Richard Feynman

by John Gribbin

  Just before Feynman had joined Phi Beta Delta, the fraternity had almost collapsed because of a conflict of interest between its members. About half the fraternity brothers were wild socialites, who had cars, knew all about girls and organized dances. The rest were serious academic types, who studied all the time, were socially gauche and never went to the dances. In Surely You’re Joking, Feynman recounts how, in order to avoid breaking apart entirely, the fraternity members had got together and agreed to help each other. Everybody in the fraternity had to achieve a certain grade level in their courses, and if one of the socialites was having difficulty then the academics were obliged to help them get up to the required standard. In return, everybody, including the academics, had to go to every dance. The socialites would help by teaching the others how to dance and other social niceties, and even by making sure that they each had a date for the evening. Apparently, the system worked beautifully, and was an ideal way for Feynman to learn how to socialize. ‘It was’, he said, ‘a good balancing act.’

  Not that he didn’t have some difficulty with the lessons. It had to be explained to him, for example, that it was not done to invite waitresses to the dance, and although he still lacked the confidence to disregard their advice in this regard, he couldn’t resist teasing his new friends with displays of the stereotypical Brooklyn character that he later played to perfection. On one occasion, a date was arranged for him with a girl called Pearl. Before he met her, he made a great play of pronouncing her name ‘Poil’ to his peers, who were horrified that he would let them down on the big occasion. So when he met the girl – pronouncing her name perfectly, of course – he explained to her that he was going to have a little joke at the expense of the other fraternity members, and spent the whole evening introducing her to friends at the dance as ‘my goil, Poil’.

  But as well as confirming his fondness for pranks and eagerness to puncture pomposity, the story highlights another facet of Feynman – the way he was able to charm people, especially women, into going along with him even if, as in the case of ‘Poil’, they had only just met. It is easy to imagine the average guy, even if he had dreamed up this prank, being met with a distinctly frosty reception when he explained it to the girl. But not Dick, as he was now becoming known to his friends. He was tall enough, at just under six foot, and certainly dark and handsome, devastatingly attractive, amusing, and, when he wanted to be, charming.

  If nothing else, the kind of behaviour typified by the ‘Poil’ incident helped to ensure that from the moment he arrived at MIT, Feynman was never known as a sissy. He made doubly sure on an occasion early in his time there when a gang of sophomores raided the Phi Beta Delta house intending to tie the freshmen up, take them out into the woods and dump them there for a long walk home.* In order not to look like a sissy, instead of going along quietly Feynman fought so vigorously that it took several of the older students to subdue him, and he gained an immediate reputation for being a tough guy that nobody ought to mess with. The exaggerated Brooklynese was all that he needed, after that, to maintain the reputation.

  Throughout his time at MIT, though, Feynman’s real ‘goil’ was still Arline. By mutual agreement, he went out with other girls when she wasn’t around, and she went out with other guys, but they wrote to each other and Arline became almost part of the Feynman family, visiting the house in Far Rockaway to give piano lessons to Joan, painting with Melville, and going to cookery classes with Lucille. She also visited MIT occasionally, and they saw each other during the vacations – it was during the midwinter break of Feynman’s freshman year that they agreed to marry when he had finished his studies, and from then on they regarded themselves as engaged.

  But the romance was not all plain sailing, even before Arline became ill. One summer, Richard stayed in Boston, working in a summer job for Chrysler, investigating friction. Arline had arranged a job in Scituate, about twenty miles away, in order to be near him, but was talked out of it by Melville Feynman. In spite of her now being a family friend, as well as Richard’s girl, Melville seems to have been concerned that she might have an adverse influence on Richard’s career. In those days, marriage was out of the question for a student, and Melville had put everything he had – not just money, but a major emotional investment – into giving his son a chance to become a real scientist. He wasn’t going to let anything stand in the way of that. Nevertheless, the couple still got together a few times during that summer.

  By then, Richard was no longer a mathematician. Some time during his first year at MIT, Feynman had begun to ask himself what mathematics was really useful for, and decided that the only thing you could do in the way of a career in maths was teach it to somebody else. In an initial over-reaction, seeking something more practical, he switched his major at first to electrical engineering; but then he realized that he had gone too far, and switched again into the middle ground as a physics major. That gave him the opportunity for the ‘hands on’ laboratory work that he loved (one of his favourite undergraduate experiments involved measuring the speed of light), but also gave free rein for his more abstract thinking about the nature of things. But whatever the course he was officially signed up for, throughout his time at MIT Feynman continued to learn more science from books and discussions with other bright students than from the standard undergraduate courses. He also benefited from the flexibility of MIT in allowing any student who was bright enough to take any course on offer, no matter how advanced it was supposed to be.

