Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

by James Gleick

  In September 1981 a tumor recurred, this time entwined about Feynman’s intestines. The doctors tried a combination of doxorubicin, radiation treatment, and heat therapy. Then he underwent his second major surgery. The radiation had left his tissues spongy. The surgery lasted fourteen and a half hours and involved what the physicians described euphemistically as a “vascular incident”—his aorta split. An emergency request for blood went out at Caltech and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and donors lined up. Feynman needed seventy-eight pints. When Caltech’s president, Marvin Goldberger, entered his hospital room afterward, Feynman said, “I’d rather be where I am than where you are” and added that he still was not going to do anything Goldberger asked. In visible pain, he entertained his hospital visitors with new stories. Before the operation, the surgeon, Donald Morton of the UCLA Medical Center, had appeared with a halo of residents and nurses. Feynman asked what his chances were. “It’s impossible to talk about the probability of a single event,” he recounted the surgeon as saying, and he replied, “From one professor to another, it is possible if it’s a future event.”

  Caltech’s influence in physics had waned. It drew the same extraordinary collection of bright, naïve, gangly undergraduates, all assuming that they would be taking graduate courses by their junior years. The best graduate students, however, went elsewhere. The physics colloquium remained an institution—Feynman usually sitting like a magnet in the front row, capable of dominating every session, visitors knew, entertainingly or ruthlessly. He could reduce an unwary speaker to tears. He shocked colleagues by tearing the flesh off an elderly Werner Heisenberg, made the young relativist Kip Thorne physically ill—the stories reminded older physicists of Pauli (“ganz falsch”). Douglas Hofstadter, a pioneer in artificial intelligence, gave an unusual talk on the slippery uses of analogy. He began by asking the audience to name the First Lady of England, looking for such answers as Margaret Thatcher, Queen Elizabeth, or Denis Thatcher. “My wife,” came the cry from the front row. Why? “Because she’s English and she’s great.” Through the rest of his talk, it seemed to Hofstadter that Feynman continued heckling in the manner of the village idiot. He was no less an institution than ever, but the center of gravity of elementary particle physics had drifted eastward again, toward Harvard and Princeton and other universities. A combined theory of electromagnetism and weak interactions had led to the gauge theories that brought together the strong interactions under the same quantum-chromodynamical umbrella. This resurgence of quantum theory also brought a new appreciation of Feynman’s path integrals, because path integrals proved essential in quantizing the gauge theories. Feynman’s discovery now seemed not just a useful tool but an organizing principle at nature’s deepest levels. Yet he did not pursue the new implications of path integrals himself. At the forefront were such theorists as Steven Weinberg,

  Abdus Salam, Sheldon Glashow, and younger colleagues who had seen neither Feynman nor Gell-Mann as the magnets they had once been. Caltech physicists, concerned about the loss of their department’s preeminence, sometimes blamed Feynman for not involving himself enough in hiring and Gell-Mann for involving himself too much.

  Ever since his return to high-energy physics with his parton model, Feynman had been struggling against the pull of gray-eminence, elder-statesman status. In 1974 he replied unnecessarily to a standard departmental inquiry by writing a one-sentence memorandum: “I have not accomplished anything this year in the way of research!” Two years later, when a friend, Sidney Coleman, put him on the participant list for a quantum field theory conference sponsored by Werner Erhard’s est Foundation, Feynman summed up his ambivalence about his insider and outsider status by replying in Groucho Marx fashion:

  What the hell is Feynman invited for? He is not up to the other guys and is doing nothing as far as I know. If you clean up the invitation list, to just the hard-core workers, I might begin to think about attending.

  Coleman duly removed him from the list, and Feynman attended.

  He was untroubled by the association with est’s vaguely humbug sixties-inspired self-improvement seminars, suffused though they were with the pseudoscientific jargon that he ordinarily despised—“another piece of evidence,” as Coleman had said, “that we are living in the Golden Age of Silliness.” Erhard’s organization and other postsixties institutions were attracted to quantum theory for what appeared—misleadingly—to be a mystical view of reality, reminiscent, they thought, of Eastern religions and anyway more intriguing than the old-fashioned view that things are more or less what they seem. Such organizations, struggling to emerge from the sixties as ongoing business enterprises, were attracted to quantum physicists for the respectability they could lend. Meanwhile, Feynman was drawn to Erhard and other “flaky people”—as Gweneth referred to some of his new friends—partly because curiosity and nonconformity had long been his own trademarks. The youth movements of the sixties had caught up with him. They had brought his own style into vogue—his tieless, pomp-free outlook, the persona that he and Carl privately spoke of as “aggressive dopiness.” He grew his graying hair in a long mane. As much as he reviled organized psychology for what he considered its slippery use of the forms and methods of experimental science, he loved the introspective, self-examining kind of psychology. He let not only Werner Erhard but also John Lilly, an aficionado of dolphins and sensory-deprivation tanks, befriend him. He tried to ignore what he called Lilly’s “mystic hokey-poke” but nonetheless submerged himself in his tanks in the hope of having hallucinations, just as he had tried so hard to observe his own dream states forty years before. Death was not far from his thoughts. He recovered the earliest childhood memories he could dredge from his mind. He tried marijuana and (he was more embarrassed about this) LSD. He listened patiently as Baba Ram Das, the former Richard Alpert of Harvard, author of the cult book Be Here Now, instructed him on how to attain out-of-body experiences. He practiced these—OBE’s, in the current jargon—not willing to believe any of the mystical paraphernalia but happy and interested to imagine his ego floating here or there, outside himself, outside the room, outside the sixty-five-year-old body that was failing him so grievously.

