Joan Feynman

Joan Feynman (born March 31, 1927) is an American astrophysicist. She has made important contributions to the study of solar wind particles and fields; sun-Earth relations; and magnetospheric physics. In particular, Feynman is known for developing an understanding of the origin of auroras. She is also known for creating a model that predicts the number of high-energy particles likely to hit a spacecraft over its lifetime, and for uncovering a method for predicting sun spot cycles. Feynman is the younger sister of physicist Richard Feynman.

Early life

Feynman was raised in Far Rockaway section of Queens, New York City, along with her older brother, Richard Feynman. Her parents were Lucille Feynman (née Phillips), a homemaker, and Melville Arthur Feynman, a businessman. Her family originated from Russia and Poland; both of her parents were Ashkenazi Jews. Like her brother, Joan was an inquisitive child, and she exhibited an interest in understanding the natural world from an early age. However, her mother and grandmother both dissuaded her from pursuing science, since they believed that women's brains were not physically capable of understanding complex scientific concepts in the way that men's brains could. Despite this, her brother Richard always encouraged her to be curious about the universe. It was he who originally introduced young Joan to auroras when, one night, he coaxed her out of bed to witness the northern lights flickering above an empty golf course near their home. Later, Feynman would find comfort in an astronomy book given to her by her brother. She became convinced that she could, in fact, study science, when she came across a graph based on research by noted astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin.

Richard Feynman

Richard Phillips Feynman, (/ˈfaɪnmən/; May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988) was an American theoretical physicist known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, and the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as in particle physics for which he proposed the parton model. For his contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman, jointly with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965. He developed a widely used pictorial representation scheme for the mathematical expressions governing the behavior of subatomic particles, which later became known as Feynman diagrams. During his lifetime, Feynman became one of the best-known scientists in the world. In a 1999 poll of 130 leading physicists worldwide by the British journal Physics World he was ranked as one of the ten greatest physicists of all time.

He assisted in the development of the atomic bomb during World War II and became known to a wide public in the 1980s as a member of the Rogers Commission, the panel that investigated the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. In addition to his work in theoretical physics, Feynman has been credited with pioneering the field of quantum computing, and introducing the concept of nanotechnology. He held the Richard C. Tolman professorship in theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology.