Genius

by James Gleick

  Physicists’ models are like maps: never final, never complete until they grow as large and complex as the reality they represent. Einstein compared physics to the conception a person might assemble of the interior mechanism of a closed watch: he might build a plausible model to account for the rhythmic ticking, the sweep of the hands, but he could never be certain. “He may also believe in the existence of the ideal limit of knowledge and that it is approached by the human mind,” Einstein said. “He may call this ideal limit the objective truth.” It was a simpler time. In Feynman’s era, knowledge advanced, but the ideal of objective truth receded deeper into the haze beyond the vision of science. Quantum theory had left an impossible question dangling in the air. One physicist chose to answer it by quoting Feynman, “one of the great philosophers of our time, whose view of the matter I have taken the liberty of quoting in the form of the poetry it surely is”:

  We have always had a great deal of difficulty

  understanding the world view

  that quantum mechanics represents.

  At least I do,

  because I’m an old enough man

  that I haven’t got to the point

  that this stuff is obvious to me.

  Okay, I still get nervous with it….

  You know how it always is,

  every new idea,

  it takes a generation or two

  until it becomes obvious

  that there’s no real problem….

  I cannot define the real problem,

  therefore I suspect there’s no real problem,

  but I’m not sure

  there’s no real problem.

  In October 1987 another abdominal tumor appeared, and his doctors made one last attempt to stall his cancer surgically. 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.” He knew he was not recovering. He was sixty-nine years old. Pain wracked one of his legs. He was exhausted. He had no appetite. In January he began awakening in the night with sweats and chills. In one corner of his dusty office blackboard he had written a pair of self-conscious mottoes: “What I cannot create I do not understand” and “Know how to solve every problem that has been solved.” Nearby was a running list under the heading, “TO LEARN” (“Bethe Ansatz Prob., 2D Hall …”). Physics changed; he talked about it once with his old Los Alamos friend Stanislaw Ulam, who had been watching a few white clouds roll against the blue New Mexico sky. Feynman seemed to read his mind: “It is really like the shape of clouds,” he said. “As one watches them they don’t seem to change, but if you look back a minute later, it is all very different.” He had not accumulated much: a hand-knitted scarf, hanging on a peg, from some students in Yugoslavia; a photograph of Michelle with her cello; some black-and-white pictures of the aurora borealis; his deep leather recliner; a sketch he had made of Dirac; a van painted with chocolate-brown Feynman diagrams. On February 3 he entered the UCLA Medical Center again.

  Doctors in the intensive care unit discovered a ruptured duodenal ulcer. They administered antibiotics. But his remaining kidney had failed. One round of dialysis was performed, with little effect. Feynman refused the further dialysis that might have prolonged his life for weeks or months. He told Michelle calmly, “I’m going to die,” in a tone that said: I have decided. He was watched and guarded now by the three women who had loved him longest: Gweneth, Joan, and his cousin Frances Lewine, who had lived with him in the house in Far Rockaway. Morphine for pain and an oxygen tube were their last concessions to medicine. The doctors said it would take about five days. He had watched one death before—trying to be scientific, observing the descent into coma and the sporadic breathing, imagining the brain clouding as it was starved of oxygen. He had anticipated his own—toying with the release of consciousness in dark sensory-deprivation tanks, telling a friend that he had now taught people most of the good stuff he knew, and making his peace with bottomless nature:

  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.

  He drifted toward unconsciousness. His eyes dimmed. Speech became an exertion. Gweneth watched as he drew himself together, prepared a phrase, and released it: “I’d hate to die twice. It’s so boring.” After that, he tried to communicate by shifting his head or squeezing the hand that clasped his. Shortly before midnight on February 15, 1988, his body gasped for air that the oxygen tube could not provide, and his space in the world closed. An imprint remained: what he knew; how he knew.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I never met Feynman. I’ve relied on the published (and semipublished) record; on his own accumulation of personal letters, notes to himself, and other documents, released to me in 1988 by Gweneth Howarth Feynman; on letters shared by other family members and friends; on his office files and other documents stored in the California Institute of Technology Archives in Pasadena; on early material collected at the Niels Bohr Library of the American Institute of Physics in New York. I obtained recently declassified notebooks and papers from the archives of Los Alamos National Laboratory. Other material came from the libraries and manuscript collections of the following institutions: the American Philosophical Society (papers of H. D. Smyth and J. A. Wheeler); the Brooklyn Historical Society; Cornell University (papers of H. A. Bethe); Far Rockaway High School; Harvard University; the Library of Congress (papers of J. R. Oppenheimer); the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Princeton University; Rockefeller University; and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.

