"There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom: An Invitation to Enter a New Field of Physics" was a lecture given by physicist Richard Feynman at the annual American Physical Society meeting at Caltech on December 29, 1959. Feynman considered the possibility of direct manipulation of individual atoms as a more powerful form of synthetic chemistry than those used at the time. Although versions of the talk were reprinted in a few popular magazines, it went largely unnoticed and did not inspire the conceptual beginnings of the field. Beginning in the 1980s, nanotechnology advocates cited it to establish the scientific credibility of their work.
Richard Phillips Feynman ForMemRS was an American theoretical physicist, known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as his work in particle physics for which he proposed the parton model. For contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 jointly with Julian Schwinger and Shin'ichirō Tomonaga.
Cargo cult science is a form of pseudoscience in which an imagined hypothesis is offered after the fact for some observed phenomenon, and further occurrences of the phenomenon are deemed to be proof of the hypothesis. It can be paraphrased as, "It has been observed to work in the past, while other methods have been observed not to work." In contrast with the scientific method, there is no vigorous effort to disprove the hypothesis. The term Cargo cult science was first used by physicist Richard Feynman during his 1974 commencement address at the California Institute of Technology.
Rote learning is a memorization technique based on repetition. The idea is that one will be able to quickly recall the meaning of the material the more one repeats it. Some of the alternatives to rote learning include meaningful learning, associative learning, and active learning.
Infinite In All Directions (1988) is a book on a wide range of subjects, including history, philosophy, research, technology, the origin of life and eschatology, by theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson. The book is based on the author's Gifford Lectures delivered in Aberdeen in 1985. Infinite in All Directions can roughly be summarized as a treatise on the universe and humanity's role and its responsibilities.
The lectures were given in two series, and this book is accordingly divided into two parts. Part 1 is about life as a scientific phenomenon, about our efforts to understand the nature of life and its place in the universe. Part 2 is about ethics and politics, about the local problems introduced by our species into the existence of life on this planet.
Freeman Dyson is Professor of Physics at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. That is a title, not a recommendation. What recommends him is his ability to communicate, not merely the interest of science and its application to human activities of every kind, but the sheer delight he takes in the universe. He loves diversity. Frequently throughout the book a passage will reveal his pleasure at being alive and seeing and thinking. He has much of Richard Feynman’s enthusiasm for the strangeness of people and things.
David Louis Goodstein is an American physicist and educator. From 1988 to 2007 he served as Vice-provost of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he is also a professor of physics and applied physics, as well as the Frank J. Gilloon Distinguished Teaching and Service Professor.
A commencement speech or commencement address is a speech given to graduating students, generally at a university, generally in the United States, although the term is also used for secondary education institutions.
QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter is an adaptation for the general reader of four lectures on quantum electrodynamics (QED) published in 1985 by American physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman.
Robert Benjamin Leighton was a prominent American experimental physicist who spent his professional career at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). His work over the years spanned solid state physics, cosmic ray physics, the beginnings of modern particle physics, solar physics, the planets, infrared astronomy, and millimeter- and submillimeter-wave astronomy. In the latter four fields, his pioneering work opened up entirely new areas of research that subsequently developed into vigorous scientific communities.
Feynman's Lost Lecture: The Motion of Planets Around the Sun is a book based on a lecture by Richard Feynman. Restoration of the lecture notes and conversion into book form was undertaken by Caltech physicist David L. Goodstein and archivist Judith R. Goodstein. Feynman had given the lecture on the motion of bodies at Caltech on March 13, 1964, but the notes and pictures were lost for a number of years and consequently not included in The Feynman Lectures on Physics series. The lecture notes were later found, but unfortunately without the photographs of his illustrative chalkboard drawings. One of the editors, David L. Goodstein, stated that at first without the photographs, it was very hard to figure out what diagrams he was referring to in the audiotapes, but a later finding of his own private lecture notes made it possible to understand completely the logical framework with which Feynman delivered the lecture.
Tuva or Bust! (1991) is a book by Ralph Leighton about the author and his friend Richard Feynman's attempt to travel to Tuva.
The one-electron universe postulate, proposed by John Wheeler in a telephone call to Richard Feynman in the spring of 1940, is the hypothesis that all electrons and positrons are actually manifestations of a single entity moving backwards and forwards in time. According to Feynman:
I received a telephone call one day at the graduate college at Princeton from Professor Wheeler, in which he said, "Feynman, I know why all electrons have the same charge and the same mass" "Why?" "Because, they are all the same electron!"
Keith Sedgwick Donnellan was an American philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles.
The Character of Physical Law is a series of seven lectures by physicist Richard Feynman concerning the nature of the laws of physics. Feynman delivered the lectures in 1964 at Cornell University, as part of the Messenger Lectures series. The BBC recorded the lectures, and published a book under the same title the following year; Cornell published the BBC's recordings online in September 2015.
Zechariah Chafee, Jr., was an American judicial philosopher and civil rights advocate, described as "possibly the most important First Amendment scholar of the first half of the twentieth century" by Richard Primus. Chafee's avid defense of freedom of speech led to Senator Joseph McCarthy calling him "dangerous" to America.
QED is a play by American playwright Peter Parnell that chronicles significant events in the life of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman. It presents scenes from a fictional day in Feynman's life, less than two years before his death, interweaving many strands from his biography, from the Manhattan project to the Challenger disaster inquiry to more personal topics such as the death of Feynman's wife and his own fight with cancer. The play, which grew out of a collaboration between Parnell, actor Alan Alda, and director Gordon Davidson, premiered in 2001. The original production, directed by Davidson and starring Alda as Feynman, was performed first at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles and, from late 2001 to mid-2002, on Broadway.
The Feynman Lectures on Physics is a physics textbook based on some lectures by Richard P. Feynman, a Nobel laureate who has sometimes been called "The Great Explainer". The lectures were presented before undergraduate students at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), during 1961–1963. The book's co-authors are Feynman, Robert B. Leighton, and Matthew Sands.
The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen Scientist is a non-fiction book by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman. It is a collection of three previously unpublished public lectures given by Feynman in 1963. The book was first published in hardcover in 1998, ten years after Feynman's death, by Addison–Wesley. Several paperback and audiobook editions of the book have subsequently been published.
Verbosity or verboseness is speech or writing that uses more words than necessary, e.g. "in spite of the fact that" rather than "although". The opposite of verbosity is plain language. Some teachers, including the author of The Elements of Style, warn against verbosity; similarly Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway, among others, famously avoid it. Synonyms include wordiness, verbiage, prolixity, grandiloquence, garrulousness, expatiation, logorrhea, and sesquipedalianism.
