Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

by James Gleick

  Compulsory Tea notwithstanding, some members argued vehemently that other members lacked essential graces, among them the ability to dance and the ability to invite women to accompany them to a dance. For a while this complaint dominated the daily counsel of the thirty-odd members of Phi Beta Delta. A generation later the ease of postwar life made a place for words like “wonk” and “nerd” in the collegiate vocabulary. In more class-bound and less puritanical cultures the concept flowered even earlier. Britain had its boffins, working researchers subject to the derision of intellectual gentlemen. At MIT in the thirties the nerd did not exist; a penholder worn in the shirt pocket represented no particular gaucherie; a boy could not become a figure of fun merely by studying. This was fortunate for Feynman and others like him, socially inept, athletically feeble, miserable in any but a science course, risking laughter every time he pronounced an unfamiliar name, so worried about the other sex that he trembled when he had to take the mail out past girls sitting on the stoop. America’s future scientists and engineers, many of them rising from the working class, valued studiousness without question. How could it be otherwise, in the knots that gathered almost around the clock in fraternity study rooms, filling dappled cardboard notebooks with course notes to be handed down to generations? Even so, Phi Beta Delta perceived a problem. There did seem to be a connection between hard studying and failure to dance. The fraternity made a cooperative project of enlivening the potential dull boys. Attendance at dances became mandatory for everyone in Phi Beta Delta. For those who could not find dates, the older boys arranged dates. In return, stronger students tutored the weak. Dick felt he got a good bargain. Eventually he astonished even the most sociable of his friends by spending long hours at the Raymore-Playmore Ballroom, a huge dance hall near Boston’s Symphony Hall with a mirrored ball rotating from the ceiling.

  The best help for his social confidence, however, came from Arline Greenbaum. She was still one of the most beautiful girls he knew, with dimples in her round, ruddy face, and she was becoming a distinct presence in his life, though mostly from a distance. On Saturdays she would visit his family in Far Rockaway and give Joan piano lessons. She was the kind of young woman that people called “talented”—musical and artistic in a well-rounded way. She danced and sang in the Lawrence High School revue, “America on Her Way.” The Feynmans let her paint a parrot on the inside door of the coat closet downstairs. Joan started to think of her as an especially benign older sister. Often after their piano lesson they went for walks or rode their bicycles to the beach.

  Arline also made an impression on the fraternity boys when she started visiting on occasional weekends and spared Dick the necessity of finding a date from among the students at the nearby women’s colleges or (to the dismay of his friends) from among the waitresses at the coffee shop he frequented. Maybe there was hope for Dick after all. Still, they wondered whether she would succeed in domesticating him before he found his way to the end of her patience. Over the winter break he had some of his friends home to Far Rockaway. They went to a New Year’s Eve party in the Bronx, taking the long subway-train ride across Brooklyn and north through Manhattan and returning, early in the morning, by the same route. By then Dick had decided that alcohol made him stupid. He avoided it with unusual earnestness. His friends knew that he had drunk no wine or liquor at the party, but all the way home he put on a loud, staggering drunk act, reeling off the subway car doors, swinging from the overhead straps, leaning over the seated passengers, and comically slurring nonsense at them. Arline watched unhappily. She had made up her mind about him, however. Sometime in his junior year he suggested that they become engaged. She agreed. Long afterward he discovered that she considered that to have been not his first but his second proposal of marriage—he had once said (offhandedly, he thought) that he would like her to be his wife.

  Her well-bred talents for playing the piano, singing, drawing, and conversing about literature and the arts met in Feynman a bristling negatively charged void. He resented art. Music of all kinds made him edgy and uncomfortable. He felt he had a feeling for rhythm, and he had fallen into a habit of irritating his roommates and study partners with an absentminded drumming of his fingers, a tapping staccato against walls and wastebaskets. But melody and harmony meant nothing to him; they were sand in the mouth. Although psychologists liked to speculate about the evident mental links between the gift for mathematics and the gift for music, Feynman found music almost painful. He was becoming not passively but aggressively uncultured. When people talked about painting or music, he heard nomenclature and pomposity. He rejected the bird’s nest of traditions, stories, and knowledge that cushioned most people, the cultural resting place woven from bits of religion, American history, English literature, Greek myth, Dutch painting, German music. He was starting fresh. Even the gentle, hearth-centered Reform Judaism of his parents left him cold. They had sent him to Sunday school, but he had quit, shocked at the discovery that those stories—Queen Esther, Mordechai, the Temple, the Maccabees, the oil that burned eight nights, the Spanish inquisition, the Jew who sailed with Christopher Columbus, the whole pastel mosaic of holiday legends and morality tales offered to Jewish schoolchildren on Sundays—mixed fiction with fact. Of the books assigned by his high-school teachers he read almost none. His friends mocked him when, forced to read a book, any book, in preparing for the New York State Regents Examination, he chose Treasure Island. (But he outscored all of them, even in English, when he wrote an essay on “the importance of science in aviation” and padded his sentences with what he knew to be redundant but authoritative phrases like “eddies, vortices, and whirlpools formed in the atmosphere behind the aircraft …”)