  Physicists did not make natural hippies. They had played too great a role in creating the technology-worshiping, nuclear-shadowed culture against which the counterculture set itself. When Feynman spoke now about his experience in the Manhattan Project, he stressed more than ever his cracking of safes and baiting of censors. He was more a rebel than an ambitious and effective group leader. Other people, “people in higher echelons,” made the decisions, he said, prefacing a 1975 talk at Santa Barbara. “I worried about no big decisions. I was always flittering about underneath.” He was hardly an enemy of technology; nor, despite his distaste for the bureaucracy of science, was he an enemy of what was now called the military-industrial complex. He had always refused to attach his name to Caltech’s grant proposals to the federal funding agencies that kept all university physics departments solvent. Still, he would emerge from Lilly’s sensory-deprivation tank, rinse off the Epsom salts in the shower, dress, and drive over to Hughes Aircraft Company, a military contractor, to deliver lectures on physics. He was not guarding his time as he had in the past. Sporadically, he worked for Hughes and several other companies as a consultant; he advised Hughes on a neural-net project sponsored by the Department of Defense and consulted with 3M Company engineers on nonlinear optical materials. For less than four hours of conversation he earned fifteen hundred dollars. These were scattered jobs, chosen with no special thought. Many of his colleagues arranged their consulting far more carefully and earned far more money. Feynman’s clients often seemed more grateful for the thrill of meeting him than for any particular technical contribution he made. He knew he was no businessman. He was Caltech’s highest paid professor, along with Gell-Mann; but Caltech kept all the royalties from The Feynman Lectures on Physics. When his old friend Philip Morrison sent him an advertisement for “seventeen towering lectures by t
wo physics giants,” available from Time-Life Films, he wondered whether Morrison received any royalties. “I don’t,” Feynman said. “Are we physics giants business dwarfs?”

  His favorite extracurricular patron in the early 1980s was the Esalen Institute at Big Sur on the California coast, a hub for many varieties of self-actualization, self-enrichment, and self-fulfillment: Rolfing, Gestalt therapy, yoga, meditation. Under the giant trees on cliffs overlooking the Pacific were the original hot tubs, fed by natural sulfur springs. For its many patrons Esalen offered an expensive form of relaxation—a “lube job for the mind,” as Tom Wolfe once put it. Feynman described it as a hotbed of antiscience: “mysticism, expanded consciousness, new types of awareness, ESP, and so forth.” He became a regular visitor. He soaked in the hot tubs, stared gleefully at the nude young women sunbathing, and learned to give massages. He gave some of his standard lectures, adjusted to fit the mental state of the audience. Barefoot, with his thin legs emerging from khaki shorts, he began his “Tiny Machines” talk:

  It has to do with the question of how small can you make machinery. Okay? That’s the subject. Because I’ve heard people around, in the baths, saying, “Tiny machines? What’s he talking about?” and I say to them, “You know, very small machines” [pinching an invisible tiny machine between thumb and forefinger] and it doesn’t work. [Pause.]

  I am talking about very—tiny—machines. Okay?

  And on he would go, to occasional cries of “All right!” from the audience. In the question period, the conversation would invariably turn to antigravity devices, antimatter, and faster-than-light travel—if not in the world of physicists then in the spiritual world. Feynman always answered soberly, explaining that faster-than-light travel was impossible, antimatter was routine, and antigravity devices were unlikely—except, as he said, “that pillow and the floor under your behind will support you effectively for a long time.” For several years he conducted a workshop in “idiosyncratic thinking.” Esalen’s catalog copy promised a route to “peace of mind and enjoyment of life’s contradictions” and added: “You are invited to bring rhythm instruments.”

  Late in spring 1984, on his way to pick up one of the first available IBM personal computers in Pasadena, he leapt excitedly out of his car, tripped on the sidewalk, and struck his head on the side of the building. A passerby told him he had a gory enough gash to go to the hospital for stitches. For a few days he felt fuzzy, but he told himself nothing was wrong.

  More days went by. It seemed to Gweneth that he was behaving strangely. He awoke in the night and wandered through Michelle’s room. He spent forty-five minutes one day looking for his car, which was parked outside the house. At the house of a model he was drawing, he suddenly undressed and tried to go to sleep; she anxiously told him that he was not at his own home. Finally, after beginning a classroom lecture, he suddenly realized he was speaking disjointed nonsense. He stopped, apologized, and left the room.