  The leading physicists who play the largest roles in this book agreed to provide their own recollections in interviews that sometimes extended over many sessions: Hans Bethe, Freeman Dyson, Murray Gell-Mann, Julian Schwinger, Victor Weisskopf, John Archibald Wheeler, and Robert R. Wilson.

  Feynman’s own voice is everywhere in his published work, of course, and toward the end of his life, wherever he went, tape recorders and video cameras seemed to be running. But several interviews of Feynman by historians and others were especially valuable. The deepest and most comprehensive—a central resource for anyone studying Feynman—is an oral history of many hundreds of pages conducted by Charles Weiner for the American Institute of Physics in 1966 and 1973; I used Feynman’s copy of the transcript, with his handwritten corrections and comments. I also consulted the AIP’s oral-history interviews with Bethe, Dyson, William A. Fowler, Werner Heisenberg, Philip Morrison, and others. The physicist and historian Silvan S. Schweber kindly shared the tape of his revealing 1980 interview on the development of quantum electrodynamics and on Feynman’s style of visualization. Lillian Hoddeson conducted a useful interview of Feynman for her technical history of Los Alamos. Robert Crease gave me the transcript of an interview for his and Charles Mann’s The Second Creation. Christopher Sykes gave me access to the uncut interview he conducted for what became the 1981 BBC-TV production, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. Sali Ann Kriegsman gave me her transcript of Feynman’s recollections of Far Rockaway.

  Ralph Leighton, who drew from Feynman the reminiscences that became Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think?, generously provided the original tapes of these interviews over nearly a decade. These are the stories that Feynman retold and refined over his lifetime—mostly accurate, but strongly filtered. I have tried not to lean on them too heavily, for rea
sons that I hope emerge in the text.

  Feynman’s family members also spoke with me at length: Gweneth, Joan, Carl, and Michelle Feynman and Frances Lewine. Helen J. Tuck, his secretary of many years, shared her invaluable memories and perceptive comments.

  Among the many other colleagues, students, friends, and observers of Feynman who helped me by submitting to interviews or providing written recollections—and in some cases copies of letters and diary pages—were Jan Anbjørn, Robert Bacher, Michel Baranger, Barry Barish, Henry H. Barschall, Mary Louise Bell, Rose Bethe, Jerry Bishop, James Bjorken, Peter A. Carruthers, Robert F. Christy, Michael Cohen, Sidney Coleman, Monarch L. Cutler, Predrag Cvitanović, Cecile DeWitt-Morette, Russell J. Donnelly, Sidney Drell, Leonard Eisenbud, Timothy Ferris, Richard D. Field, Michael E. Fisher, Evelyn Frank, Steven Frautschi, Edward Fredkin, Sheldon Clashow, Marvin Goldberger, David Goodstein, Frances R. (Rose McSherry) Graham, William R. Graham, Jules Greenbaum, Bruce Gregory, W. Conyers Herring, Simeon Hutner, Albert Hibbs, Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gerald Holton, John L. Joseph, Daniel Kevles, Sándor J. Kovács, Donald J. Kutyna, Janijoy La Belle, Leo Lavatelli, Ralph Leighton, Charles Lifer, Leite Lopes, Edward Maisel, Anne Tilghman Wilson Marks, Robert E. Marshak, Leonard Mautner, Robert M. May, William H. McLellan, Carver Mead, Nicholas Metropolis, Maurice A. Meyer, Philip Morrison, Masako Ohnuki, Paul Olum, Abraham Pais, David Park, John Polkinghorne, Burton Richter, John S. Rigden, Michael Riordan, Daniel Robbins, Matthew Sands, David Sanger, J. Robert Schrieffer, Theodore Schultz, Al Seckel, Barry Simon, Cyril Stanley Smith, Norris Parker Smith, Novera H. Spector, Millard Susman, Kip S. Thome, Yung-Su Tsai, John Tukey, Tom van Sant, Dorothy Walker, Robert L. Walker, Steven Weinberg, Charles Weiner, Theodore A. Welton, Arthur S. Wightman, Jane Wilson, Stephen Wolfram, and George Zweig.

  Two indispensable histories of twentieth-century physics are Kevles, The Physicists, and Pais, Inward Bound.