  He was what the Russians derided as nekulturniy, what Europeans refused to permit in an educated scientist. Europe prepared its scholars to register knowledge more broadly. At one of the fateful moments toward which Feynman’s life was now beginning to speed, he would stand near the Austrian theorist Victor Weisskopf, both men watching as a light flared across the southern New Mexico sky. In that one instant Feynman would see a great ball of flaming orange, churning amid black smoke, while Weisskopf would hear, or think he heard, a Tchaikovsky waltz playing over the radio. That was strangely banal accompaniment for a yellow-orange sphere surrounded by a blue halo—a color that Weisskopf thought he had seen before, on an altarpiece at Colmar painted by the medieval master Matthias Grünewald to depict (the irony was disturbing) the ascension of Christ. No such associations for Feynman. MIT, America’s foremost technical school, was the best and the worst place for him. The institute justified its required English course by reminding students that they might someday have to write a patent application. Some of Feynman’s fraternity friends actually liked French literature, he knew, or actually liked the lowest-common-denominator English course, with its smattering of great books, but to Feynman it was an intrusion and a pain in the neck.

  In one course he resorted to cheating. He refused to do the daily reading and got through a routine quiz, day after day, by looking at his neighbor’s answers. English class to Feynman meant arbitrary rules about spelling and grammar, the memorization of human idiosyncrasies. It seemed like supremely useless knowledge, a parody of what knowledge ought to be. Why didn’t the English professors just get together and straighten out the language? Feynman got his worst grade in freshman English, barely passing, worse than his grades in German, a language he did not succeed in learning. After freshman year matters eased. He tried to read Goethe’s Faust and felt he could make no sense of it. Still, with some help from his fraternity friends he managed to write an essay on the limitations of reason: problems in art or ethics, he argued, could not be settled with certainty through chains of logical reasoning. Even in his class themes he was beginning to assert a moral viewpoint. He read John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (“Whatever crushes individuality is despotism”) and wrote about the despotism of social niceties, the white lies and fake politesse that he so wanted to escape. He read
Thomas Huxley’s “On a Piece of Chalk,” and wrote, instead of the analysis he was assigned, an imitation, “On a Piece of Dust,” musing on the ways dust makes raindrops form, buries cities, and paints sunsets. Although MIT continued to require humanities courses, it took a relaxed view of what might constitute humanities. Feynman’s sophomore humanities course, for example, was Descriptive Astronomy. “Descriptive” meant “no equations.” Meanwhile in physics itself Feynman took two courses in mechanics (particles, rigid bodies, liquids, stresses, heat, the laws of thermodynamics), two in electricity (electrostatics, magnetism, …), one in experimental physics (students were expected to design original experiments and show that they understood many different sorts of instruments), a lecture course and a laboratory course in optics (geometrical, physical, and physiological), a lecture course and a laboratory course in electronics (devices, thermionics, photoemission), a course in X rays and crystals, a course and a laboratory in atomic structure (spectra, radioactivity, and a physicist’s view of the periodic table), a special seminar on the new nuclear theory, Slater’s advanced theory course, a special seminar on quantum theory, and a course on heat and thermodynamics that worked toward statistical mechanics both classical and quantum; and then, his docket full, he listened in on five more advanced courses, including relativity and advanced mechanics. When he wanted to round out his course selection with something different, he took metallography.

  Then there was philosophy. In high school he had entertained the conceit that different kinds of knowledge come in a hierarchy: biology and chemistry, then physics and mathematics, and then philosophy at the top. His ladder ran from the particular and ad hoc to the abstract and theoretical—from ants and leaves to chemicals, atoms, and equations and then onward to God, truth, and beauty. Philosophers have entertained the same notion. Feynman did not flirt with philosophy long, however. His sense of what constituted a proof had already developed into something more hard-edged than the quaint arguments he found in Descartes, for example, whom Arline was reading. The Cartesian proof of God’s perfection struck him as less than rigorous. When he parsed I think, therefore I am, it came out suspiciously close to I am and I also think. When Descartes argued that the existence of imperfection implied perfection, and that the existence of a God concept in his own fuzzy and imperfect mind implied the existence of a Being sufficiently perfect and infinite as to create such a conception, Feynman thought he saw the obvious fallacy. He knew all about imperfection in science—“degrees of approximation.” He had drawn hyperbolic curves that approached an ideal straight line without ever reaching it. People like Descartes were stupid, Richard told Arline, relishing his own boldness in defying the authority of the great names. Arline replied that she supposed there were two sides to everything. Richard gleefully contradicted even that. He took a strip of paper, gave it a half twist, and pasted the ends together: he had produced a surface with one side.

  No one showed Feynman, in return, the genius of Descartes’s strategy in proving the obvious—obvious because he and his contemporaries were supposed to take their own and God’s existence as given. The Cartesian master plan was to reject the obvious, reject the certain, and start fresh from a state of total doubt. Even I might be an illusion or a dream, Descartes declared. It was the first great suspension of belief. It opened a door to the skepticism that Feynman now savored as part of the modern scientific method. Richard stopped reading, though, long before giving himself the pleasure of rejecting Descartes’s final, equally unsyllogistic argument for the existence of God: that a perfect being would certainly have, among other excellent features, the attribute of existence.