  A scan of his brain revealed a massive subdural hematoma, slow bleeding inside the skull that was putting strong pressure on the brain tissue. The doctors sent him directly into surgery, where the standard procedure was performed at once: two holes drilled through the cranium to drain the liquid. By the early hours of the next morning Gweneth was relieved to find him sitting up and speaking normally. He had no memory of the lost three weeks. Afterward the specialist who had performed the scan repeated it to rule out a recurrence. He could not resist scrutinizing this remarkably detailed image of Feynman’s brain, the convoluted gray tissue, the wrapped bundles of nerve fiber (“But you can’t see what I am thinking,” Feynman told him), looking for a sign of something different from all the other sixty-five-year-old brains he had scanned. Were the blood vessels larger? The doctor was not sure.

  Surely You’re Joking!

  Feynman had begun to have autobiographical thoughts around the time of the Nobel Prize. Historians came by to record his recollections, and they treated his notes as artifacts too important to be piled in boxes or strewn about on the shelves in the home office he had made in his basement. Sitting there was Arithmetic for the Practical Man, a relic of his childhood. He still had the adolescent notebook he had sent back and forth to T. A. Welton in the course of reinventing early quantum mechanics. Interviewers set up tape recorders to capture every word of the same stories he had entertained his friends with for decades.

  An MIT historian, Charles Weiner, persuaded him to cooperate in what became the most thorough and serious of his interviews. For a while Feynman considered collaborating with Weiner on a biography. They sat in Feynman’s screened back patio while Carl played in a tree house nearby. He not only told his stories but also demonstrated them: “Okay, start your watch,” he told Weiner; then, after they had conversed for eight minutes and forty-two seconds, he interrupted himself and said, “Eight minutes forty-two seconds.” After many hours the conversation sometimes grew intimate. He rummaged through one box and pulled out a photograph of Arline, reclining almost nude, wearing only translucent lingerie. He almost wept. They shut off the tape recorder and remained silent for a time. Feynman kept most of those memories to himself even now.

  He began dating his scientific notes as he worked, something he had never done before. Weiner once remarked casually that his new parton notes represented “a record of the day-to-day work,” and Feynman reacted sharply.

  “I actually did the work on the paper,” he said.

  “Well,” Weiner said, “the work was done in your head, but the record of it is still here.”

  “No, it’s not a record, not really. It’s working. You have to work on paper, and this is the paper. Okay?” It was true that he wrote in astonishing volume as he worked—long trains of thought, almost suitable to serve immediately as lecture notes.

  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 vacillated and finally let the idea drop. Still, he sat for interviews with historians interested in Far Rockaway and Los Alamos and filled out questionnaires for psychologists interested in creativity. (“Is your scientific problem-solving accompanied by any of the following?” He checked visual images, kinesthetic feelings, and emotional feelings and added “(1) acoustic images, (2) talk to self.” Under “major illnesses” he reported: “Too much to list… . Only adverse effects are laziness during recovery period.”)

  For several years he had played drums regularly with a young friend, Ralph Leighton, the son of another Caltech physicist. Leighton had begun taping their sessions, and then he began taping the stories Feynman would tell. He urged him on, calling him Chief and begging to hear the same stories again and again. Feynman told them: how he became known in Far Rockaway as the boy who fixed radios by thinking; how he asked a Princeton librarian for the map of the cat; how his father taught him to see through the tricks of circus mind readers; how he outwitted painters, mathematicians, philosophers, and psychiatrists. Or he would just ramble while Leighton listened. “Today I went over to the Huntington Medical Library,” he said one day—his remaining kidney was presenting problems. “But it’s all interesting, how the kidney works, and everything else. You want me to tell you some interesting things? The damn kidney is the craziest thing in the world!”

  Gradually a manuscript began to take shape. Leighton transcribed the tapes and presented them to Feynman for editing. Feynman had strong views about the structure of each story; Leighton realized that Feynman had developed a routine of improvisational performance in which he knew the order and pacing of every laugh. They consciously worked on the key themes. Feynman talked about Arline’s having embarrassed him with a box of “Richard darling, I love you! Putzie” pencils:

  RICHARD. And the next morning, all right? Next morning, in the mail, there’s this letter, all right, this postcard, which starts out, “What’s the idea of trying to cut the name off the pencils?”

  RALPH. [Laughs] Oh, boy! [Laugh
s.]

  RICHARD. “What do you care what other people think?”

  RALPH. Oh, this is——Yeah, this is a good theme.

  RICHARD. Hmmm?

  RALPH. This is a good theme, because there’s a theme in here. You know, what other people think …

  They knew they had a remarkable central figure, a scientist who prided himself not on his achievements in science—these remained deep in the background—but on his ability to see through fraud and pretense and to master everyday life. He underscored these qualities with an exaggerated humility; he took the tone of a boy calling the grownups Mr. and Mrs. and asking politely dangerous questions. He was Holden Caulfield, a plain old straight shooter trying to figure out why so many other people are phonies.

  “Pompous fools—guys who are fools and are covering it all over and impressing people as to how wonderful they are with all this hocus pocus—THAT, I CANNOT STAND!” Feynman said. “An ordinary fool isn’t a faker; an honest fool is all right. But a dishonest fool is terrible!”