Exuberance: The Passion for Life

by Kay Redfield Jamison

  Davy’s restless liveliness, a catalyst to his scientific imagination and integral to his gifts as a teacher, had its drawbacks: he was often irritable and impatient and difficult to satisfy. An acquaintance, later his biographer, remarked that fly fishing, perhaps not surprisingly, was ill-suited to Davy’s disposition: “The temperament of Davy was far too mercurial: the fish never seized the fly with sufficient avidity to fulfill his expectations, or to support that degree of excitement which was essential to his happiness.”

  Davy’s scientific achievements were as fundamental as they were diverse. He showed that by using electricity, chemical compounds could be decomposed into their constituent parts, and he isolated, for the first time, the elements sodium, calcium, barium, potassium, and magnesium. He also demonstrated, despite entrenched scientific opinion to the contrary, that iodine and chlorine were elements; he described in detail the physiological effects of many gases (including, as we have seen, nitrous oxide), wrote influential scientific texts, and invented a widely used safety lamp for miners. (Davy refused to take out a patent on the lamp because, he said, the sole object of his invention was to “serve the cause of humanity.” His public-spiritedness is this regard is not unlike that of Benjamin Franklin, who chose not to patent the lightning rod or the Franklin stove, and of the Stevensons in Scotland, who declined to patent their inventions in lighthouse technology.)

  Davy’s response to his scientific discoveries was unconstrained exuberance. When he first isolated potassium and saw the “minute globules of potassium burst through the crust of potash and take fire as they entered the atmosphere,” Davy’s cousin reports, he “could not contain his joy—he actually bounded about the room in ecstatic delight … some little time was required for him to compose himself sufficiently to continue the experiment.” Discoveries, declared Davy, “are like blessings of heaven, permanent and universal … by learning man ascendeth to the heavens and their motions, where in body he cannot come.”

  Such excitability, together with Davy’s literary sensibilities and scientific accomplishments, were enough to attract the fascination not only of Byron, who engaged in animated dinner conversations with him about volcanoes and gases, but also of Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife, Mary, who consulted Davy’s Elements of Chemical Philosophy as she wrote Frankenstein. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was also captivated by Davy and declared that he had “never met so extraordinary a young man.” Had he turned his mind to it, said Coleridge, Davy would have been the “greatest poet of his age.” Almost everyone recognized Davy as one of the preeminent teachers of his time; the Church of England, impressed by his passion and sense of theater in the lecture hall, implored him to become a preacher.

  Davy was, in fact, all the things he was said to be—preacher, teacher, poet, and scientist—but nowhere more impressive than when he lectured to the public about chemistry. His talks at the Royal Institution were a sensation. The lecture theater, which held a thousand people, was nearly always packed by the time he arrived. Carriages blocked the streets nearby, and the crowds were so great in Albemarle Street that, in order to accommodate traffic, it had to be converted into a one-way thoroughfare, the first ever in London.

  A London tanner who attended the talks gives a sense of the excitement they generated: “The sensation created by his first course of Lectures at the Institution, and the enthusiastic admiration which they obtained, is … scarcely to be imagined. Men of the first rank and talent, —the literary and the scientific, the practical and the theoretical, blue-stockings, and women of fashion, the old and the young, all crowded—eagerly crowded the lecture room.” Davy infected the audience with his passion for science. He was a natural storyteller, as he had been even when very young: “I was seized with the desire to narrate,” Davy wrote about his childhood. “I gradually began to invent, and form stories of my own. Perhaps this passion has produced all of my originality.” Certainly passion fueled his curiosity and his enthusiastic talks on science. His lectures were punctuated by his own surges of enthusiasm as well as by the dramatic explosions of gases that he created in order to demonstrate principles of chemistry and electricity.