  I’m especially grateful to Mitchell Feigenbaum and Silvan S. Schweber for patient guidance and sharp insights on matters of physics. I particularly thank Schweber for letting me read the manuscript-in-progress of his forthcoming history of quantum electrodynamics, QED: 1946–1950: An American Success Story. I thank Predrag Cvitanovi? for permission to quote his fable of Quefithe. Robert Chadwell Williams, a biographer of Klaus Fuchs, sent a helpful mass of archival material relating to the Manhattan Project. I benefited from discussions with Joseph N. Straus and Hugh Wolff about genius, music, and music theory.

  Cheryl Colbert lent me her intelligent and resourceful assistance. Emilio Millan shared a useful file of clippings and other documents that he had collected.

  This book owes an enormous obligation to the skills of my editor, Daniel Frank, and my agent, Michael Carlisle.

  As always, the indescribable debt is to Cynthia Crossen, who for so long endured, among other things, that strange, persistent presence of an extra soul in our household.

  J. G.

  Brooklyn, New York

  8 July 1992

  NOTES

  ABBREVIATIONS

  AIP: Niels Bohr Library, Center for the History of Physics, American Institute of Physics.

  BET: H. A. Bethe papers, Cornell University.

  CIT: California Institute of Technology Archives.

  CPL: The Character of Physical Law.

  F-H: Interview with Lillian Hoddeson and Gordon Baym, 16 April 1979. LANL.

  F-L: Interviews with Ralph Leighton. Tapes courtesy of Leighton.

  F-Sch: Interview with Silvan S. Schweber, 13 November 1988. Tape courtesy of Schweber.

  F-Sy: Interview with Christopher Sykes, recorded in preparation for The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, BBC-TV, 1981. Tape courtesy of Sykes.

  F-W: Interviews with Charles Werner, 4 March 1966, 27–28 June 1966, and 4 February 1973. AIP.

  FOI: Feynman’s FBI files and documents from other federal agencies, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

  LANL: Los Alamos National Laboratory Archives.

  Lectures: The Feynman Lectures on Physics.

  LOC: Library of Congress.

  MIT: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries.

  NL: “The Development of the Space-Time View of Quantum Electrodynamics.” Nobel lecture (Feynman 1965a; cf. Feynman 1965b and 1965c). For convenience, page numbers refer to the Weaver 1987 reprint.

  OPP: J. R. Oppenheimer papers. LOC.

  PERS: Personal papers obtained by the author.

  PUL: Princeton University Libraries.

  QED: QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter.

  SMY: H. D. Smyth papers, American Philosophical Society.

  SYJ: Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!

  WDY: What Do You Care What Other People Think?

  WHE: J. A. Wheeler papers, American Philosophical Society.

  PROLOGUE

  The account of the Pocono meeting is based on interviews with several of the participants (Hans Bethe, Robert Marshak, Abraham Pais, Julian Schwinger, Victor Weisskopf, and John Archibald Wheeler), on Feynman’s account in Physics Today (Feynman 1948d) and his recollections in F-W, on Wheeler’s handwritten and mimeographed notes (Wheeler 1948), on correspondence in the J. R. Oppenheimer papers, on historical essays by Silvan S. Schweber (1985 and forthcoming), and on my visit to the site.

  3 NOTHING IS CERTAIN: Feynman to Arline Feynman, 9 May 1945, PERS.

  3 IT GNAWED AT HIM: Feynman 1975, 132.

  3 WOMEN SIDLED AWAY: AIP, 423.

  3 HALF GENIUS AND HALF BUFFOON: Freeman Dyson to his parents, 8 March 1948; Dyson, interview, Princeton, N.J.

  4 NO TRANSCRIPT: John Archibald Wheeler made and later circulated several dozen pages of handwritten notes, however (Wheeler 1948).

  5 PRINCIPLES: “Addresses,” notebook, PERS.

  6 THE MOST BRILLIANT YOUNG PHYSICIST: “He is by all odds the most brilliant young physicist here, and everyone knows this.” Smith and Weiner 1980, 268.

  6 THE KEY EQUATION: Hans Bethe, interview, Ithaca, N.Y.

  6 TWISTING A CONTROL KNOB: Victor Weisskopf had brought the trains from Russia. “He played the following game. The guy with the switches has to avoid an accident and the other one has to produce an accident. It was the most nervewracking game you can imagine, and Dick was absolutely into it. It didn’t matter which role he played.” Weisskopf, interview, Cambridge, Mass.

  6 WHAT ABOUT THE EXCLUSION PRINCIPLE?: F-W, 471.

  7 IS IT UNITARY?: Ibid., 472.

  7 THIS WONDERFUL VISION OF THE WORLD: Dyson 1979, 62.

  7 THANK GOD: W.H. Auden, “After Reading a Child’s Guide to Modern Physics,” Selected Poetry of W. H. Auden (New York: Vintage, 1971), 214.

