by John Gribbin
At the end of the course, instead of a final lecture the professor picked out a few of the better themes to read to the class. To Feynman, sitting twisting his drill bit into the sole of his shoe, it was the same old gibberish. As far as he could tell, the professor was mumbling something along the lines of ‘Mum bum wugga mum bum … ‘Dick had no idea what the theme was about. The professor came to another theme, and read on: ‘Mugga wugga mum bum wugga wugga …’ Neither Dick nor his drill bit had a clue what it was about, until the professor got to the end, and recited:
Uh wugga wuh. Uh wugga wuh.
Uh wugga wugga wugga.
Uh wugga wuh uh wugga wuh
Uh wugga wugga wugga.
It was only then that Feynman realized his contribution had been singled out for praise.7 He got an A for his theme, without having understood anything the professor had tried to teach during the course. In English, he had at least been aware of the plot of Faust, and made some effort to mention it in his theme. His belief that philosophy was completely idiotic was reinforced, but again he had achieved a good enough grade.
In fact, during his time at MIT Feynman didn’t do anything outside science unless he had to. ROTC was compulsory, so he joined; but he didn’t join any other clubs or societies. The fraternity dances were compulsory, so he went along, and benefited enormously from the experience; but otherwise his idea of a wild time was discussing physics with Welton. He was aware of the financial pressures on his family, and earned what money he could to help out. But he didn’t work behind the counter in a drug store, or pumping gas; he worked as an assistant doing various odd jobs for the professors at MIT, and in summer jobs with a scientific flavour. Somewhere along the line, though, one of his lifetime hobbies, drumming, got started while he was at MIT (the other hobby, art, got started much later). He banged on walls, tables, pots and pans – anything he could use to beat a rhythm – and enjoyed listening to African drum music, although he never enjoyed ‘ordinary’ music, and described himself as being tone deaf.
Feynman’s scientific achievements as an undergraduate, especially in his senior year, were so good that he had two scientific papers published in the Physical Review before he even graduated (more about those pieces of work in Chapter 4). He liked MIT, and wanted to stay on there to do research, working for his PhD. It was the only scientific world he knew, and he thought it must be the best school in the country – if not the entire world – to do science. But Slater, who knew the high-flying student well by then, wouldn’t permit it. He told Feynman that he had to go to another school to complete his education, and Feynman was later grateful for the advice. ‘Slater was right. I learned that the world is bigger and there are many good places.’8 The ‘good place’ that Feynman went to, after he graduated from MIT in 1939, was Princeton.
As early as January 1939, Slater and Morse had advised their colleagues at Princeton that something special was coming up. The advice was necessary, because Feynman’s academic record was a bizarre mixture of the nearly perfect and the truly dreadful. John Wheeler, who became Feynman’s thesis adviser at Princeton, has told how baffled the Graduate Admissions Committee at Princeton was by Feynman’s scores in the standard aptitude tests.9 In physics, he was literally perfect – 100 per cent. The maths score was nearly as good – both were the best the Committee had ever seen. But they had never admitted anyone with such low scores in history and English (it doesn’t bear thinking how low those scores would have been without all that help from his fraternity brothers). What tipped the balance was his practical experience in chemistry and investigating friction. The odd jobs for the professors at MIT, and the summer job for Chrysler, paid a dividend that Feynman can never have anticipated, and he was duly admitted to Princeton in the autumn of 1939.
There had been one other, almost unmentionable, hurdle to overcome. Princeton didn’t actually have a formal Jewish quota, but on the other hand they didn’t want the place overrun with Jews. The head of physics at Princeton, H. D. Smyth, made delicate inquiries of MIT; Slater and Morse replied that although Feynman was Jewish, he didn’t look it and had an attractive personality, as well as being the best student they had seen for many years.10 ‘I guarantee you’ll like him’, Slater told Smyth. Morse was equally enthusiastic, describing Feynman as ‘a pleasure to work with. One only needs to give him a few suggestions to keep him going on research; and his abilities make him capable of covering a large amount of territory in a short time.’ With recommendations like that, the Jewish background was never really going to be a problem, even in the culture of 1939.
