Born in the United States in 1918, Richard Feynman studied physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and received his PhD at Princeton University in 1942, where he wrote a doctoral thesis titled "The Principle of Least Action in Quantum Mechanics".
During World War II, Feynman was recruited to serve as a staff member of the U.S. atomic bomb project at Princeton University, and then at the secret Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico where atomic bombs were designed and built. At Los Alamos, he became the youngest group leader in the theoretical division of the Manhattan Project.
From 1945 to 1950, Feynman became an associate professor at Cornell University and returned to studying the fundamental issues of quantum electrodynamics. In 1950, he became professor of theoretical physics at Caltech where he remained for the rest of his career. He was co-awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1965 for this work. Feynman was also interested in the relationship between physics and computation and was one of the first scientists to conceive of the possibility of quantum computers.
Feynman delivered a series of three Beatty lectures in October 1979 on the theme of "Light and Matter, the Modern View" including "Photons, Particles of Light", "Quantum Behaviour" and "Interaction of Light and Matter".
Listen to audio from Richard Feynman's first Beatty Lecture:
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 3 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7
Audio: Â鶹AV Archives
Image: Creative Commons