  7 A POEM FEYNMAN DETESTED: Feynman to Mrs. Robert Weiner, 24 October 1967, CIT. Auden wrote, “This passion of our kind/For the process of finding out/Is a fact one can hardly doubt”—and Feynman resented his adding, “But I would rejoice in it more/If I knew more clearly what/We wanted the knowledge for.” Feynman said: “We want it so we can love Nature more… . A modern poet is directly confessing not understanding the emotional value of knowledge of nature.”

  9 WE PUT OUR FOOT IN A SWAMP: Albert R. Hibbs, interview, Pasadena, Calif.

  9 A LITTLE BIZARRE: Snow 1981, 142–43.

  10 A SHALLOW WAY TO JUDGE: Morrison 1988, 42.

  10 WE GOT THE INDELIBLE IMPRESSION: David Park, personal communication.

  10 DICK COULD GET AWAY WITH A LOT: Sidney Coleman, interview, Cambridge, Mass.

  10 FEYNMAN TRIED TO STAND ON HIS OWN: Kac 1985, 116.

  10 THERE ARE TWO KINDS OF GENIUSES: Ibid., XXV.

  11 ANGERED HIS FAMILY: E.g., Gweneth Feynman, interview, Altadena, Calif.; Gell-Mann 1989a, 50.

  11 HE’S NO FEYNMAN, BUT: Morrison 1988, 42.

  12 A HALF-SERIOUS DEBATE: Coleman, interview.

  12 BOOK II, CHAPTER 41, VERSE 6: D. Goodstein 1989, 75.

  13 PHILOSOPHERS ARE ALWAYS ON THE OUTSIDE: CPL, 173.

  13 IT HAS NOT YET BECOME OBVIOUS: Feynman 1982,
471.

  13 DO NOT KEEP SAYING TO YOURSELF: CPL, 129

  13 NATURE USES ONLY THE LONGEST THREADS: Ibid., 34; draft, PERS.

  15 AN OFFICIAL SECRECY ORDER: U. S. Department of Commerce Rescinding Order, 7 January 1966, CIT.

  15 HE DID THE TRAINING IN STAGES: Ralph Leighton, interview, Pasadena.

  16 A TWO-HANDED POLYRHYTHM: Theodore Schultz, interview, Yorktown Heights, N.Y.

  16 AN HONEST MAN: Schwinger 1989, 48.

  FAR ROCKAWAY

  Family members and childhood friends provided recollections and copies of correspondence from the 1920s and 1930s: Joan Feynman, Frances Lewine, Jules Greenbaum (Arline Greenbaum’s brother), Leonard Mautner, Jerry Bishop, Mary D. Lee, and Novera H. Spector. Far Rockaway High School and the Brooklyn Historical Society had records, school newspapers, Chamber of Commerce publications, and other useful documents from the period. Sali Ann Kriegsman and Charles Weiner kindly shared transcripts of oral-history interviews they had conducted with Lucille Feynman.

  18 HE ASSEMBLED A CRYSTAL SET: F-W, 35.

  18 WHEN ATMOSPHERIC CONDITIONS WERE RIGHT: SYJ, 5.

  18 EINSTEIN WAS SHOWING: Einstein 1909.

  18 IT SEEMS THAT THE AETHER: Weyl 1922, 172.

  19 “THE SHADOW” and “UNCLE DON”: F-W, 35.

  19 A COIL SALVAGED FROM A FORD: SYJ, 4.

  19 STANDARD EMERGENCY PROCEDURE: Frances Lewine, interview, Washington, D.C., and Far Rockaway.

  19 DANGLING HIS METAL WASTEBASKET: Lucille Feynman to Feynman, 8 August 1945, PERS.

  19 HIS SISTER, JOAN: Joan Feynman, interview, Pasadena.

  20 RICHARD WALKED TO THE LIBRARY: Feynman, interview conducted by Sali Ann Kriegsman, 27 October 1975.

  21 WHEN I WAS A CHILD: Kazin 1951, 8–10.

  21 IT SOMETIMES SEEMED THAT THE THINGS NEAR THE SEA: Feynman-Kriegsman.

  21 SOMETIMES FELT GAWKY: Evelyn Frank, interview, Marina del Rey, Calif.

  22 IF WE STAND ON THE SHORE: Lectures, II-2-1.