While still at Princeton, Feynman married Arline Greenbaum, the girl of his dreams. In 1942, they set out for Los Alamos, NM, for him to work on the highly secret project to build an atomic bomb. During this time, Arline entered the hospital in Albuquerque because she was dying of tuberculosis. While Feynman was working in Los Alamos, it became clear that he was at the level with the intellectual giants of his day. In Los Alamos, he made the patent for an atomic submarine and an atomic airplane.
In 1945, Arline died in the hospital in Albuquerque. Feynman was very distraught about this event.
After the war, Feynman took a position at Cornell University to work on the quantum mechanical description of the interaction between light and matter. In 1950, he left Cornell to come to California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He would spend the rest of his career there. He came to Caltech to study the problem of superfluidity in liquid helium.
In 1952, Feynman married Mary Louise Bell. She was a university instructor in the history of decorative art. However, they were divorced in 1956. In 1960, he married for the final time to Gweneth Howarth. Between 1962 and 1968, they had a son, Carl, and adopted a daughter, Michelle.
From 1961-1963, Feynman undertook a project that impacted the entire scientific community. He agreed to teach a two-year course of introductory physics to the Caltech freshman students. These lectures were recorded, transcribed, and photographs were taken of all the blackboards filled with his writing. From this material, a series of three books called The Feynman Lectures on Physics were published. These books became the backbone of some of the scientific literature even now. In 1962-1963, he taught the same students as sophomores. After these lectures, he only taught courses designed for graduate students.
In 1965, he received the Nobel Prize in Physics, along with Sin-Itero Tomanaga and Julian Schwinger, for his work in quantum electrodynamics, or QED. After this event, Feynman suffered a brief period of dejection. Upon his reviewing of Watson and Crick's The Double Helix (late 1960), he was back in action.
Feynman was consumed with the problem of collisions at extreme high energy of heavy particles. This would occupy his time for the next decade or more.
In early June 1979, Feynman was to have surgery. He had stomach cancer. This would eventually kill him. The surgery went well and he was supposed to live out his life.
In the 1980s, Feynman became a great public figure. This was the last decade of his life. In 1985, a friend of his, Ralph Leighton, wrote "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" which became a surprise bestseller. Three years later, the book was followed by a second volume entitled, "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" also by Ralph Leighton.
On January 28, 1986, the Challenger accident happened. NASA asked Feynman, as well as others, to help investigate the accident. Feynman figured out what was wrong, and announced in during a nationally televised hearing of the commission. It turned out that the gasket material lost its resiliency at freezing temperature.
Feynman's last lecture took place on Friday, December 4, 1987. The lecture was on curved spacetime. Richard P. Feynman died two months later, on February 15, 1988.
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