Richard Feynman - The Ultimate Physicist

One of the leading Scientists of the last century was an American called Richard Feynman.

As with most great physicists, like Einstein and Newton, Feynman was a real character. There are some classic photos of him playing the bongos and legend has it that one day, just wanting to get away from it all, he put a pin in a map of the world and just took off to wherever it landed.

He apparently ended up living in some remote Russian village where he studied science in a little hut surrounded by local people who's language he didn't know.

He was a great guy and really down to Earth, and more miraculously he pretty much taught himself physics. It is because he taught himself he says, that was such a good communicator of the subject and his books and lectures were fantastic and very easy to understand.

Because he taught himself, he was able to come up with a lot of ideas that other people were not able to see who had been taught in school.

And so many of his inventions were groundbreaking and completely unique, such as the Feynman diagrams which show particles travelling in space and time. From these diagrams we can see that time travel is possible, a thing that we couldn't really visualise without them.

At the start of one his lectures, the Great Man says the following quote, which is relevant to all of my classes but at the moment is especially relevant to year 7, who are studying the particle model,

If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis that

All things are made of atoms-little particles that that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.

In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied.

You can hear the man himself speak on this website and if you have time why not look up some of the things he said and post them on the group so that everyone can learn a bit more about the life and work of Richard Feynman