Growing Up Feynman - Michelle Feynman - 5/11/2018

What a great night this has been, thanks to Caltech for organizing and hosting such a fantastic event. Caltech was my father's home for some 38 years, so it is especially meaningful to pay tribute to him from this stage tonight. There's one more speaker after me, but I thought I'd use my time to share some stories about what it was like

growing

up as a Fineman. My father had a unique sense of humor. This is a button he liked. It is read if you can't read it. Genius is genetically determined. Inherit it from your children, you know that he didn't take himself too seriously, perhaps because he didn't take the universe at face value and was always looking for ways to understand and appreciate the world from different points of view.

Omni magazine once made that assessment. that Richard Phillips Fineman was the most intelligent man in the world. He was born in Queens, New York, in 1918 and was the son of a military uniform salesman. His mother was fun, pragmatic and clever. She was in my life until I was 13 and I remember her well. Her father did not. had formal scientific training, but he taught Richard the scientific method and my father, in turn, inspired his younger sister Joan, who we have heard since tonight, to become a physicist, which was not the usual course for events for women in those days when he was attending MIT as a BA and PhD at Princeton University, he married his childhood sweetheart, Arlene Greenbaum, even though she was ill with tuberculosis, which at the time was incurable .

In 1942, the United States government asked him to join the Manhattan Project. Los Alamos and he became a group leader in the atomic bomb project. On the weekends he would borrow a friend's car and drive to Albuquerque and spend time with Arlene and was with her when she died on June 16, 1945. After the war, he became a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Cornell and in 1950 he was offered a job at Caltech and spent the rest of his career here in 1960 he married my mother Gweneth and in 1962 my brother Carl was born, hey Carl you want to stand up so the next image is a photo of baby Carl, my mom and dad, with one of the many awards my dad won, so I know I need to explain this photo, it represents a very busy and happy week where he literally won an award the day after my brother . he was born and then they decided to put together this image.

I don't think it was his idea, but they set it up in the hospital. He won the Nobel Prize in 1965 with Julian Schwinger and Shinichiro Tomonaga for their independent work on quantum electrodynamics. He was born three years later, in 1986. She was asked again to serve his country, this time investigating the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. When I was very young, we had a lot of games that we played. He had one that I loved called The Grip of Steel and required. I escaped from a frozen embrace of his arms from Steel's grasp. I remember running downstairs and grabbing a roll of paper towels that I used to replace myself and his still-frozen hug and he pretended to be completely overcome by me and my clever thinking. delighted with his confusion of fame, another of my favorite games where he would pretend to be a radio and I would sit on his lap and twist his nose and he would make up songs from different radio stations on Sunday mornings, he would often refrain from read the newspaper. in bed for a wild hour of story telling, playing drums and loud music with my brother and I and sitting and swinging on my brother's bed because it was suspended from the ceiling with ropes, I was convinced we were having the best time possible when it was his turn to drive the carpool to elementary school, he would start going the wrong way or drive to a different school or even start driving himself to work and all the kids would say no, not that way, I know, I can't believe it. they didn't call him a dodo either and I have to say, "It's okay, that's how it is," and he would turn the wrong way again and we would say no, absolutely terrified that we were going to be late somehow, we would always be on time thinking about the past".

Now, as a parent, I don't know how he did that. I couldn't have done half the things he did. He loved to cause mischief when we were in a restaurant and, putting our name on a list, he would spell the name B.J. Oh. with a line through RK and happily waited for his name to be called when we were in a restaurant, he would order coffee and when it was brought to the table he would say it was for the children, he would pretend to speak Italian in an Italian restaurant and chat with our waiter to our dismay, now it's funny, but you know, when you're a teenager, it's pretty embarrassing to have a parent who enjoys those public games when they're introduced to someone at a party who spoke a foreign language, pretended to be fluent in their native language, The surprising thing is that his determined confidence and total commitment to the joke often fooled them into thinking that this gibberish was somehow an unknown regional dialect and they said what a shame. was that they didn't speak the same version of the language, suffice it to say that my father had a unique perspective on life that made his approach to most things unconventional.

My mother was fiercely independent and a passionate world traveler, so it's no surprise that she grew up. In a family of adventurers, one of our favorite things to do was take our Dodge pickup truck and go camping. We spent a lot of time in California, visited Oregon, and even made it to Canada one summer. We often didn't say it in the camps. I know it's a photo of a camp, but a lot of times we didn't say camping because the van had room to sleep inside, so we didn't have to worry about rain or cold and with that van we worked hard.

To find ourselves in the middle of nowhere, at each fork in the road we took the one that was in the worst condition, the most interesting, the van was discreet, not flashy, not really, it had Fineman diagrams painted everywhere. My father loved teaching. In 1972, he won the medal. Oersted, the highest award from the American Association of Physics Teachers for his contributions to physics teaching, ten years later won an award from the Associated Students of Caltech for excellence in teaching and in his response to students said I was very happy to be honored to do something he so enjoyed when someone asked him about teaching children based on his experiences with my brother and me and he couldn't have a definitive answer because our personalities were so different.

My brother liked when my dad made up stories about tiny people walking around the house and Carl had to guess where they were based on the details of the story. It required some imagination because the scale was completely unknown, you know what the trees were; these people were actually rug stalks I didn't like these stories I went here the ones with a book over and over again they were closed while Carl was

growing

up and at some point during my brother's adolescence they became more collaborators than father and son and they would continue long walks and discuss technical ideas I know because sometimes I accompanied him and regretted it.

The image below is a picture of Carl graduating from MIT following in my father's footsteps. It was one of the deepest joys in our father's life to have a son like Carl. Whoever spoke his language to say that he was proud of Carl is an understatement. My more grounded interests served me well and then a lot said to help them with reminders of tasks they needed to do well. My father realized that I was the responsible and trustworthy guy. he tried to teach me how to do his income taxes. He was 12 years old. My mother told him to stop torturing me and I must say that I did not become the family accountant, but I enjoyed being the family historian.

I have curated three books about myself. My father and I really enjoyed the moment of hearing his voice and laughing at his wit to finish. I would like to show an image that for me sums up how all-encompassing his love of physics was. I know it looks like a piece of paper, yes it is. a piece of paper is the insert postcard for the Time magazine subscription, as you can see it is completely covered by equations this happened during leisure reading, so he is reading and keeps thinking about physics, this is how we work, it covered the margins of newspapers, place mats and restaurants. even boxes of Kleenex with calculations I don't think he considered it work because he enjoyed it so much but I think if my father is a hard worker Richard Feynman's legacy will probably always be distilled down to a single word genius my hope is that generations From now on, at least some people know that, in addition to the genius who could peer into the quantum realm, he was also my irrepressible, funny, adorable father, happy birthday dad.