Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself

by Alan Alda

  It was a maddening process, but finally we were getting ready to open for a run in Los Angeles. We did a preview performance for students and professors from Caltech in Pasadena. Feynman had spent the last decades of his life teaching at Caltech and was beloved there, and we were laying our hearts on the table to show them the play we had devised about their legend.

  The theater was packed with young scientists who knew him better than we did, but they got so caught up in our imaginary Feynman that at one point when I asked a hypothetical question about science, somebody raised his hand and tried to give his answer. The evening was so filled with the thunder of their laughter and the emotion they felt for their hero, we wondered if we’d ever have a night like that again. But we did. We ran for six months in Los Angeles and then played for a season in New York. The theater was full every night, and over the course of our run about fifty thousand people were introduced to Richard Feynman.

  Between the closing in Los Angeles and the New York opening, the attack of 9/11 occurred. We played in New York to an audience completely different from the one we’d been accustomed to. As I came out onstage opening night at Lincoln Center, the attack was only three weeks behind us and Ground Zero just a few dozen blocks from us. At one point in the play, Feynman tells the audience about his experience working on the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos. He describes the sight of the white blast in the desert and his subsequent depression months later. He tells of sitting in a New York restaurant and calculating the destruction spreading out from where he was if the bomb were to go off there, putting him at ground zero. The response from the audience was the most complete stillness I’ve ever heard in a theater. A few months earlier in Los Angeles, audiences had been drawn in, fascinated, by this story of a man who had helped create the most destructive device ever built, but now they were hearing an account not only of their past, but of their possible future. There was a sense of unity and clarity of thought—a thread that ran from Feynman, to Peter Parnell, to me, to the audience, and back to Feynman; it was a sensation I had never known on a stage before.

  The audience had changed. And, through playing Feynman, I was changing, too.

  Because I had interviewed scientists on television for eleven years and then played Feynman, my name was beginning to be associated, in a way, with science. I didn’t mind this for two reasons. First, one of my flaws, which I consider charming, is that I don’t mind appearing smarter than I am. Second, I had learned early in life to make the best use of whatever comes my way. It was how I knew what to work on and sometimes even how I found out who I was. So when I was invited places to talk about science, or help in some way to promote an interest in science, I began to see that I could use this lifelong interest as a way to be helpful. It was tricky, because I wanted to be helpful, but I also knew I was in so far over my head, my hat was floating a mile above me.

  A year or so after we opened QED, I was asked to give the commencement talk at Caltech. I said yes immediately, and immediately, I was terrified. I was still apparently looking for ways to scare myself. I didn’t mind it if people thought I was smarter than I was. But I didn’t really want to show them in public how wrong they were. I agonized over the speech for months. I tried out ideas on friends, and I would watch their faces for signs of interest or, more likely, simple confusion.

  Finally, I decided simply to tell the story of my infatuation with Feynman and the maddening effort of trying to figure out who he was and to get that person on the stage. It was difficult partly because it was so hard to understand his work in quantum mechanics, but it was difficult also because of the complex person he was. Everything we tried diminished him to just one aspect of an ordinary guy. And as much as he wanted to present himself as an ordinary guy, he was as far from ordinary as you can get. As one writer said in the title of a book about Feynman, he was “no ordinary genius.”

  So on a sunny day in 2002, I drove to Caltech, climbed the steps to the rostrum, and looked out over the faces of several thousand people seated in a long esplanade in front of me, many of them graduating with degrees in science. I had come a long way since the days when, shooting M*A*S*H, I had been idly curious about the very place where I was standing.

  Twenty-five or thirty years ago, on my days off from the Korean War, which was at that time being waged at Twentieth Century–Fox in Beverly Hills, I would often come to Pasadena to visit the Rembrandts at the Norton Simon Museum or take a walk in the Huntington Gardens. And sometimes I would drive by Caltech and give it a glance and wonder what interesting stuff was going on in there. I had been reading about science avidly for years, and I was immensely curious about how scientists went about what they did. It didn’t occur to me each time I passed by that there was one particular man in one of these buildings who at that moment might be drawing gluon tubes on a blackboard, or playing the bongos, or just standing looking out the window as a young woman passed by—a man in whom, in a few years, I would become intensely interested.

  One day exactly twenty-eight years ago, he was standing right here, giving the commencement address. (This is the way the universe operates. First Richard Feynman gives the talk; then twenty-eight years later, an actor who played him on the stage gives it. This is what’s called entropy. This is what happens just before the cosmos reaches a temperature of absolute zero.)

  Let me tell you a little about the path that led me here. After I had read several books about Richard Feynman, I brought one of them, a charming, touching book by Ralph Leighton called Tuva or Bust!, to Gordon Davidson at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. I wondered if he thought we might be able to make a play about Feynman. He suggested Peter Parnell to write the play, and the three of us started off on a journey to find out who Richard Feynman was. We thought we’d open the play a year or so later. Instead, it took us over six years.

