Feynman, Richard P.

AN INCREDIBLE PORTRAIT BY FEYNMAN OF HIS IDOL, THE GREAT PHYSICIST PAUL DIRAC, THE MAN WHO INSPIRED FEYNMAN TO BECOME A PHYSICIST AND SET HIM ON THE PATH WHICH WOULD RESULT IN HIS BEING AWARDED THE 1965 NOBEL PRIZE FOR PHYSICS

"WHEN I WAS A YOUNG MAN, DIRAC WAS MY HERO. HE MADE A BREAKTHROUGH, A NEW METHOD OF DOING PHYSICS." -Richard P. Feynman, "The Reason for Antiparticles."

Although the two men could not have had more different personalities — Feynman famously social and chatty, Dirac legendarily shy and taciturn — the two men were cut from the same intellectual cloth. Dirac's brother-in-law, Princeton physicist Eugene Wigner said of Feynman, "He is a second Dirac, only this time human." (Genius,  p. 184)

Feynman had already read Dirac's magnum opus The Principles of Quantum Mechanics while still a sophomore in high school (Feynman's annotated copy of this book sold in these rooms in 2019 for $87,500), and in his Nobel lecture, Feynman credited Dirac with "challenging and inspiring" him to work on quantum electrodynamics (QED) — "The beginning of the thing was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, when I was an undergraduate student reading about the known physics, learning slowly about all these things that people were worrying about, and realizing ultimately that the fundamental problem of the day was that the quantum theory of electricity and magnetism was not completely satisfactory. This I gathered from books like those of Heitler and Dirac. I was inspired by the remarks in these books; not by the parts in which everything was proved and demonstrated carefully and calculated, because I couldn’t understand those very well. At the young age what I could understand were the remarks about the fact that this doesn’t make any sense, and the last sentence of the book of Dirac I can still remember, 'It seems that some essentially new physical ideas are here needed.'" -Feynman, "The Development of the Space-Time View of Quantum Electrodynamics", Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1965.

Artwork by Feynman is exceptionally rare on the market, with only one other portrait by him having sold at auction (of Dabney Zorthian, wife of artist Jirayr Zorthian, sold in these rooms in 2019 for $21,250). Feynman executed the present portrait only a few years after starting art lessons with Jirayr Zorthian, and chose to sign the work with his real name, rather than the pseudonym "Ofey" which he used for the majority of his artworks.

REFERENCES:

Letter from Oppenheimer to Birge Recommending Richard Feynman for a Position at Berkeley, November 4, 1943

Feynman, Richard P. "The Reason for Antiparticles," in Richard P. Feynman and Steven Weinberg, Elementary Particles and the Laws of Physics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999 [1987], p. 1.