Someone else, though, was worried about the problems of Jews finding employment in the United States as the 1930s gave way to the 1940s. In his autobiography,11 Morse mentions a visit Melville made to see him around the time Dick was graduating. Having explained that the family could just barely afford to finance Richard through another four years of school, Melville asked for reassurance that the effort would be worth it. Was Richard good enough? Jobs in physics were hard to get in 1939, and the unspoken question behind Melville’s inquiry was whether they would be impossible to get for a young physicist from a Jewish background. Morse writes in his autobiography that he reassured Melville, telling him that Richard definitely was good enough to justify the continuing investment in his education. But there is more to the story than this.
Joan Feynman explains that, with hindsight, it became clear that the main reason for Melville’s concern was that he had health problems, and knew that his high blood pressure meant that he would not live long – probably not long enough to see Joan through college (in fact, he died when she was in her freshman year, by which time his annual income had passed $10,000; from then on she funded her education with scholarships and other aid). The family was already saving to provide for Lucille and for Joan’s education when and if the inevitable happened, so Melville’s concern about Richard’s prospects was well founded.12 Nevertheless, it is a sad reflection on the almost automatic antisemitism of the times that this should have been an additional cause for concern for Melville at an already difficult time.
The Admissions Committee at Princeton was, in the end, sufficiently impressed by Feynman not just to admit him, but to offer him a research assistantship, which meant that he actually got paid for helping a more senior scientist with his research and his undergraduate teaching, while working for his own PhD as well. This must have been a great relief to Melville. The scientist Feynman was assigned to was Wheeler. He was 28, and Feynman 21, when they met for the first time. Perhaps over-conscious of his own relative youth, Wheeler (who was a first-rate scientist and had already worked for a couple of years with Niels Bohr’s group in Copenhagen) tried to establish what he regarded as the proper professor–student relationship from the outset.
The full flavour of the first encounter between Feynman and Wheeler doesn’t always come across in books about him, but it was a highly significant meeting of minds that set the scene for a fruitful collaboration between two scientists who were both open to new ideas in physics, no matter how wild. It was obvious to anyone who knew him, even slightly, that Feynman had this crazy kind of genius. But Wheeler has always seemed, from the outside, to be a much more sober kind of person. He wears suits and ties, he is calm and respectable, he doesn’t play the bongo drums or crack safes. But behind the façade lies one of the best ideas brains of the past 60 years, an expert on exotica such as black holes (he coined the term in its astronomical sense) and parallel realities. Reading some of Wheeler’s scientific papers, it is hard to believe that the bizarre images they conjure up spring from the mind of a man who looks like the head of an old-fashioned bank.
As a pompous and somewhat self-important 28-year-old, though, who had yet to make his own mark on science, Wheeler felt that his time was too valuable to squander overmuch on new graduate students. He made an appointment to see Feynman at certain times every week, and told him that each meeting would last for a certain time. It is easy to imagine the freewhe
eling Feynman’s internal reaction to this rigid timetabling. At the start of the first of these formal meetings, Wheeler made a show of pulling out his expensive pocket watch and placing it on the table, so that he would know when Feynman’s time was up – and so that Feynman would know his place in the pecking order. Well, thought Dick, two can play at that game. Before the next meeting, he bought a cheap pocket watch of his own, which he brought along and laid on the table alongside Wheeler’s watch, as if to say that his time was just as valuable as Wheeler’s, even if it was measured on a cheap watch.
