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Feynman’s Vision

TEDxCaltech Celebrates the Vision of Richard Feynman

screenshot from TEDxCaltech website



The talks throughout the day were peppered by video clips of Feynman, plus musical performances inspired by Feynman’s passion for drumming. But the meat of the day was in the lectures by scientists, grad students, and even undergrad students who have carried on Feynman’s vision in various fields. To wit, Curtis Wong, a Principal Researcher in eScience at Microsoft introduced us to, “a free interactive storytelling and virtual learning environment providing the highest resolution multispectral imagery of the universe.” It is a 3D tour of the universe, inspired by Feynman’s creative genius in visualizing data in a manner that enhances understanding.

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The afternoon sessions of heavy-duty science and technology talks were broken up with some seriously geeky humor when Caltech cosmologists Kip Thorne (whom I posed with in the picture) and John Preskill played a science-geek version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire, complete with the music, rotating spot lights between questions, and slides projecting the question and four-answer options on the screen. Since TEDxCaltech was a tribute to Feynman, all questions pertained to things that Feynman said or did, so of course the correct answer to every question was “Richard Feynman.” Nevertheless, Thorne and Preskill could not seem to agree on an answer so they had to use their three lifelines: 50/50, poll-the-audience, and phone-a-friend. The first question was:

“Who said ‘If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics.’?”

Answer choices:

  • George W. Bush
  • Lady Gaga
  • Albert Einstein
  • Richard Feynman

For this question Thorne and Preskill used their 50/50 lifeline and narrowed it down to Einstein or Feynman, and they correctly guess the latter because the former never fully accepted quantum mechanics, much less understood it.

The next two questions went the same way, forcing Thorne and Preskill to poll the audience (we got it right: “Richard Feynman”) and, finally, to phone-a-friend. For the latter, Thorne and Preskill deduced that the answer was either Stephen Hawking or Richard Feynman, so they chose to phone no less an expert than Stephen Hawking, who not only answered his phone, but when Thorne asked him to please come to Caltech to answer the question, there he was, wheeling down the aisle of Beckman Auditorium at Caltech and up onto the stage, where he promptly answered, “Richard Feynman. That’s my final answer.”


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The day wrapped up with speakers discussing Feynman diagrams, the squiggly lines that help particle physicists visualize what interacting subatomic particles are doing when they collide in atom smashers. Even though Feynman diagrams are so useful that they appear on blackboards in physics departments around the world—and even on the side of Feynman’s van—additional discussions noted how difficult it is to actually compute mathematically what is really happened in even the simplest of particle interactions depicted in such diagrams. Nonetheless, Feynman’s vision, and his legacy lives on.

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The Feynman-Tufte Principle

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