Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

by James Gleick

  He believed, too, in an independence of moral belief from any particular theory of the machinery of the universe. An ethical system that depended on faith in a watchful or vengeful God was unnecessarily fragile, prone to collapse when doubt began to undermine faith.

  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. Only by understanding uncertainty could people learn how to evaluate the many kinds of false knowledge that bombard them: claims of mind reading and spoon bending, belief in flying saucers bearing alien visitors. 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.”

  How could one evaluate miracle cures or astrological forecasts or telekinetic victories at the roulette wheel? By subjecting them to the scientific method. Look for people who recovered from leukemia without having prayed. Place sheets of glass between the psychic and the roulette table. “If it’s not a miracle,” he said, “the scientific method will destroy it.” It was essential to understand coincidence and probability. It was noteworthy that flying-saucer lore involved a considerably greater variety of saucer than of creature: “orange balls of light, blue spheres which bounce on the floor, gray fogs which disappear, gossamer-like streams which evaporate into the air, thin, round flat things out of which objects come with funny shapes that are something like a human being.” It was fantastically improbable, he noted, that alien visitors should come in near-human form and just at the moment in history when people discovered the possibility of space travel.

  He subjected other forms of science and near-science to the same scrutiny: tests by psychologists, statistical sampling of public opinion. He had developed pointed ways of illustrating the slippage that occurred when experimenters allowed themselves to be less than rigorously skeptical or failed to appreciate the power of coincidence. He described a common experience: an experimenter notices a peculiar result after many trials—rats in a maze, for example, turn alternately right, left, right, and left. The experimenter calculates the odds against something so extraordinary and decides it cannot have been an accident. Feynman would say: “I had the most remarkable experience… . While coming in here I saw license plate ANZ 912. Calculate for me, please, the odds that of all the license plates …” And he would tell a story from his days in the fraternity at MIT, with a surprise ending.

  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.

  Feynman, who had once astonished the Princeton admissions committee with his low scores in every subject but physics and mathematics, did believe in the primacy of science among all the spheres of knowledge. He would not concede that poetry or painting or religion could reach a different kind of truth. The very idea of different, equally valid versions of truth struck him as a modern form of cant, another misunderstanding of uncertainty.

  That any particular knowledge—quantum mechanics, for example—must be provisional and imperfect does not mean that competing theories cannot be judged better or worse. He was not what philosophers called a realist—by one definition, someone who, in asserting the existence of, say, electrons, adds “a desk-thumping, foot-stamping shout of ‘Really!’” Real though electrons seemed, Feynman and some other physicists recognized that they are part of a never-perfect, always-changing scaffolding. Do electrons really travel backward in time? Are those nanosecond resonances really particles? Do particles really spin? Do they really have strangeness and charm? Many scientists believed in a straightforward reality. Others, including Feynman, felt that in the late twentieth century it was not necessary or possible to answer a final yes. It was preferable to hold one’s models delicately in the mind, weighing alternative viewpoints and letting assumptions slide here and there. But to physicists the scaffolding was not all. It did imply a truth within, toward which humans might perpetually strive, however imperfectly. Feynman did not believe, as many philosophers did, that the now-famous “conceptual revolutions” or “paradigm shifts” to which science seemed so prone—Einstein’s relativity replacing Newton’s dynamics—amounted to the replacing of one socially bound fashion by another, like hemlines rising and falling year to year. Like most members of his community, he could not abide in his business what one philosopher, Arthur Fine, called “the great lesson of twentieth-century analytic and continental philosophy, namely, that there are no general methodological or philosophical resources for deciding such things.” Scientists do have methods. Their theories are provisional but not arbitrary, not mere social constructions. By means of the peculiar stratagem of refusing to acknowledge that any truth may be as valid as any other, they succeed in preventing any truth from becoming as valid as any other. Their approach to knowledge differs from all others—religion, art, literary criticism—in that the goal is never a potpourri of equally attractive realities. Their goal, though it always recedes before them however they approach it, is consensus.

  The Swedish Prize

  When Einstein won the 1921 Nobel Prize, it did not create a stir. Although Einstein could command front-page coverage in the New York Times merely by delivering a public lecture, the detail of the prize impressed the editors only to the extent of a one-sentence notice inside the newspaper, lumping him with the next year’s winner, a more obscure professor whose name they misspelled:

  The Nobel Committee has awarded the physics prize for 1921 to Professor Dr. Albert Einstein of Germany, identified with the theory of relativity, and that for 1922 to Professor Neils Bohr, Copenhagen.

