Just weeks ago, after being treated to a lecture by Feynman, physics majors at the university got as close as they probably have to knowing Feynman as a person. Florida’s very own Rick Field worked with Feynman for a number of years as a research fellow and associate professor at Caltech in the 1970s. Recently, just before the Thanksgiving holiday, Professor Field gave a talk on how he met Feynman, the research he performed with him, and what it was like to work with the legend.



Dr. Field’s journey began with his birth into a family immersed in the world of Hollywood. His mother and sister, Sally Field, were actresses. As Dr. Field would explain, his proximity to Hollywood would strangely enough play a role in shaping his relationship with Feynman. Professor Field’s passion for physics was strengthened as a student at the University of California Berkeley, and he stayed on to receive a Ph.D. under J.D. Jackson (of Classical Electrodynamics fame). Dr. Field then moved onto a postdoctoral position at Brookhaven National Laboratory, where experimentalists involved him in the development of the parton model. A parton is part of a framework developed in order to understand hadron-hadron collisions and is the term given to high momentum quarks or gluons created in Quantum Chromodynamics hard scattering processes. As Dr. Field’s work took him to Caltech, one day he gave a talk on his work with partons that was attended by Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann. At the time, Feynman was no longer working on high-energy physics; rather he had devoted his time to Egyptian hieroglyphics. Nonetheless, Dr. Field’s talk caught Feynman’s interest and soon enough, the two were the only ones left in the room still discussing partons. There, Feynman invited Dr. Field to visit him regularly to discuss physics. The Feynman-Field days had been born.

The collaboration between Feynman and Field led to a deeper understanding of jets, which are narrow cones of hadrons produced in high-energy particle collisions. It is interesting that although this body of work is collectively referred to as Feynman-Field, the original journal papers that were published listed Field as the first author. This was done at the insistence of Feynman, who felt that if Feynman’s name was listed first, people would think the credit belong mostly to him. This was not the case – the way the papers were written went something like this: Dr. Field would write the entire paper, and Feynman would come in and pull out of his pocket folded-up slips of paper containing key notes that he wanted included in the paper. Their research ended up being highly productive and successful, with important applications to work done at Fermilab and even experiments to be performed at CERN.

Professor Field has felt that he was able to work with Feynman so closely due to an odd combination: J.D. Jackson and Hollywood. Dr. Field grew up amongst actors and actresses so he was never fazed by a person’s fame or power. All too often, he would observe people who couldn’t function around Feynman because they were so taken aback by his status. Dr. Field had no such qualms, and this, coupled with the thorough training he received under J.D. Jackson, allowed him to approach Feynman as if he were any other ordinary colleague. Their close working relationship shaped Professor Field’s research, and it has been interesting to witness Feynman’s legacy reach all the way to the University of Florida.