I did not know Richard Feynman had a brilliant sister.

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Scientist Solved Mysteries of the Sun and Magnetic Fields

Joan Feynman, sister of a Nobel laureate, made her own mark in physics despite her mother’s doubts.

By James R. Hagerty

September 18, 2020

To be Richard Feynman’s little sister was an adventure. As a teenager, the future Nobel laureate paid his sister, Joan, nine years younger, a few pennies a week to be an assistant in his home science lab, where she was sometimes expected to endure electrical shocks. As a reward for her advances in arithmetic, he let her pull his hair and pretended it hurt.

He once awakened her in the night and took her to a golf course to see flickering lights in the sky. “He told me that it was an aurora and no one knew what caused it exactly,” she said later.

Richard Feynman helped develop the atomic bomb and won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1965. His sister found an important, if less prominent, role as an astrophysicist whose research included explaining what causes auroras.

Working for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and other institutions, she also devised models to predict how many high-energy particles would smash into spacecraft. In 2000, NASA awarded her its Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal. She died July 22 at the age of 93.

Dr. Feynman, who didn’t want to be completely overshadowed by her famous brother, recalled proposing a deal: “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.”

Her work advanced understanding of what causes those natural light shows: Charged particles flow out of the sun in what is known as the solar wind. Most are deflected by the Earth’s magnetic field, but a fraction of them get trapped in that field and interact with molecules in the Earth’s atmosphere, creating light waves visible in the northern and southern polar latitudes.

Though her brother encouraged her scientific studies, others didn’t. When she was eight years old, Joan was told by her mother that “women can’t do science because their brains aren’t made for it,” according to “A Passion for Science: Stories of Discovery and Invention,” a 2013 book edited by Suw Charman-Anderson. Dr. Feynman recalled “sitting in a chair and weeping.”

Joan Feynman was born on March 30, 1927, and grew up in the Far Rockaway section of Queens. Her father, a businessman, set an example with his own quest for scientific knowledge. He sometimes opened an encyclopedia volume to a random page and read whatever he found.

After leaving home to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Richard Feynman encouraged his sister to persist with science by sending her a college astronomy textbook. Noticing data in the book attributed to a female scientist, young Joan felt renewed hope about her chances for making a career in scientific research.

At Oberlin College in Ohio, she studied physics and met a fellow student, Richard Hirshberg. They married in 1948, and she spent a year with him in Guatemala while he did anthropological research. She earned a doctorate in physics from Syracuse University in 1958.

In the early 1960s, with children at home, she tried homemaking in Spring Valley, N.Y., where her husband was working. She became depressed and sought help from a psychiatrist, who prescribed work outside the home. She got a job at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and studied the Earth’s magnetic fields.

She later worked at labs in California and Colorado, alternating with periods of unemployment, while she raised three children. Her first marriage ended in divorce in 1974. She joined NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., in 1985.

In 1990, during a conference near Sochi, Russia, she bonded with Alexander Ruzmaikin, a Soviet space scientist. He invited her for an early morning swim in the frigid Black Sea. To his surprise, she agreed. Dr. Ruzmaikin recalled that on the way back to the hotel they took a glass-walled elevator.

“Why is it transparent?” she asked.

“To keep couples from kissing and smooching,” he explained.

“Let’s kiss!” she said.

They married in 1992.

Dr. Feynman and Dr. Ruzmaikin published research linking the development of agricultural societies to a period of climate stability around 10,000 years ago. Before then, they found, climate changes were too frequent to allow for sustained farming.

She is survived by Dr. Ruzmaikin, three children and four grandchildren.

“When I went to college my father told me to learn to make a living because you never know what life brings,” she said in a speech in 2018. “Only men made good livings in those days, and so I figured I’d better go into a man’s profession. I chose physics and hoped to be some sort of an assistant.”

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Appeared in the September 19, 2020, print edition as 'Scientist Solved Solar Mysteries.'