Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

by James Gleick

The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

Originality was his obsession. He had to create from first principles—a dangerous virtue that sometimes led to waste and failure.

There are two kinds of geniuses, the “ordinary” and the “magicians.” An ordinary genius is a fellow that you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what they have done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians. They are, to use mathematical jargon, in the orthogonal complement of where we are and the working of their minds is for all intents and purposes incomprehensible. Even after we understand what they have done, the process by which they have done it is completely dark. They seldom, if ever, have students because they cannot be emulated and it must be terribly frustrating for a brilliant young mind to cope with the mysterious ways in which the magician’s mind works. Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest caliber.

It has not yet become obvious to me that there’s no real problem. I cannot define the real problem, therefore I suspect there’s no real problem, but I’m not sure there’s no real problem.

In private, with pencil on scratch paper, he labored over aphorisms that he later delivered in spontaneous-seeming lectures: Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.

For him knowledge did not describe; it acted and accomplished. Unlike many of his colleagues, educated scientists in a cultivated European tradition, Feynman did not look at paintings, did not listen to music, did not read books, even scientific books. He refused to let other scientists explain anything to him in detail, often to their immense frustration. He learned anyway. He pursued knowledge without prejudice.

He did not want to let himself be too “delicate,” and poetry, literature, drawing, and music were too delicate. Carpentry and machining were activities for real men.

You are rowing a boat upstream. The river flows at three miles per hour; your speed against the current is four and one-quarter. You lose your hat on the water. Forty-five minutes later you realize it is missing and execute the instantaneous, acceleration-free about-face that such puzzles depend on. How long does it take to row back to your floating hat? A simpler problem than most. Given a few minutes, the algebra is routine. But a student whose head starts filling with 3s and 41/4s, adding them or subtracting them, has already lost. This is a problem about reference frames. The river’s motion is irrelevant—as irrelevant as the earth’s motion through the solar system or the solar system’s motion through the galaxy. In fact all the velocities are just so much foliage. Ignore them, place your point of reference at the floating hat—think of yourself floating like the hat, the water motionless about you, the banks an irrelevant blur—now watch the boat, and you see at once, as Feynman did, that it will return in the same forty-five minutes it spent rowing away. For all the best competitors, the goal was a mental flash, achieved somewhere below consciousness. In these ideal instants one did not strain toward the answer so much as relax toward it. Often enough Feynman would get this unstudied insight while the problem was still being read out, and his opponents, before they could begin

In the stories modern physicists have made of their own lives, a fateful moment is often the one in which they realize that their interest no longer lies in mathematics. Mathematics is always where they begin, for no other school course shows off their gifts so clearly.

What is it good for? He got the classic answer: If you have to ask, you are in the wrong field.

Menge, putting his pragmatism aside for a moment, offered perhaps the only one: Does the student, he asked, “feel the craving of adding to the sum total of human knowledge? Or does he want to see his work go on and on and his influence spread like the ripples on a placid lake into which a stone has been cast? In other words, is he so fascinated with simply knowing the subject that he cannot rest until he learns all he can about it?”

He does not ordinarily argue about philosophical implications.... Questions about a theory which do not affect its ability to predict experimental results correctly seem to me quibbles about words, ... and I am quite content to leave such questions to those who derive some satisfaction from them.

The more competently science performed, the less it needed God.

When he parsed I think, therefore I am, it came out suspiciously close to I am and I also think.

His father years before had raised the problem of what happens when one falls asleep. He liked to prod Ritty to step outside himself and look afresh at his usual way of thinking: he asked how the problem would look to a Martian who arrived in Far Rockaway and starting asking questions. What if Martians never slept? What would they want to know? How does it feel to fall asleep? Do you simply turn off, as if someone had thrown a switch? Or do your ideas come slower and slower until they stop? Up in his room, taking midday naps for the sake of philosophy,

No field; no self-action. Implicit in Feynman’s attitude was a sense that the laws of nature were not to be discovered so much as constructed.

In fact Feynman suddenly realized that he had been describing a different phenomenon altogether, a painfully simple one: ordinary reflected light. He felt foolish.

Feynman associated colors with the abstract variables of the formulas he understood so intimately. “As I’m talking,” he once said, “I see vague pictures of Bessel functions from Jahnke and Emde’s book, with light tan j’s, slightly violet-bluish n’s, and dark brown x’s flying around. And I wonder what the hell it must look like to the students.”