  Gradually the awards gained in stature. Longevity contributed: there were other prizes, but the foresighted Alfred Nobel, inventor of dynamite, had established his early. The particular contributions of scientists grew more difficult to describe to a lay public, and the awarding of such a distinguished international honor provided a useful benchmark. A physicist’s obituary in the late twentieth century would almost have to begin with the phrase “won the Nobel Prize for …” or the phrase “worked on the atomic bomb,” or both. The prize committee arrived at its judgments with care: it made errors, sometimes serious ones, but it generally reflected a conservative consensus of leading scientists in many countries. Scientists began to covet the prize with an intensity that they suppressed as well as they could. Their interest could be felt nonetheless in the ways scientists did and did not discuss the prize. Any potential prizewinner exhibited an extreme reluctance to mention its name. The distinguished group of those who had almost won revealed a forlorn tendency to rehearse for the rest of their lives the slight contingencies that had stood between them and the prize—the indecision that made them delay a paper for a crucial few months, or the timidity that kept them from joining a team embarked on an all-too-promising experiment. Even winners showed how much they cared through small mannerisms, such as the euphemism winkingly employed by Gell-Mann, among others: “the Swedish prize.” The winners formed an elite group—but elite was too weak a word. A sociologist assessing the prize’s stature found herself having to multiply s
uperlatives: “As the ne plus ultra of honors in science, the Nobel Prize elevates its recipients not merely to the scientific elite but to the uppermost rank of the scientific ultra-elite, the thin layer of those at the top of the stratification hierarchy of elites who exhibit especially great influence, authority, or power and who generally have the highest prestige within what is a prestigious collectivity to begin with.” Physicists always knew who among their colleagues had won and who had not.

  Few scientists after Einstein, if any, remained larger than the prize—capable of adding as much to its stature as it added to theirs. In 1965 several active physicists at least seemed to be sure future winners, as much because of their dominance in the community as because of their particular accomplishments. Feynman, Schwinger, Gell-Mann, and Bethe were chief among them. The Nobel committee traditionally found it easier to identify worthy candidates than to pinpoint their most worthy particular achievements. Most notoriously, Einstein had won specifically for his work on the photoelectric effect, not for relativity. When Bethe finally did win, in 1967, the prize singled out his parsing of the thermonuclear reactions in stars—important work, but an arbitrary choice from an unusually broad and influential career spanning decades. Feynman could plausibly have won for his liquid-helium work, had that been his only achievement. Each fall, as the announcement neared, Feynman had been alive to the possibility. He and Gell-Mann might have won for their theory of weak interactions, yet Gell-Mann had already moved on to a more sweeping model of high-energy particle physics. The committee found it easier to reward particular experiments or discoveries, and experimenters tended to win their prizes far more promptly than theorists. Broad theoretical conceptions like relativity were the most difficult of all. Even so, it was odd that the Nobel committee had not yet recognized the theoretical watershed reached almost twenty years before with quantum electrodynamics and renormalization. The experimenters Willis Lamb and Polykarp Kusch had long since been recognized, in 1955, for their contributions to quantum electrodynamics.

  No more than three people may share a Nobel Prize. That rule may have added to the complications in the case of quantum electrodynamics. Feynman and Schwinger were two. Tomonaga had matched or anticipated the essence of Schwinger’s theory, even if his version had not been quite as panoramic. Dyson was a problem. His contribution had been the most mathematical, and the Nobel Prize abhorred mathematics. Some physicists felt vehemently that Dyson had done no more than analyze and publicize work created by others. Dyson, having settled at the Institute for Advanced Study, drifted away from the theoretical physics community. He had no taste for the involutions of particle physics. He indulged his lifelong passion for space travel by participating in various visionary projects. He grew fascinated with the global politics of nuclear weapons and with the origin of life. The Nobel recommendations of influential American physicists—his old antagonist Oppenheimer among them—may have omitted Dyson, although to a knowledgeable minority it seemed that no one, during the tumultuous birth of modern quantum electrodynamics, had understood the problem more broadly or influenced the community more deeply.

  Thus, when the Western Union “telefax” arrived at 9 A.M. on October 21, 1965, it named Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga for their “fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics with deep ploughing consequences for the physics of elementary particles.” By then Feynman had been awake for more than five hours. The first call had come at 4 A.M. from a correspondent of the American Broadcasting Corporation shortly after the announcement in Stockholm. He rolled over and told Gweneth. At first she thought he was joking. The telephone kept ringing until finally they left it off the hook. They could not get back to sleep. Feynman knew his life would not be the same. Photographers from the Associated Press and the local newspaper were at his house before sunrise. He posed outdoors in the dark with Carl, his sleepy three-year-old, and gamely held a telephone receiver to his ear as the flashbulbs popped.

