Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

by James Gleick

Architect of quantum theories, brash young group leader on the atomic bomb project, inventor of the ubiquitous Feynman diagram, ebullient bongo player and storyteller, Richard Phillips Feynman was the most brilliant, iconoclastic, and influential physicist of modern times.

One group held a half-serious debate on the question, Is Feynman human? They envied the inspiration that came (so it seemed to them) in flashes. They admired him for other qualities as well: a faith in nature’s simple truths, a skepticism about official wisdom, and an impatience with mediocrity.

Feynman was widely quoted by scientists and science writers (although he seldom submitted to interviews). He despised philosophy as soft and unverifiable. Philosophers “are always on the outside making stupid remarks,” he said, and the word he pronounced philozawfigal was a mocking epithet, but his influence was philosophical anyway, particularly for younger physicists.

After he died several colleagues tried to write his epitaph. One was Schwinger, in a certain time not just his colleague but his preeminent rival, who chose these words: “An honest man, the outstanding intuitionist of our age, and a prime example of what may lie in store for anyone who dares to follow the beat of a different drum.”

Children and scientists share an outlook on life. If I do this, what will happen? is both the motto of the child at play and the defining refrain of the physical scientist. Every child is observer, analyst, and taxonomist, building a mental life through a sequence of intellectual revolutions, constructing theories and promptly shedding them when they no longer fit. The unfamiliar and the strange—these are the domain of all children and scientists.

Einstein’s piety was sincere but neutral, acceptable even to the vehemently antireligious Dirac, of whom Wolfgang Pauli once complained, “Our friend Dirac, too, has a religion, and its guiding principle is ‘There is no God and Dirac is His prophet.’”

A movie showing a drop of ink diffusing in a glass of water looks wrong when run backward. Yet a movie showing the microscopic motion of any one ink molecule would look the same backward or forward. The random motions of each ink molecule can be reversed, but the overall diffusion cannot be. The system is microscopically reversible, macroscopically irreversible. It is a matter of chaos and probability. It is not impossible for the ink molecules, randomly drifting about, someday to reorganize themselves into a droplet. It is just hopelessly improbable.

He was a sculptor who sleeps and dreams with the feeling of clay alive in his fingers.

Are Americans so squeamish that they cannot write the word ‘titbits’?

A colleague trying to take notes while he worked at the blackboard through the night found the process hectic. Schwinger, who was ambidextrous, seemed to have fashioned a two-handed blackboard technique that let him solve two equations at once.

Feynman was not thinking about history, but Paul Olum was. “Someday when they make a moving picture of the dramatic moment at which the men of Princeton learn about the bomb, and the representative comes back from Chicago and presents the information, it will be a very serious situation, with everybody sitting in their suit coats and the man comes in with his briefcase,” he told Feynman. “Real life is different than one imagines.”

Presiding over a committee dinner at a steak house, he expected his companions to follow his lead in specifying rare meat; when one man tried to order well-done, Oppenheimer turned and said considerately, “Why don’t you have fish?”

Challenges and fresh insights came easily from Feynman. He did not wait, as Bethe did, to double-check every intuitive leap. His first idea did not always work. His cannier colleagues developed a rule of thumb: If Feynman says it three times, it’s right.

Oppenheimer warned that Feynman was sure to have other job offers, because “a not inconsiderable number of ‘big shots’” had already noticed him. He quoted two of the big shots. Bethe, according to Oppenheimer, had said bluntly that he would sooner lose any two scientists than lose Feynman. And Wigner of Princeton had made what was, for a physicist’s physicist in the 1940s, perhaps the ultimate tribute. “He is a second Dirac,” Wigner said, “only this time human.”

A Half-Assedly Thought-Out Pictorial Semi-Vision Thing

What I am really trying to do is bring birth to clarity, which is really a half-assedly thought-out pictorial semi-vision thing. I would see the jiggle-jiggle-jiggle or the wiggle of the path. Even now when I talk about the influence functional, I see the coupling and I take this turn—like as if there was a big bag of stuff—and try to collect it away and to push it. It’s all visual. It’s hard to explain.