  Humphry Davy, like his apprentice Michael Faraday and, a century and a half later, Richard Feynman, stoked enthusiasm in his listeners and was in turn stoked by theirs. And, also like Faraday and Feynman, Davy was an impassioned teacher because he was indefatigably curious and excitable. His zest for learning ignited those who heard him speak. He transferred to his audience his love of the natural world and his profound appreciation for its enchantments. He gave his first lectures at the Royal Institution when he was twenty-three, and he spoke then, as later, about the beauty of natural law: “The appearances of the greater number of natural objects are originally delightful to us, and they become more so when the laws by which they are governed are known,” he said. “The study of nature, therefore, in her various operations must be always more or less connected with the love of the beautiful and sublime.” Davy was by birth an enthusiast, who loved science, knew its beauties, and conveyed without check his enthusiasm to those he taught.

  One of those ignited by Davy’s exuberant lecturing was Michael Faraday, the son of a blacksmith, who had taught himself science by reading books on chemistry and physics. He attended Davy’s lecture series at the Royal Institution when he was scarcely twenty and took such lucid, fastidious notes, nearly four hundred pages of them, that when he sent them to Davy and asked for a position as his assistant, Davy took him on. During the decades to follow Faraday did the work that established him as one of the greatest scientists in history (Einstein said that there were four physical scientists who towered above all others: Galileo, Newton, Faraday, and Maxwell). He was the first to conceptualize magnetic fields and the first to discover the laws of electromagnetic conduction and rotation, as well as the laws of electrolysis. Faraday, in short, gave the world its fundamental understanding of electricity.

  But Faraday was also a great teacher. Like Davy, he believed passionately that the ways and findings of science should be communicated to the public and that preparation for public lectures should be rigorous. He wrote a “Manual for the Lecturer,” which presented in painstaking detail the desired physical layout of lecture halls—their ventilation systems, entryways, and exits, and the arrangement of the experimental apparatus to be used in teaching demonstrations. Lecturers, he believed, owed it to their audiences to be not only prepared but also stimulating. “A lecturer should exert his utmost effort to gain completely the mind and attention of his audience,” he wrote. “A flame should be lighted at the commencement and kept alive with unrelenting splendour to the end.”

  Faraday’s first talk at the Royal Institution was widely acclaimed as brilliant. Later he would come to be known as a supreme showman, the “Prince of Lecturers” in Victorian England. Charles Darwin and Charles Dickens were among the thousands who flocked to hear him, and the painter J.M.W. Turner consulted him about the chemistry of pigments. He founded the Christmas Lectures for Juveniles, a prestigious series which continues to this day, broadcast by the BBC. He gave his first Christmas lecture in 1827, and his last in 1860, with such titles as “The Chemistry of Coal,” “Water and Its Elements,” and “Atmospheric Air and Its Gases.” The talks were wildly popular, and none more so than his most famous lecture, “On the Chemical History of a Candle,” which was first delivered to an audience of young people in 1849. There were “bangs, flashes, soap bubbles filled with hydrogen floating upwards, and other spectacular effects” and, in a demonstration not unlike the drama to be provided by Richard Feynman during the twentieth-century NASA Challenger hearings, Faraday “placed two vessels made of half-inch-thick iron, and filled with water, in a freezing solution, then went on lecturing until the vessels exploded.”

  Explosions, flashes, and bubbles were only part of Faraday’s genius at lecturing, however. Like that of so many other enthusiasts—Snowflake Bentley, John Muir, Richard Feynman, Humphry Davy—Faraday’s work an
d teaching were fueled by an exuberance for science. He, like they, maintained the joy in discovery that children have in play; he taught best, as children learn best, because he had the ebullient inquisitiveness so central to youthful exploration. “The Christmas lectures brought out the boy in Faraday,” writes his biographer James Hamilton, “his ‘wonderful juvenility of spirit’ being never far from the surface: ‘Hilariously boyish upon occasion he could be, and those who knew him best knew he was never more at home, that he never seemed so pleased, as when making an old boy of himself, as he was wont to say, lecturing before a juvenile audience at Christmas.’ The fun came to a climax in many ways, most noisily perhaps in Faraday’s flinging a coal scuttle full of coal, a poker and tongs at an electro-magnet to demonstrate the powers of magnetism.” Faraday said simply, “I claim the privilege of speaking to juveniles as a juvenile myself.”

