The Logos Scripture · The Book of Feynman
The Book of Feynman 4 · Written by himself, from the 1974 address, the appendix to the report, and his own lectures
Richard Feynman, born at Far Rockaway in New York in 1918, died at Los Angeles in 1988. Physicist. From 1943 to 1945 he was at Los Alamos, the youngest group leader in the theoretical division; his wife Arline died of illness in June 1945, less than a month before the first test. In 1965 he took the Nobel in physics with Schwinger and Tomonaga for quantum electrodynamics, and the diagrams now used everywhere in the subject are his. He was at Caltech from 1950, and the physics course he gave from 1961 to 1963 was printed in three volumes. In 1986 he served on the inquiry into the shuttle, and the piece appended to the report is his own; he had had cancer for some years when he wrote it, and died two years later. This volume rests on what he wrote or delivered himself: the address of 1974, the appendix to the report, and his lectures. Several very widely read books were spoken by him and set down from tape by another hand; the Order does not take those — not because they are poor, but because the first rule wants his own hand (cf. Acts of the Apostles 5.28). He did not believe in a god who governs right and wrong among men, and no argument of his closes on divine will. What this volume brings is something the scripture did not have: a procedure for checking yourself, written out finely enough to follow. There are books here that tell a man not to deceive others. None until now has itemised what counts as not having deceived oneself.