If Wheeler had really been the pompous ass he was pretending to be, or if Feynman had gone along with the pomposity without questioning it, their relationship might never have developed beyond the formal. As it was, both men saw the humour of the situation, and collapsed into fits of laughter reminiscent of the scenes round the dinner table at Far Rockaway – corpsing, like actors unable to continue with their lines. Every time they tried to get down to business, one of them would start giggling again and set the other off. The two men became firm friends, and when the time came Feynman had no hesitation in choosing Wheeler as his thesis adviser. The pattern of their first encounter continued throughout their student–teacher relationship: ‘Discussions turned into laughter, laughter into jokes and jokes into more to-and-fro and more ideas.’13
A graduate student at Princeton had plenty of choice in his work, both of his thesis supervisor (if the professor he wanted was willing to take him on) and in the courses he attended. In fact, there were no formal course requirements at all (sheer bliss after the labours of English and philosophy at undergraduate level), although the student had to pass tough preliminary examinations, complete a satisfactory thesis based on original research, and defend that thesis in a rigorous oral examination. Among the classes Feynman chose to attend was a graduate-level course in biology, a subject he was to dabble in at an even higher level later in his career; there was, quite frankly, nothing he could learn from the graduate courses in physics. The research students helped each other out with their problems, though, and that way they learned a lot about what was going on in physics in general, not just the area covered by their own thesis topic. On one occasion early in his time at Princeton Feynman was able to calculate, using quantum theory, the value of a parameter that one of his fellow students needed in order to explain certain details of the way an atomic nucleus captures an electron, in the process known as inverse beta decay. It was the first time that he had made a calculation that was needed in connection with a current experiment at the cutting edge of physics.
Just as he hadn’t been worried that the Greeks had discovered the rules of geometry before he had, Feynman wasn’t concerned about what use, if any, his fellow student made of the calculation. ‘The important thing was that I did it, that was the beginning of the real stuff, and it felt good.’14 As ever, the important thing, to Feynman, was solving the problem. Throughout his career, he would be almost entirely unconcerned about publishing his discoveries. The important thing was that he had done it. He couldn’t resist problem solving, and when faced with a problem he was largely unconcerned about whom he was talking to. As a research student, he had no hesitation in questioning even Albert Einstein, who by then was based at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, and gave a seminar at the university. The name and the reputation didn’t mean a thing. There was just some guy, a fellow scientist, giving a talk, and if something he said didn’t sound right then Feynman would question him until it did make sense.
There was another way in which Feynman lacked respect (in the best possible way) for authority, linked to his love of problem solving. He wanted to work out everything for himself, from first principles.15 That way, he could be sure he had got it right, instead of, perhaps, wasting valuable time developing someone else’s ideas, only to find that those ideas had been wrong in the first place. He was encouraged in this attitude by the last sentence in the 1935 edition of Dirac’s book on quantum physics, which said, ‘it seems that some essentially new physical ideas are here needed’ – a sentence he quoted to himself as a kind of mantra for the rest of his life. Whenever Feynman was stuck with a physics problem he was working on, even in the 1980s, he would walk around muttering ‘it seems that some essentially new physical ideas are here needed’ while trying to find a way out of the impasse.16
The sentence made such an impression on Feynman, when he first read it, because Dirac himself was admitting that quantum theory as understood in the 1930s was incomplete and imperfect, and that new ideas were needed. So, surely, the last thing to do was to try to use these old ideas as the starting point for a new version of quantum physics. Better, thought Feynman, to start entirely from scratch, build his own quantum theory, and see if the problems that so puzzled Dirac and his contemporaries could be solved that way. This idea had been firmly planted in Feynman’s mind while he was still at MIT; it flowered at Princeton, and came to fruition, as we shall see, in his masterwork after the Second World War.
But all that still lay far in the future when the young graduate student was struggling to come to terms with the social scene at Princeton. Princeton was deliberately designed as an imitation of the old colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, both in its architecture and its social style – and its imitation English accents. Feynman was assigned a room in the Graduate College, an impressive, ivy-clad building complete with a Great Hall with stained glass windows and a Flail Porter to guard the door of the college. He was more than a little nervous about what he had let himself in for, especially since his colleagues at MIT had been teasing him about how horrified Princeton would be by this rough diamond from Brooklyn. He had hardly got settled in his room, on the Sunday he arrived, when he was invited to join the Dean for tea – a regular Princeton ritual – that afternoon. The event was very formal, Feynman was very nervous and didn’t know anybody. It was there, his mind preoccupied with trying to work out where he should go, and whether he ought to sit down, that he was offered tea by the Dean’s wife, who asked if he would like cream or lemon in it. ‘Both please’, he replied absentmindedly, leading to the famous response ‘Surely you’re joking, Mr Feynman!’ that later became the title of his first bestselling popular book.