  We had no idea how hard it would be. For one thing, Feynman was an extremely unusual person. Toward the end of his life, he knew he was dying and he knew exactly what the most important questions were, and he knew he had a shot at answering them…yet he kept to his habit of doing only what interested him.

  He spent a good part of his time trying to get to this little place in the middle of Asia called Tuva, mainly because its capital was spelled with no vowels, which for some reason he found extremely interesting.

  But just as getting to Tuva was tantalizingly difficult for Feynman, getting to Feynman became maddeningly hard for us.

  What part of him do you focus on? He helped create the atomic bomb, he helped figure out why the Challenger blew up, he understood the most puzzling questions in physics so deeply, they gave him the Nobel Prize. Which facet of him do you let catch the most light? The one who was a revered teacher, a bongo player, an artist, a hilarious raconteur, or a safecracker?

  We wanted to make a play about Feynman, but which Feynman?

  A mathematician friend of mine suggested that a central image for a play about him could be Feynman’s own idea of a sum over histories. Just as Feynman saw a photon taking every possible path on its way to your eye, Feynman himself took every possible path on his way through life. He was the sum of all his histories.

  Well, nature may be smart enough to know how to average all the paths of a photon. But we three theater people couldn’t figure out how to add up all the histories that made up Feynman.

  At one point, I said, “You know what we ought to do? We ought to write a play about three guys sitting around in a hotel room, trying to figure out a play about Feynman. They never figure it out. They just drive themselves crazy.”

  We researched him like mad, of course. The people who knew him and worked with him and loved him here at Caltech opened their doors and their hearts to us. They were extremely generous and helpful as we struggled to reduce this irreducible person to an evening in the theater.

  I think one of the things I most hoped would come through was his honesty. He never wanted to deceive anyone, especially himself. He questioned his every ass
umption. And when he was talking to ordinary people with no training in physics, he never fell back on his authority as a great thinker. He felt that if he couldn’t say it in everyday words, he probably didn’t understand it himself.

  I was fascinated by this in him. He knew more than most of us will ever know, yet he insisted on speaking our language.

  Like Dante in his time, he could say the most exquisitely subtle things in the language of the common people. He was an American genius, and like many American artists, he was direct and colloquial…not afraid to take a look at the ordinary and not afraid to go deeply into it to reveal the extraordinary roots of ordinary things.

  And yet he recoiled from oversimplification. He wasn’t interested in dumbing down science…he was looking for clarity.

  If he left something out, he always told you what he was leaving out, so you didn’t get a false picture of a simplicity that wasn’t there. And later, when things got more complex, you were prepared for it.

  It may not seem important exactly how Feynman achieved clarity. Maybe we should just be glad he did it and let it go at that. But I think it is important. Because I think we have to figure out how we can do it, too.

  For one thing, we live in a time when massive means of destruction are right here in our hands. We’re probably the first species capable of doing this much damage to our planet. We can make the birds stop singing; we can still the fish and make the insects fall from the trees like black rain. And ironically, we’ve been brought here by reason, by rationality. We cannot afford to live in a culture that doesn’t use the power in its hands with the kind of rationality that produced it in the first place.

  But right now, instead of reason, a lot of people are making use of wishes, dreams, mantras, and incantations. They’re trying to heal themselves using crystals, magnets, and herbs with unknown properties. People will offer you a pill made from the leaf of an obscure plant and say, “Take it, it can’t hurt you, it’s natural.” But so is deadly nightshade.

  Interestingly, they expect the plant to have active properties to cure them, but they’re certain it has no active properties that can harm them. How do they know that?

  I mention this not to denigrate anyone’s beliefs (I feel strongly that we’re all entitled to our beliefs, just as we’re entitled to our feelings), but I bring it up to point out that we’re in a culture that increasingly holds that science is just another belief.

  And I guess it’s easier to believe something…anything…than not to know.

  We don’t like uncertainty—so we gravitate back to the last comfortable solution we had—no matter how cockeyed it is.

  But Feynman was comfortable with not knowing. He enjoyed it. He would proceed for a while with an idea as if he believed it was the answer. But that was only a temporary belief in order to allow himself to follow it wherever it led. Then, a little while later, he would vigorously attack the idea to see if it could stand up to every test he could think of. If it couldn’t stand up, then he simply decided he just didn’t know. “Not knowing,” he said, “is much more interesting than believing an answer which might be wrong.”

  You’re graduating today partly as Feynman’s heirs in this gloriously courageous willingness to be unsure. And just as he was heir to Newton, who was in turn heir to Galileo…I hope you’ll think about devoting some time to helping the rest of us become your heirs.

