Author: Muon Ray
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Professor Lawrence Krauss presents "Quantum Man: Richard Feynman's Life in Science" at a talk at CERN, Geneva. Lawrence Krauss is Foundation Professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration and Director of the ASU Origins Project at Arizona State University. He is the only physicist to have received the highest awards from all 3 major US professional physics societies. Professor Krauss has over 300 academic publications, mainly in the field of Cosmology. His popular science publications include The Physics of Star Trek, Quintessence, and Atom, Quantum Man: Richard Feynman's Life in Science and, more recently, the widely acclaimed A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing, a book which is, in my opinion, the "A Brief History of Time" of this generation of science literature. One of the 3 winners of the 1965 Nobel prize in Physics for his work, Richard Feynman was an expert on quantum mechanics and developed the Path Integral formulation of Relativistic Quantum mechanics, used in Quantum Field Theory, he also interpreted the Born series of scattering amplitudes as vertices and Green's functions as propagators and incorporated these in his famous diagrams, the Feynman Diagrams . Feynman's genius was quickly seen when he worked on the Manhattan Project, where his pipelining technique of performing physics calculations could be considered the first instance of parallel processing using human "computers". Feynman developed nuclear weapon yield equations with another giant of quantum physics, Hans Bethe. The Bethe-Feynman Equation was a key component in deriving the more advanced nuclear weapon yield equations which are still considered restricted data by the United States Military. Feynman also worked on the fundamental quantised excitations in Liquid Helium leading to a correct model describing superfluidity using phonons, maxons and rotons to describe the various excitation curves. Other fields of work include the Feynman-Hellmann Theorem, which can relate the derivative of the total energy of any system to the expectation value of the derivative of the Hamiltonian under a single parameter, e.g volume. He also worked on the Rogers Commission report during the investigation of the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, where Feynman famously demonstrated how the Booster Rocket O-rings, which are elastic sealing joints, became less resilient and subject to seal failures at ice-cold temperatures by immersing a sample of the material in a glass of ice water- his high intelligence and independent way of looking at the world often made him "a real pain" in the eyes of other, less skilled, Commission members. Feynman's own investigation reveals a disconnect between NASA's engineers and executives that was far more striking than he expected. His interviews of NASA's high-ranking managers revealed startling misunderstandings of elementary concepts, such as safety procedures. Although Feynman got plenty of media coverage due to him being on the Commission, he was often told to stay quiet about NASA's more sinister secrets and tactics in space exploration. Feynman himself was an interesting man of science, as we shall soon see in this excellent talk,which has also been given to the Science Network, which is available on The Science Foundation's Channel.