But Princeton wasn’t all formality and imitation English manners; it had a first-class physics school, to which Feynman had been attracted by noticing how often the address appeared on papers in the Physical Review. He imagined the Princeton cyclotron (an early form of particle accelerator) as a huge and impressive instrument, polished with care and attended by acolytes in gleaming white coats (rather like the ‘scientists’ you see in a soap powder commercial today). But when he went over to the physics building, the day after the Dean’s tea incident, to see the great machine for himself, he found something else entirely; a homely device tucked away in a basement and surrounded by wires and cables and water pipes, with bits of wax stuck over it where things were being fixed, and water dripping from some of the pipes. It was just like his own childhood ‘laboratory’ on a larger scale – a real research instrument, where people tinkered ‘hands on’ and persuaded the machine to perform its tricks. Nothing could be more different from the formal face of Princeton typified by the Dean’s tea, and Feynman fell in love with the cyclotron on the spot, happy to be reassured that he had indeed come to the right place to do his kind of physics.
Graduate College also had its advantages, since people from all disciplines were living together under one roof, and Feynman could get involved in deep discussions with researchers from other fields. Sometimes he sat at dinner with the philosophers (winding them up by demonstrating the shallowness of their debates), sometimes with the biologists and often with the mathematicians. He learned that he was able to keep track of time accurately for long periods by counting in his head, and competed with John Tukey, who later became an eminent statistician, in performing this trick while engaged in other tasks, such as reading, or running up and down stairs. They discovered
that they did their mental counting in different ways. Feynman ‘heard’ a voice counting off the seconds in his head, while Tukey ‘saw’ the numbers marching past. As a result, Feynman could read a book while still keeping his mental count, but Tukey could not, because the reading part of his brain was busy. On the other hand, Tukey could talk while counting, but Feynman could not (so he could not read out loud), because the verbal part of his brain was busy.17 It was only much later that Feynman realized that this was an important discovery about the working of the mind, showing how the same end could be achieved in different ways, and was original enough for it to have been published in a psychology journal in the 1940s.18
At Wheeler’s house, where Feynman often worked with Wheeler, he would amuse Wheeler’s two small children with jokes and tricks, including demonstrating how to tell if the contents of a tin can are liquid or solid by tossing the can in the air and watching the way it wobbles in its flight.19 When a professor of psychology visited Princeton to lecture on hypnosis, Dick was the first to volunteer to be hypnotized (to his surprise, it worked). And his drumming became more practised.
Feynman was happy, his work was going well (as we discuss in the next chapter) and in many ways the future seemed assured. In spite of Melville’s fears (he also called on Wheeler during Richard’s time at Princeton, this time asking outright whether anti-Jewish prejudice might affect Richard’s career and being firmly told ‘no’), there would clearly be no problem about Richard’s finding a job after completing his PhD, and as soon as he was no longer a student he and Arline could marry. Long before the end of Richard’s first year at Princeton, the authorities were well aware that they had something special on their hands. In a reference endorsing Feynman’s application for a Proctor Fellowship, on 17 May 1940, H. P. Robertson, the Professor of Mathematical Physics, described him as a ‘most promising student’ and said that ‘at the corresponding stage in their careers’, Richard’s showing was ‘better than that of John Bardeen’.20 Bardeen later became the first person to win the Nobel Prize in Physics twice, which is some indication of how special Feynman was as a graduate student. He would certainly have no problem making a career in physics. But there were two clouds on the horizon.
