions to the theory s incompleteness. This incompleteness, Feynman l.

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: Les Prix Nobel En 1965: The Development of the Space-Time View of Quantum Elektrodynamics Nobel Lecture
• Publisher: The Nobel Foundation, Stockholm
• Publication Date: 1966
• Binding: Original Wrappers
• Edition: First Edition.
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)
• Seller catalogs:
  • Literature
  • History, Culture & Ideas
  • Science & Technology