(Website Addition of October 9, 2003)
Richard Feynman was always one to "call a spade a spade" and to look at new ideas with an open mind. However, he was not always an object of endearment with the "greats" of science. In the July 16, 2005, issue of Science News there is a three-page article on Richard Feynman called Dr. Feynman's Doodles. In it, Feynman is honored for his "doodles" which are known as Feynman diagrams. Some excerpts from this article follow.
Immortalized in books and plays, Feynman is adored as a mischief maker, impulsive explorer, drummer, and blunt, eccentric personality. He is equally adored for his dazzling intellect and groundbreaking contributions to quantum physics.
Although inscrutable to the uninitiated, a typical Feynman diagram looks simple... however, the diagrams offer a bare-bones way of representing extremely complicated mathematical expressions...
During a heady year beginning in the spring of 1947, Julian Schwinger of Harvard University finally managed to calculate a value for the strength of the electron's magnetic field that agreed with the experimental findings. Meanwhile, Feynman, then a professor at Cornell University, learned that his diagrammatic approach could more easily yield similar answers.
Others became enchanted with Feynman's technique...
In March 1948, Feynman, then 29 years old, joined other up-and-coming pioneers of the new computational approaches to attend a tete-a-tete in the Pennsylvania mountains with many of the physicists already recognized as the intellectual giants of the era. The group included Niels Bohr, Paul Dirac, Enrico Fermi, and J. Robert Oppenheimer, then director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. The audience patiently followed an elaborate presentation by Schwinger, in which he presented virtuoso manipulations of thick jungles of equations.
But when Feynman stepped to the blackboard and started to scribble diagrams, the audience leaped to challenge him. Turning a deaf ear to the details of his method, many in the group demanded proof that the physics depicted in the diagrams wasn't violating basic principles of quantum mechanics.
"The greats of quantum theory had no idea what he was doing," MIT's Kaiser says. "They were dismissive. They took the chalk out of [Feynman's] hand."
... Oppenheimer so thoroughly disapproved of Feynman's diagrams that he would interrupt every time that Dyson tried to speak about the method. When other postdoctoral students urged Dyson to give talks about the new approach, the group had to meet secretly. In time, these initiates became ambassadors for the technique, which they helped to spread throughout the particle physics community...
As Feynman's new technique spread in the early 1950s, physicists started applying the diagrams to areas outside the theory of quantum electrodynamics. Today, those areas span a broad reach of physics...
Like the trail maps they resemble, Feynman diagrams continue to point the way for physicists...
Unfortunately, those in science with egos that outweigh their curiosity and sense of fair play may continue to obstruct advances in the sciences. But fortunately, time and perhaps the next generation tend to adopt better ideas provided the new ideas are presented in a manner conducive to understanding.