Joan Feynman Found Her Place in the Sun
hackaday.com
hackaday.com
I love how some scientists never retire. I hope I love my work as much as they do and am able to take a similar path.
But then a second thought crossed her mind. “Richard is pretty smart, and if I tell him about an interesting problem, he’ll find the answer before I do and take all the fun out of it for me.” So Joan decided to strike a deal with him. “I said, Look, I don’t want us to compete, so let’s divide up physics between us. I’ll take auroras and you take the rest of the Universe. And he said OK!”
[...]
In the early 1980s, Joan wasn’t the only Feynman seduced by solar-terrestrial relations. Her brother Richard had kept his original promise to her not to work on auroras. Despite an impressive polymath career in which he applied his genius to a spectacular spectrum of problem-solving across the fields of maths, physics, chemistry, and biology, he had never turned his attention to Joan’s chosen field.
But then he traveled to Alaska, an important centre for aurora studies. On a tour of the facility, the head of the lab pointed out many of the interesting geophysical phenomena that were yet to be explained. “Would you be interested in working on it?” he enquired. Richard responded that he would, but added that he’d have to ask his sister’s permission. Joan remembers that he came back and told her the story. “I’m sorry Richard,” she replied, “but I’m not giving you permission.” Richard duly reported back that his sister had refused to allow him to study auroras!
Word of this story eventually got round, and people would come up to Joan at conferences and ask her if it was true. At one meeting, a colleague from UCLA told the gathering that he wanted “to publicly thank Richard Feynman for not studying aurora, so that we can all have some fun!”
https://findingada.com/shop/a-passion-for-science-stories-of...
Further confirmation that this story is in the book comes from the reader comments to the book at http://fullmoon.typepad.com/books/nonfiction/page/2/ :
> "He didn't mean to, but he couldn't help it: present Feynman with a problem, from a Mayan codex to a locked safe to the mysteries of quantum electrodynamics, and he would just have to solve it--the exception that proves the rule, of course, being his promise to his sister Joan to leave the aurora to her."
> "At one point in adulthood someone asks him to look at something and he asks Joan for permission first. When she says no, she's not done with it yet, he tells the other person that the two of them have an agreement about that sort of thing. Good brother!"
For example, Stephen Hawking is well known because of #1 and #4, and his medical condition helps make him memorable.
Neil deGrasse Tyson is well known because of #4. As a scientist he's just average, but he's great at talking science to the general public.
Richard Feynman is known because of #1 (quantum mechanics), #2 (Manhattan Project, the Challenger investigation), and #3 (Nobel Prize).
Joan Feynman's work has mostly been in areas that are just not that interesting to most of the general public. Interactions between the solar wind and the magnetosphere just do not excite the general public the way black holes and quantum mechanics do.
I believe they were mentioned in both Larry Page and Serge Brin favorite books.
Her academic path even crossed with that of her uncle: she wrote a paper analysing the physics of radiometers, after which Albert did too.
[Her paper argued in favour of the radiometric force being proportional to the surface area of the veins, Albert argued (more convincingly) in favour of a model in which the force in proportional to the perimeter.]
Remember, the other was Japanese. Very interesting story too.