  In his freshman year – when he was already, remember, doing the sophomore course in mathematics – Feynman’s roommates at the fraternity house were two senior students, Art Cohen and Bill Crossman. They were taking an advanced course in physics, intended for seniors and graduate students, which had recently been devised by John Slater. It was based on his own book Introduction to Theoretical Physics. Slater was the head of the physics department at MIT, and had worked in Europe, where he had learned first hand about the new quantum mechanics; the course didn’t quite go that far, but it did introduce the new atomic theory and the wave concepts that were becoming so important in quantum physics. Unlike some of his contemporaries, however, Slater didn’t worry about the seemingly mystical aspects of quantum theory – the way in which an entity could be both particle and wave, or the way in which a photon seemed to know in advance about the set-up of the experiment with two holes before it passed through the apparatus. He was a pragmatist, who asked only that theories should be able to predict the outcome of experiments with reasonable accuracy, a philosophy that he tried to pass on to his students. Just how the photon got from A to B didn’t matter, as long as the theory could tell you that it would indeed, if it started out from A in a certain way, end up at B.

  Feynman used to listen to Cohen and Crossman discussing problems they had been set in Slater’s course. After a couple of months, he was confident enough to chip in when they were worrying about how to solve some problem. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘why don’t you try Baronally’s equation?’ Cohen and Crossman had never heard of ‘Baronally’. The trouble was, being self-taught and only ever having seen the name in a book, he had hopelessly mispronounced the name ‘Bernoulli’. But eventually communication was established. They tried the equation, and it worked. From then on, the two seniors were always ready to discuss their physics problems with Feynman, and although he couldn’t do them all, he often knew some trick, like Bernoulli’s equation, that would set them on the right trail. And by talking about the problems, of course, he picked up a lot more so-called advanced physics. By the end of the year, he had decided that he knew enough to tackle the course (aimed, remember, at seniors and graduate students) in his sophomore year.2

  When he turned up to register for the course, Feynman was wearing his Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) uniform, which was compulsory for first-and second-year students. All the seniors and graduate students wore their everyday clothes. They had green or brown cards to fill in to register, corresponding to their status; Feynm
an had a pink card. In addition, he looked even younger than he really was. It all made him feel good; he liked to be seen as the boy genius. This time, though, he wasn’t alone. Another student in ROTC uniform, carrying a pink card, came and sat next to him. It was another boy genius, another sophomore, Ted Welton, who also had enough self-confidence to sign up for the advanced course.

  The two prodigies cautiously got to know each other, verbally circling around one another to see if they would be rivals or friends. Feynman noticed that Welton was carrying a book on differential calculus that he had wanted to get out of the library. Welton discovered that a book he had been trying to find in the library had been taken out by Feynman. Feynman claimed he had taught himself quantum mechanics already, using Dirac’s book; Welton claimed that he had learned all about the General Theory of Relativity. Each was impressed by the other. They decided that ‘cooperation in the struggle against a crew of aggressive-looking seniors and graduate students might be mutually beneficial’,3 and soon became firm friends.

  Even among the aggressive-looking seniors and graduate students, Feynman stood out. For the first semester, the course was taught by Julius Stratton, a young physicist who certainly knew his stuff (he went on to become President of MIT) but sometimes didn’t prepare his presentation with due care and attention. Whenever he got stuck in the middle of a lecture, he would turn to the audience and ask, ‘Mr Feynman, how did you handle this problem?’, and Dick would take over. ‘I note’, Welton recalled many years later, ‘that Stratton never entrusted his lecture to me or to any other student.’4

  Quantum mechanics appeared formally in the second semester of the course, and was taught by another young physicist, Philip Morse. Feynman and Welton, having worked together through some introductory texts by then, swallowed this up and were eager for more. They asked Morse where they could go for the real quantum nitty gritty, and as a result he invited them, during their junior year, to visit him one afternoon a week, along with a promising student in his senior year, for special tuition in the subject. Eventually Morse gave them real problems to solve using quantum mechanics – such as the separation of the energy levels for the electron in a hydrogen atom. This brought home to them, forcefully, that it wasn’t just some abstract theory, but practical science which could indeed be used to solve real problems.

  Feynman also swallowed up courses in chemistry, metallurgy, experimental physics and optics – anything scientific was meat and drink to him. When a new course in theoretical nuclear physics, intended for graduate students, was offered for the first time at MIT, he went along to sign up for that as well. There was a crowd of students already in the room, and Morse was sitting on the window sill. He looked up, and asked if Feynman intended to register for the course. Feynman replied that he did. Morse asked if Welton was coming along. Feynman said yes. Good, said Morse; that meant they could start. It turned out that the rules required at least three students to enrol formally on the course, for credit, before it could be given. Only one of the graduate students had been willing to sign up for it. The others were afraid that they might flunk it, damaging their grade averages, but were eager to sit in on the course as observers, without being examined on the subject, if it did take place. So two of the three officially enrolled students for the new graduate course were actually undergraduates. Feynman, in the end, found it all quite straightforward – and passed the graduate course with flying colours.

