I start with the simplest phenomena... the first... is the phenomena of light. Early on, when light was being investigated by Newton, he thought that… - Richard Feynman

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I start with the simplest phenomena... the first... is the phenomena of light. Early on, when light was being investigated by Newton, he thought that the light that came into the eye was like a rain of particles, like rain drops... [M]ore light meant more particles... and one kind of color light would one kind of rain drop and another... would be a different kind of rain drop... over the whole spectrum... and if we would some day have sufficiently delicate instruments, we would presumably discover that it was like a pattering... [I]t would go click, click, click when the particles came raining down. ...He also discovered ...the light from the soap bubbles or light from thin films... The brightness of reflection... depends on how thick the film is. As the film gets thicker and thinner, it gets brighter and darker. That was hard for him to understand from the point of view of particles. Finally a theory of waves was invented which explained that very easily... until we measured light very precisely... and lo and behold, to our horror, it behaved like particles.

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About Richard Feynman

Richard Phillips Feynman (May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988) was an American theoretical physicist. He is known for the work he did in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, and in particle physics, for which he proposed the parton model. For his contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 jointly with Julian Schwinger and Shin'ichirō Tomonaga. Feynman developed a widely used pictorial representation scheme for the mathematical expressions describing the behavior of subatomic particles, which later became known as Feynman diagrams. During his lifetime, Feynman became one of the best-known scientists in the world.

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Also Known As

Pen Names: Ofey
Native Name: Richard Phillips Feynman
Alternative Names: Feynman Dick Feynman Richard P. Feynman
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Additional quotes by Richard Feynman

It requires a much higher degree of imagination to understand the electromagnetic field than to understand invisible angels. ... I speak of the E and B fields and wave my arms and you may imagine that I can see them ... [but] I cannot really make a picture that is even nearly like the true waves.

The different colored light... correspond to particles of different energy, that is energy comes in lumps and these lumps have different sizes for the different colored light. [I]t was hard... virtually impossible to understand... that the reflection of light... from layers of different thicknesses varies by using particles... [T]hat makes a problem which I want to describe...

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You are a strong and beautiful woman. You are not always as strong as other times but it rises & falls like the flow of a mountain stream. I feel I am a reservoir for your strength- without you I would be empty and weak.

[Letter to Arline Feynman]

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