  Faraday punctuated his lectures not only with explosions and dramatic hurlings but with bursts of his own enthusiasm. “Wonderful” and “beautiful” emerge time and again to describe his delight in nature. In Faraday’s attempts to link gravity, magnetism, and electricity he wrote memorably, “Nothing is too wonderful to be true” (a statement he qualified by the less often quoted, “if it be consistent with the laws of nature, and in such things as these, experiment is the best test of such consistency”). Indeed, an irrepressible sense of wonder finds its way into his talks. During the sixth and final lecture in his Christmas series “On the Chemical History of a Candle,” for instance, Faraday’s language is charged with that sense of wonder, of beauty and joy: nature is wonderful, beautiful, and curious.

  “Wonderful it is,” he said to his young audience when explaining the conversion of carbon into carbonic acid, and “wonderful,” he said again, is the change provided by respiration, the life and support of plants and vegetables. He continued, during the candle’s burning: “What a wonderful change of carbon must take place … what a curious, wonderful change.” Powdered lead burning in air, he said, is a “beautiful instance” of chemical affinity; Japanese candles do not start into action at once, they wait for years or ages, and this waiting is a “curious and wonderful thing.” “See how beautifully [the candles] are colored,” he went on. They are “most beautifully shaped” and, if watched carefully, there is a “beautifully regular ascending current of air.” Rubies and diamonds cannot rival the remarkable beauty of a candle’s flame, he enthused; the light is “glorious.” The use of “beautiful” and “wonderful” continues: a process of nature is not just a process, said Faraday, it is a “beautiful and simple process.” The analogy between respiration and combustion is “beautiful and striking,” he tells his audience; “what an extraordinary notion,” what a “most curious and beautiful [thing] it is to see.” Faraday’s language, if stripped of “wonderful,” “curious,” “extraordinary,” and “beautiful,” which I have italicized for emphasis, would be plain speech indeed; it would also have been speech unlikely to infect an audience with the enthusiasm for science that he so deeply felt. Nature, he knew as well as anyone, was never too wonderful to be true.

  A century after Faraday’s last Christmas lecture at the Royal Institution, Richard Feynman gave three lectures at the University of Washington in Seattle. The imagination of nature, he told his audience, is always far greater than the imagination of man. He contrasted the scientific view of the natural world to the one contrived by the ancients: their belief that the earth was the back of an elephant that stood on a tortoise that swam in a bottomless sea, he said, was the result of imagination. But truth is even more marvelous: “Look at the way we see it today. Is that a dull idea? The world is a spinning ball, and people are held on it on all sides, some of them upside down. And we turn like a spit in front of a great fire. We whirl around the sun. That is more romantic, more exciting.”

  Feynman’s exuberance about science, about life, and about discovery, together with his rapier, intuitive intellect made him a celebrated teacher. Robert Oppenheimer, who worked with him at Los Alamos, described him in 1943 as “the most brilliant young physicist here, and everyone knows this … and [he is] an excellent teacher.” Later, when trying to recruit him to Berkeley, Oppenheimer specifically cited Feynman’s lucidity as a teacher and recommended him as “a rare talent and a rare enthusiasm.” Those who heard him teach would resoundingly echo Oppenheimer’s early observations. The physicist David Goodstein, vice provost of the California Institute of Technology, where Feynman was on the faculty, said, “I think Dick was a truly great teacher, perhaps the greatest of his era and ours.” For Feynman, he said, “the lecture hall was a theater, and the lecturer a performer, responsible for providing drama and fireworks as well as facts and figures.” His graduate students agreed. Laurie Brown, who went on to become a professor of physics and astronomy, said that Feynman stressed creativity: “He urged each of us to create his or her universe of ideas.… It was excitingly different from what most of us had been taught earlier.”