  Philosophy at MIT only irritated Feynman more. It struck him as an industry built by incompetent logicians. Roger Bacon, famous for introducing scientia experimentalis into philosophical thought, seemed to have done more talking than experimenting. His idea of experiment seemed closer to mere experience than to the measured tests a twentieth-century student performed in his laboratory classes. A modern experimenter took hold of some physical apparatus and performed certain actions on it, again and again, and generally wrote down numbers. William Gilbert, a less well-known sixteenth-century investigator of magnetism, suited Feynman better, with his credo, “In the discovery of secret things and in the investigation of hidden causes, stronger reasons are obtained from sure experiments and demonstrated arguments than from probable conjectures and the opinions of philosophical speculators of the common sort.” That was a theory of knowledge Feynman could live by. It also stuck in his mind that Gilbert thought Bacon wrote science “like a prime minister.” MIT’s physics instructors did nothing to encourage students to pay attention to the philosophy instructors. The tone was set by the pragmatic Slater, for whom philosophy was smoke and perfume, free-floating and untestable prejudice. Philosophy set knowledge adrift; physics anchored knowledge to reality.

  “Not from positions of philosophers but from the fabric of nature”—William Harvey three centuries earlier had declared a division between science and philosophy. Cutting up corpses gave knowledge a firmer grounding than cutting up sentences, he announced, and the gulf between two styles of knowledge came to be accepted by both camps. What would happen when scientists plunged their knives into the less sinewy reality inside the atom remained to be seen. In the meantime, although Feynman railed against philosophy, an instructor’s cryptic comment about “stream of consciousness” started him thinking about what he could learn of his own mind through introspection. His inward looking was more experimental than Descartes’s. He would go up to his room on the fourth floor of Phi Beta Delta, pull down the shades, get into bed, and try to watch himself fall asleep, as if he were posting an observer on his shoulder. 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, Feynman found that he could follow his consciousness deeper and deeper toward the dissolution that came with sleep. His thoughts, he saw, did not so much slow down as fray apart, snapping from place to place without the logical connectives of waking brain work. He would suddenly realize he had been imagining his bed rising amid a contraption of pulleys and wires, ropes winding upward and catching against one another, Feynman thinking, the tension of the ropes will hold … and then he would be awake again. He wrote his observations in a class paper, concluding with a comment in the form of doggerel about the hall-of-mirrors impossibility of true introspection: “I wonder why I wonder why. I wonder why I wonder. I wonder why I wonder why I wonder why I wonder!”

  After his instructor read his paper aloud in class, poem and all, Feynman began trying to watch his dreams. Even there he obeyed a tinkerer’s impulse to take phenomena apart and look at the works inside. He was able to dream the same dream again and again, with variations. He was riding in a subway train. He noticed that kinesthetic feelings came through clearly. He could feel the lurching from side to side, see colors, hear the whoosh of air through the tunnel. As he walked through the car he passed three girls in bathing suits behind a pane of glass like a store window. The train kept lurching, and suddenly he thought it would be interesting to see how sexually excited he could become. He turned to walk back toward the window—but now the girls had become three old men playing violins. He could influence the course of a dream, but not perfectly, he realized. In another dream Arline came by subway train to visit him in Boston. They met and Dick felt a wave of happiness. There was green grass, the sun was shining, they walked along, and Arline said, “Could we be dreaming?”

  “No, sir,” Dick replied, “no, this is not a dream.” He persuaded himself of Arline
’s presence so forcibly that when he awoke, hearing the noise of the boys around him, he did not know where he was. A dismayed, disoriented moment passed before he realized that he had been dreaming after all, that he was in his fraternity bedroom and that Arline was back home in New York.

  The new Freudian view of dreams as a door to a person’s inner life had no place in his program. If his subconscious wished to play out desires too frightening or confusing for his ego to contemplate directly, that hardly mattered to Feynman. Nor did he care to think of his dream subjects as symbols, encoded for the sake of a self-protective obscurity. It was his ego, his “rational mind,” that concerned him. He was investigating his mind as an intriguingly complex machine, one whose tendencies and capabilities mattered to him more than almost anything else. He did develop a rudimentary theory of dreams for his philosophy essay, though it was more a theory of vision: that the brain has an “interpretation department” to turn jumbled sensory impressions into familiar objects and concepts; that the people or trees we think we see are actually created by the interpretation department from the splotches of color that enter the eye; and that dreams are the product of the interpretation department running wild, free of the sights and sounds of the waking hours.

  His philosophical efforts at introspection did nothing to soften his dislike of the philosophy taught at MIT as The Making of the Modern Mind. Not enough sure experiments and demonstrated arguments; too many probable conjectures and philosophical speculations. He sat through lectures twirling a small steel drill bit against the sole of his shoe. So much stuff in there, so much nonsense, he thought. Better I should use my modern mind.