Science is a way to teach how something gets to be known, what is not known, to what extent things are known (for nothing is known absolutely), how to handle doubt and uncertainty, what the rules of evidence are, how to think about things so that judgments can be made, how to distinguish truth from fraud, and from show.

The Chicago astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar independently produced Feynman’s result—it was part of the work for which he won a Nobel Prize twenty years later. Feynman himself never bothered to publish. Someone with a new idea always risked finding, as one colleague said, “that Feynman had signed the guest book and already left.”

The difficulty, from an experimentalist’s perspective, was that gravity was so weak compared to the other forces. A bare handful of electrons can create a palpable electromagnetic force, while it takes a mass as great as the earth to create the gravity that draws a leaf from a tree.

It doesn’t seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil—which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama.

I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination—stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern—of which I am a part.... What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?

He believed that it was not certainty but freedom from certainty that empowered people to make judgments about right and wrong: knowing that they could never be more than provisionally right, but able to act nonetheless.

Science can never disprove such claims, any more than it can disprove God. It can only devise experiments and explore alternative explanations until it gains a commonsense sureness. “I have argued flying saucers with lots of people,” Feynman once said. “I was interested in this: they keep arguing that it is possible. And that’s true. It is possible. They do not appreciate that the problem is not to demonstrate whether it’s possible or not but whether it’s going on or not.”

I was upstairs typewriting a theme on something about philosophy. And I was completely engrossed, not thinking of anything but the theme, when all of a sudden in a most mysterious fashion there swept through my mind the idea: my grandmother has died. Now of course I exaggerate slightly, as you should in all such stories. I just sort of half got the idea for a minute.... Immediately after that the telephone rang downstairs. I remember this distinctly for the reason you will now hear.... It was for somebody else. My grandmother was perfectly healthy and there’s nothing to it. Now what we have to do is to accumulate a large number of these to fight the few cases when it could happen.

Having tried to impart fundamental knowledge to Caltech freshmen, he also believed it was possible to teach real knowledge to first-graders. “Shoe leather wears out because it rubs against the sidewalk and the little notches and bumps on the sidewalk grab pieces and pull them off.” That is knowledge. “To simply say, ‘It is because of friction,’ is sad, because it’s not science.”

He told Weiner that he had never read a scientific biography he had liked. He thought he would be portrayed either as a bloodless intellectual or a bongo-playing clown.

He concluded his personal report by saying, “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.” He joined his fellow commissioners for a ceremony at the White House Rose Garden. Then he returned home, as he now knew, to die.

NOTHING IS CERTAIN. Werner Heisenberg wrote this message in the twentieth century’s consciousness. The mathematician Kurt Gödel followed with a famous proof that no logical system can ever be consistent and complete. The possibilities of true knowledge seemed to fade.

When Hawking said, “We may now be near the end of the search for the ultimate laws of nature,” many particle physicists agreed. But Feynman did not. “I’ve had a lifetime of that,” he said on another occasion. “I’ve had a lifetime of people who believe that the answer is just around the corner.” But again and again it’s been a failure. Eddington who thought that with the theory of electrons and quantum mechanics everything was going to be simple ... Einstein, who thought that he had a unified theory just around the corner but didn’t know anything about nuclei and was unable of course to guess it.... People think they’re very close to the answer, but I don’t think so.... Whether or not nature has an ultimate, simple, unified, beautiful form is an open question, and I don’t want to say either way.

When the Los Angeles Times sent him an advance copy of his obituary, he thanked the author but said, “I have decided it is not a very good idea for a man to read it ahead of time: it takes the element of surprise out of it.”

You see, one thing is, I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I’m not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here.... I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell. It doesn’t frighten me.