  Since the press now had to give an account of quantum electrodynamics for the first time, Feynman rapidly learned to field a sequence of variations on what seemed to him a single question: “Will you please tell us what you won the prize for—but don’t tell us! Because we’ll not understand it.” The actual questions were impossible to answer: “What applications does this paper have in the computer industry?” “I’m going to ask you also to comment on the statement that your work was to convert experimental data on strange particles into hard mathematical fact.” And then the one question he could answer: “What time did you hear about the award?” In a private moment a reporter for Time made a suggestion he loved: that he simply say, “Listen, buddy, if I could tell you in a minute what I did, it wouldn’t be worth the Nobel Prize.” He realized that he could work up a stock phrase about the interaction of matter and radiation but felt it would be a fraud. He did make a serious remark—and repeated it all day—that reflected his inner feeling about renormalization. The problem had been to eliminate infinities in calculations, he said, and “We have designed a method for sweeping them under the rug.”

  Julian Schwinger called, and they shared a happy moment. Schwinger, still at Harvard, was pursuing an ever more solitary road in his theoretical physics but, unlike Feynman, had brought forth a long and distinguished string of graduate students working on the frontier problems of high-energy physics. A decade earlier, when Feynman won the Einstein Award, he wrote his mother: “I thought you would be happy that I beat Schwinger out at last, but it turns out he got the thing 3 yrs ago. Of course, he only got ½ a medal, so I guess you’ll be happy. You always compare me with Schwinger.” Now their rivalry was over, if not forgotten. Feynman called Tomonaga in Japan and then reported to a student journalist a capsule caricature of the Nobel Prize–day telephone conversation:

  [FEYNMAN:] Congratulations.

  [TOMONAGA:] Same to you.

  How does it feel to be a Nobel Prize winner?

  I guess you know.

  Can you explain to me in layman’s terms exactly what it was you did to win the prize?

  I am very sleepy.

  By afternoon students had raised across the dome of Throop Hall an enormous cloth banner reading, “Win big, RF.”

  Hundreds of letters and telegrams came in over the next weeks. He heard from childhood friends who had not seen him in almost forty years. There were cables from shipboard and muffled telephone calls from Mexico. He told reporters that he planned to spend his third of the $55,000 prize money to pay his taxes on his other income (actually he used it to buy a beach house in Mexico). He felt himself under stress. He had always felt that honors were suspect. He liked to ridicule pomp and talk about his father, the uniform salesman who taught him to see past the uniforms. Now he would be traveling to Sweden to appear before the king. The mere thought of buying a tuxedo made him nervous. He did not want to bow before a foreign potentate. For several weeks he grew obsessed with an odd fantasy that one was forbidden to turn one’s back on the king and therefore had to back up a flight of steps after receiving the award. He practiced jumping backward up steps, both feet at once, because he decided that he would invent a method that no one had used before. He planned to examine the actual steps in advance and rehearse. One friend sent him a rear-view mirror from an automobile as a joke; Feynman took it as evidence that other people knew about this rule. When Sweden’s ambassador paid him a courtesy call, Feynman took the opportunity to confess his worry. The ambassador assured him that he could face any direction he chose; no one climbed stairs backward.

  In the event, he put on white tie and tails, slicked his hair down, and grinned as he accepted the award from a bespectacled King Gustav VI Adolf. The prizewinners sped through a week of banquets, dances, formal toasts, and impromptu speeches in Sweden’s ornate and palatial civic buildings. They traveled from Stockholm to Uppsala and back, partied with students in a beer cellar, and made conversation with ambassadors and princesses. They collected their medals, certificates, and bank checks. They delivered thei
r Nobel Prize lectures. Feynman realized that he had never read anyone’s Nobel lecture. Scientists’, especially, seemed automatically obscure. Friends told him about William Faulkner’s famous speech in 1950 (“I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail”); he did not think he could produce anything so grand, but he wanted to say something memorable, and he did not want to give the précis of quantum electrodynamics that might also be coming from his fellow winners.

  He believed that historians, journalists, and scientists themselves all participated in a tradition of writing about science that obscured the working reality, the sense of science as a process rather than a body of formal results. Real science was confusion and doubt, ambition and desire, a march through fog. With hindsight, the polished histories tended to impose a post facto logic on the sequence of reasoning and discovery. The appearance of an idea in the scientific literature and the actual communication of the same idea through the community could be sharply different, Feynman knew. He decided to give a personal, anecdotal, and—he claimed—unpolished version of his route to the space-time view of quantum electrodynamics. “We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible,” he began, “to cover up all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or to describe how you had the wrong idea first.”

  He described the historic difficulty of infinities in the self-interaction of the electron. He confessed his secret desire as a graduate student to eliminate the field altogether—to produce a theory of direct action between charges. He recounted his collaboration with Wheeler: “as I was stupid, so was Professor Wheeler that much more clever.” He tried to give his listeners a feeling for what had seemed a new philosophical stance—the willingness of a physicist in the post-Einstein era to accept paradoxes without stopping to say, “Oh, no, how could that be?”—and offered his memory of the way his physical viewpoint had evolved. He repeated his view of renormalization: “I think that the renormalization theory is simply a way to sweep the difficulties of the divergences of electrodynamics under the rug. I am, of course, not sure of that.”