Leonard Susskind, Father of String Theory, Warmly Remembers His Friend, Richard Feynman

Leonard Susskind — he’s the father of String The­o­ry, some­one who won the black hole wars with Stephen Hawk­ing, and a Stan­ford pro­fes­sor who likes to bring physics to the broad­er pub­lic. (Find his 6‑course intro­duc­tion to Mod­ern The­o­ret­i­cal Physics in the Physics sec­tion of our col­lec­tion of Free Online Cours­es.) Last year, Susskind head­ed to Cal­Tech to talk about Richard Feyn­man. Of course, he’s the late, great physi­cist who won the Nobel Prize for his work on Quan­tum Elec­tro­dy­nam­ics (find his pub­lic lec­tures on that here). He also shared Susskind’s enthu­si­asm for pop­u­lar­iz­ing sci­ence, cre­at­ing mem­o­rable shows like Fun to Imag­ine, a tele­vi­sion series for the BBC, and The Plea­sure of Find­ing Things Out. In this warm talk, Susskind remem­bers his men­tor and friend, a com­plex per­son few got to know very well. Feyn­man was many things — a great sci­en­tist, a show­man, a philoso­pher, drum­mer, teacher, a bit of an ego­tist who could co-exist with oth­er big egos, and much more. When you’re done with Susskind’s talk, don’t miss these very relat­ed items:

The Richard Feyn­man Tril­o­gy: The Physi­cist Cap­tured in Three Films

Free: Richard Feynman’s Physics Lec­tures from Cor­nell (1964)