  There was one outstanding oddity about the way Feynman did his science at MIT, in the light of how he later made his mark in science. He liked to solve problems ‘properly’, by working out the relevant equations – in the case of a ball flying through the air, for example, this would involve solving Newton’s equations of motion. There was an easier way, which the students at MIT were taught, called the Lagrangian approach, after the French mathematician Joseph Louis Lagrange, who lived from 1736 to 1813 and was made a Count by Napoleon Bonaparte. The beauty of the Lagrangian approach is that it doesn’t involve calculating the changing forces and accelerations affecting, in this example, the flight of a moving object instant by instant, but deals only with the overall energies involved and the elapsed time.

  Sound familiar? The Lagrangian approach is, indeed, directly based on the Principle of Least Action, that Feynman had fallen in love with when it had been introduced to him by Bader in high school. Why he eschewed this approach as an undergraduate remains a mystery, but the most likely explanation is his love of both problem solving (preferably from first principles) and showing off. While his fellow students, including Welton, were solving the problems the easy way, using the Lagrangian, Feynman would solve them even more quickly (in almost all cases) the hard way, integrating the equations of motion as laid down by Newton – a technique often known as the Hamiltonian method, after the 19th-century Irish mathematician William Hamilton. This involved working with ‘the Hamiltonian’, an appropriate set of differential equations describing the system being investigated.

  ‘My way would take ingenuity,’ Feynman later said,5 ‘whereas the trick of the Lagrangian was that you could do it blindfold.’ Shades of the old days of the Interscholastic Algebra League! The trouble was, for the problems the students were given at undergraduate level, the Lagrangian approach was simply too easy for Feynman to bother with; it hardly gave him scope to exercise his brain. But he learned the approach anyway, if only to be able to test it against the conventional methods, such as the Hamiltonian approach, and see which was really quickest in a variety of situations. And in a few years’ time, when he came up against some really tricky problems, he was happy to use the technique to solve them.

  But if Feynman found the science taught at MIT so easy that he had to make his own difficulties in order to make the problem solving more interesting, outside the sciences it was a different matter. In a letter to a friend soon after he started at MIT, Feynman described the courses he was taking as ‘physics, math, chemistry, ROTC, English; in decreasing order of pleasure I get out of them’.6 But he soon found something even worse than English that he had to struggle with in order to keep up his overall grades and be allowed to graduate.

  MIT quite rightly required all their students to take (and pass) three humanities courses, in order to become at least slightly more well rounded as citizens by the time they graduated. English, like it or not, was compulsory, but to Feynman’s delight he found astronomy listed as a humanities course, so that was no problem. But for his third choice, after rejecting possibilities such as French literature, he was left with philosophy, which at least sounded as if it ought to have some bearing on science. But he was wrong, at least as far as the philosophy being taught to undergraduates at MIT in the 1930s was concerned.

  In Surely You’re Joking, he explained how he scraped through the English and philosophy courses without bringing shame to the fraternity – for, of course, in these cases the boot was on the other foot, and it was Feynman who was obliged to seek help and advice from the others in order to achieve the standard that the fraternity felt was acceptable for one of its members.

  In English, for example, on one occasion the assignment was to write a theme on Goethe’s Faust. Feynman was in despair, unable to come up with anything, and threatening not to hand in any work at all. His fraternity brothers persuaded him that he had to write something – anything – just to prove that he wasn’t trying to get out of doing the work. So he wrote an essay on the theme ‘On the Limitations of Reason’, discussing the relevance of moral values, scientific methods of reasoning and so on. But there was nothing about Faust. One of the fraternity brothers read the theme, and advised Feynman that what he should now do was add a few lines linking what he had said to Faust. It seemed ridiculous, but under pressure from his peers Feynman complied, adding half a page saying that Mephistopheles represents reason, Faust the spiritual, and that Goethe’s aim in writing Faust was, indeed, to show the limitations of reason.

  The professor was completely taken in. He commented that
the introductory material was good, even if the direct references to Faust were rather brief, and awarded Feynman a B+. More confirmation that English was a ‘dippy’ subject – but the grade was up to the requirements demanded by the fraternity.

  Philosophy, though, was beyond mere dippiness. According to Feynman, the professor who gave those classes, an old man with a beard, mumbled so much that Dick could not understand a word he was saying. To pass the time in class, Feynman used to drill holes in the sole of his shoe, using a one-sixteenth drill bit that he carried in his pocket, twisting it between his fingers. The crunch came when it was time to write a theme at the end of the course. The only words that Feynman could recall from the weeks of lectures were ‘stream of consciousness’. That gave him the idea of writing about what happens to the stream of consciousness when you go to sleep – how does it switch off?

  Formulated that way, the project became a scientific experiment. There were four weeks to go before the theme had to be handed in, and every afternoon (as well, of course, as every night) Feynman would go to his room, lie down and go to sleep, while trying to observe mentally what was happening. He noticed, among other things, that as he dropped off to sleep the flow of ideas still seemed to his consciousness to be logically connected, even as they became more jumbled. He watched his mind ‘turning off’, and wrote a theme about his experiences. To round it off, he ended with a little verse:

  I wonder why. I wonder why.

  I wonder why I wonder.

  I wonder why I wonder why

  I wonder why I wonder!