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The Meaning of it All
Richard Feynman
THE MEANING OF IT ALL
by Richard P. Feynman
Richard P. Feynman was one of this century's most brilliant theoretical physicists and
original thinkers. Born in Far Rockaway, New York, in 1918, he studied at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he graduated with a BS in 1939. He went
on to Princeton and received his Ph.D. in 1942. During the war years he worked at the
Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. He became Professor of Theoretical Physics at
Cornell University, where he worked with Hans Bethe. He all but rebuilt the theory of
quantum electrodynamics and it was for this work that he shared the Nobel Prize in 1965.
His simplified rules of calculation became standard tools of theoretical analysis in both
quantum electrodynamics and high-energy physics. Feynman was a visiting professor at
the California Institute of Technology in 1950, where he later accepted a permanent
faculty appointment, and became Richard Chace Tolman Professor of Theoretical
Physics in 1959. He had an extraordinary ability to communicate his science to audiences
at all levels, and was a well-known and popular lecturer. Richard Feynman died in 1988
after a long illness. Freeman Dyson, of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton,
New Jersey, called him 'the most original mind of his generation', while in its obituary
The New York Times described him as 'arguably the most brilliant, iconoclastic and
influential of the postwar generation of theoretical physicists'.
A number of collections and adaptations of his lectures have been published, including
The Feynman Lectures on Physics, QED (Penguin, 1990), The Character of Physical Law
(Penguin, 1992), Six Easy Pieces (Penguin, 1998), The Meaning of It All (Penguin, 1999)
and Six Not-So-Easy
Pieces (Allen Lane, 1998; Penguin, 1999). The Feynman Lectures on Gravitation and
The Feynman Lectures on Computation are both forthcoming in Penguin. His memoirs,
Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman, were published in 1985.
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The Meaning of It All
Richard P. Feynman
Contents
I.The Uncertainty of Science
II.The Uncertainty of Values
III.This Unscientific Age
These lectures, given in April 1963, are published here for the first time. We are grateful
to Carl Feynman and Michelle Feynman for making this book possible.
I
The Uncertainty of Science