  I’m assuming you’re here at Caltech because you love science, and I’m assuming you’ve learned a great deal here about how to do science. I’m asking you today to devote some significant part of your life to figuring out how to share your love of science with the rest of us.

  But not just because explaining to us what you do will get you more funding for what you do…although it surely will…but just because you love what you do.

  And while you’re explaining it, remember that dazzling us with jargon might make us sit in awe of your work, but it won’t make us love it.

  Tell us frankly how you got there. If you got there by many twists and turns and blind alleys, don’t leave that out. We love a detective story. If you enjoyed the adventure of getting there, so will we.

  Most scientists do leave that out. By the time we hear about their great discoveries, a lot of the doubt is gone. The mistakes and wrong turns are left out…and it doesn’t sound like a human thing they’ve done. It separates us from the process.

  Whatever you do, help us love science the way you do.

  Like the young man so head over heels about his sweetheart, he can’t stop talking about her; like the young woman so in love with her young man, she wants everyone to know how wonderful he is…show us pictures, tell us stories, make us crave to meet your beloved.

  Don’t just tell us science is good for us and, therefore, we ought to fund you for it; don’t tell us to trust you that your fancy words actually mean something; don’t keep the tricks of your trade up an elite sleeve. Don’t be merchants, or mandarins, or magicians…be lovers!

  Look, we’re accustomed in our culture to know when a commercial is coming. We know how to turn it off. But love we can’t resist.

  You may be swayed by people who insist they’re only interested in hearing about the practical applications of science. You may be tempted to bend over backward, telling them what they want to hear.

  When Feynman stood here and spoke twenty-eight years ago, he cautioned scientists against going too far in telling laypeople about the wonderful everyday applications of their work, especially if there weren’t any. I don’t think Feynman needed to justify his curiosity about nature. Pure science was pure pleasure. It was fun.

  It’s like the story of the plate.

  The one thing I was certain of from the beginning was that we had to have the story of the plate in the play. It was central. The author, Peter Parnell, would do draft after draft. And I would look at it and say, “Where’s the plate?” I drove him crazy.

  The plate story is this: After the war, Feynman became depressed. His first wife had just died of tuberculosis, and the realization of the awful destructive power of the bomb he had helped make had finally sunk in. He was teaching at Cornell, but he had no taste for it. He couldn’t concentrate. Then, one day, he’s in the school cafeteria and some guy starts fooling around, tossing a plate in the air. Feynman watches the design on the rim of the plate as it spins, and he sees that as it spins, the plate wobbles. He gets fascinated, and he tries to figure out the relationship between the spin and the wobble. He spends months on this and finally comes up with this complicated equation, which he shows to Hans Bethe.

  And Bethe says, “That’s interesting, Feynman, but what’s the importance of it?”

  And Feynman says, “It has no importance, it’s just fun!”

  But, see, that’s the thing—it not only brought him out of his slump, but that playful inquiry, according to Feynman, eventually led in a circuitous way to the work that won him the Nobel Prize.

  But no matter where it might have led him, he made up his mind that day in the cafeteria never to work on anything that didn’t interest him, that wasn’t fun.

  Of course, what Feynman was looking for was serious fun. It was the awe he felt when he looked at nature. And not just the official great wonders of nature, but any little part of nature, because any little part of it is as amazing and beautiful and complicated as the whole thing is.

  So, this is interesting. I’m urging you to be like someone whom I admit I’ve found to be pretty elusive.

  Here I am, seven years later. And just as Feynman never got to see Tuva, I never really found Feynman. Not really. I came close; but he was too many things. He had too many histories.

  We came up with a play in QED that was immensely satisfying. It was beautifully written and beautifully directed, and it gave the audience a Feynman that was as close an approximation as we could come up with. But part of me feels that a large chunk of the man is still beyond our reach—probably beyond the reach of anyone. He’s just out of sight,
smiling at us. Laughing at how he put one over on us, letting us think he was just an ordinary guy. A guy we could get.

  It turns out, though, that the old thing about the destination not being as valuable as the journey really is true.

  Because when we began, finding Feynman seemed important, and I guess it was…but as it turned out, looking for Feynman has been the fun.

  Every once in a while, though, I can feel Feynman looking over my shoulder, and he’s not smiling. Like right now. I’m at the end of my talk, and I feel the pressure of the words he closed his talk with twenty-eight years ago. “One last piece of advice,” he said. “Never say you’ll give a talk unless you know clearly what you’re going to talk about and more or less what you’re going to say.”

  In other words, where are the brass tacks?

  I had been looking for something I could offer these young scientists that was more useful than admiration. And it was through playing Feynman that I found it. Feynman and I were light-years apart, but two things we shared were curiosity and a desire to see science communicated clearly. I took a chance and challenged them.