  Feynman was an exuberant teacher in every way. His enthusiasm and curiosity spilled over onto those whom he held captive in his orbit. He thought the quest to know the laws of the universe was the most exciting adventure a person could undertake. “I’m an explorer,” he once said, “I like to find out.” The natural world was to him wonderful, beautiful, and an object of endless play.

  Feynman was the ultimate scientific galumpher. Science was fun for him, and he made science fun for those he taught. Freeman Dyson observed, “I never heard him give a lecture that did not make the audience laugh.” For Feynman, laughter, excitement, and scientific imagination were inseparable. His sister said of their childhood that there was “this excitement in the house, this great love of physics.… The feeling of excitement was in the house all the time, in my brother and my father. So I just grew up with it.” His mother, Feynman wrote, taught him that one of the highest forms of understanding was laughter; in like vein, his thesis adviser at Princeton observed that for Feynman, “discussions turned into laughter, laughter into jokes and jokes into more to-and-fro and more ideas.” All his life, his sister said, Feynman did physics for fun: “When people asked him how long he worked each week, he really couldn’t say, because he never knew when he was working and when he was playing.” Not surprisingly, perhaps, Feynman was the “favorite adult playmate” of the children of his colleagues.

  Even at his last public appearance, just a few months before he died of cancer, a fellow physicist was amazed by Feynman’s joy in talking about teaching high school physics: “As I watched, I realized I was witnessing something extraordinary. Feynman’s energies grew as he responded to question after question. The outside corners of his eyes were creased by the smiles that played over his face as he talked about physics. His hands and arms cut through the air with increasing vigor.… It was the enjoyment he exuded as he stood there talking physics with an eager, receptive group of physics teachers that moved me. It was an enjoyment I could feel.… I had the feeling that I was standing on holy ground.”

  Feynman utterly enjoyed the idea of things. Science, he said, is “done for the excitement of what is found out.… It is almost impossible for me to convey in a lecture this important aspect, this exciting part, the real reason for science.” You cannot understand science, he emphasized, unless you “understand and appreciate the great adventure of our time… [this] tremendous adventure…[is] a wild and exciting thing.” Life, for Feynman, was the fabulous pursuit of truth and beauty and joy:

  It is a great adventure to contemplate the universe, beyond man, to contemplate what it would be like without man, as it was in a great part of its long history and as it is in a great majority of places. When this objective view is finally attained, and the mystery and the majesty of matter are fully appreciated, to then turn the objective eye back on man viewed as matter, to view life as part of this universal mystery of greatest depth, is to sense an experience which is very rare, and very exciting. It usually ends in laughter and a delight in the fut
ility of trying to understand what this atom in the universe is, this thing—atoms with curiosity—that looks at itself and wonders why it wonders. Well, these scientific views end in awe and mystery, lost at the edge in uncertainty, but they appear to be so deep and so impressive that the theory that it is all arranged as a stage for God to watch man’s struggle for good and evil seems inadequate.

  Some will tell me that I have just described a religious experience. Very well, you may call it what you will.

  Like John Muir, who could not keep “glorious” from popping out of his inkwell, and Snowflake Bentley, who didn’t even try, Feynman’s exuberant affair with nature bubbled over into his writings and into the lecture hall. “The world is so wonderful,” he exclaimed, using the word that dotted Faraday’s talks at the Royal Institution. To trace out the origins of man and the universe, Feynman believed, is to be held spellbound; it is to stand in awe, to fill with delight: “Where did the stuff of life and of the earth come from? It looks as if it was belched from some exploding star, much as some of the stars are exploding now. So this piece of dirt waits four and a half billion years and evolves and changes, and now a strange creature stands here with instruments and talks to the strange creatures in the audience. What a wonderful world!”