Searching for a response: the intriguing mystery of Feynman’s theoretical reference amplifier (2019)
Vincenzo d’Alessandro (Author)
Santolo Daliento (Author)
Di Mauro, Marco (Author)
Esposito, Salvatore (Author)
Naddeo, Adele (Author)
European Physical Journal H
Volume: 44
Issue: 4
Pages: 331-347
We analyze Feynman’s work on the response of an amplifier performed at Los Alamos and described in a technical report of 1946, as well as lectured on at the Cornell University in 1946–47 during his course on Mathematical Methods. The motivation for such a work was Feynman’s involvement in the Manhattan Project, for which the necessity emerged of feeding the output pulses of counters into amplifiers or several other circuits, with the risk of introducing distortion at each step. In order to deal with such a problem, Feynman designed a theoretical “reference amplifier”, thus enabling a characterization of the distortion by means of a benchmark relationship between phase and amplification for each frequency, and providing a standard tool for comparing the operation of real devices. A general theory was elaborated, from which he was able to deduce the basic features of an amplifier just from its response to a pulse or to a sine wave of definite frequency. Moreover, in order to apply such a theory to practical problems, a couple of remarkable examples were worked out, both for high-frequency cutoff amplifiers and for low-frequency ones. A special consideration deserves a mysteriously exceptional amplifier with best stability behavior introduced by Feynman, for which different physical interpretations are here envisaged. Feynman’s earlier work then later flowed in the Hughes lectures on Mathematical Methods in Physics and Engineering of 1970–71, where he also remarked on causality properties of an amplifier, that is on certain relations between frequency and phase shift that a real amplifier has to satisfy in order not to allow output signals to appear before input ones. Quite interestingly, dispersion relations to be satisfied by the response function were introduced.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Thesis
Ellen D. McGehee;
(2015)
Commemorating Controversy: Place-Making at the Birthplace of the Bomb
Book
Bailey, Janet;
(1995)
The good servant: Making peace with the bomb at Los Alamos
Book
Mason, Katrina R.;
(1995)
Children of Los Alamos: An oral history of the town where the Atomic Age began
Book
Fermi, Rachel;
Samra, Esther;
(1995)
Picturing the bomb: Photographs from the secret world of the Manhattan Project. Introduction by Richard Rhodes
Book
Truslow, Edith C.;
(1991)
Manhattan District history: Nonscientific aspects of Los Alamos Project, 1942 through 1946. Edited by Thayer, Kasha V.
Article
Goldberg, Stanley;
(1995)
Groves and the scientists: Compartmentalization and the building of the bomb
Thesis
Canaday, John T.;
(1995)
The uses of literature in the construction of the first atomic bombs
Article
Veys, Lucy;
(2013)
Joseph Rotblat: Moral Dilemmas and the Manhattan Project
Article
Rall, Denise N.;
(2006)
The “House That Dick Built”: Constructing the Team that Built the Bomb
Article
Joshua DiCaglio;
(2025)
Microbes as Machines: Life, Control, and the Problem of Scale in the Emergence of Nanotechnology
Article
Jacob Tropp;
(2018)
Transnational development training and Native American ‘laboratories’ in the early Cold War
Article
Penner, Barbara;
(January 2018)
The Cornell Kitchen: Housing and Design Research in Postwar America
Article
Zeh, H. D.;
(2011)
Feynman's Interpretation of Quantum Theory
Book
Lindsey A. Freeman;
(2015)
Longing for the Bomb: Oak Ridge and Atomic Nostalgia
Book
Matthew Shindell;
(2019)
The Life and Science of Harold C. Urey
Article
Joseph, Timothy;
(Fall 2009)
The Manhattan Project
Book
Kelly, Cynthia C.;
(2007)
The Manhattan Project: The Birth of the Atomic Bomb in the Words of Its Creators, Eyewitnesses, and Historians
Chapter
Alessandro Costazza;
(2014)
La dialettica dell'illuminismo nel dramma. "Sul caso di J. Robert Oppenheimer" di Heinar Kipphardt
Article
Leyva, Amy;
(2009)
Christmas at Hanford
Book
Des Jardins, Julie;
(2010)
The Madame Curie Complex: The Hidden History of Women in Science
Be the first to comment!