by John Gribbin
Las Vegas? How come Feynman knew the showgirls from Las Vegas? As he recounts in Surely You’re Joking, most summers while he was at Cornell he used to set off west in his car, heading for the Pacific Ocean. ‘But, for various reasons, I would always get stuck somewhere – usually in Las Vegas.’ The ‘various reasons’ came down to having a good time, not just by participating in the usual activities in a place like Las Vegas, but by watching how the people there, and the whole set-up, operated. One way and another, by the time he was 30 Feynman was well set for the lifestyle that would continue for much of his next decade, teaching and researching at Caltech, travelling the world to attend scientific meetings, and having fun at the beach or in places like Las Vegas. With his reputation as a scientist already established, this was the period in which the legend of Dick Feynman the scientific playboy arose, and from which many of his own anecdotes and reminiscences are drawn. And the first big adventure of his new life out west was the sabbatical year spent in Brazil.
Feynman didn’t really settle in Pasadena during his first year out west, the academic year 1950–1. He still wasn’t sure that Caltech was going to be a permanent home, and still thought he might move back east, or (more likely) find a way to persuade the Brazilians to offer him a permanent post. So he stayed for the entire year at the faculty club on campus, the Athenaeum, and deliberately didn’t try to put down any roots. But neither was Caltech a clear-cut break with the past, at least as far as his personal life was concerned. Among the women Feynman had dated at Cornell was Mary Louise Bell, a student of art history who came from Neodesha, Kansas. Mary Lou, as she was known, was something of a blonde bombshell, a few months older than Dick. She was the kind of woman his friends weren’t at all surprised to see him involved with in a short-term relationship, but they would soon be dumbfounded when she became his second wife. Although Dick and Mary Lou often quarrelled, and had, as we shall see, ultimately incompatible personalities and ideas about how to live, she had one thing going for her (apart from her looks) – she wasn’t dippy, and knew a great deal about Mexican art, which also fascinated Dick. And although they had met at Cornell, when Dick moved to Pasadena she turned out to be living near the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in nearby Westwood.
Even so, the relationship didn’t develop particularly seriously during Feynman’s first year at Caltech, and he left for Brazil in the summer of 1951 very much a free agent. He was at the Centre for Research in Physics, this time for ten months, from August 1951 to June 1952, funded partly by Caltech and partly by a programme of the US State Department. He stayed at the Miramar Palace Hotel in Copacabana, overlooking the beach; the hotel was also favoured by airline crews from Pan American during their stopovers in Rio, and Feynman soon became a regular member of their crowd, socializing with the stewardesses and getting through some serious drinking with them in the bars. But one day, in the middle of the afternoon, he realized that this was getting to be more than a social habit.
I was walking along the sidewalk opposite the beach at Copacabana past a bar. I suddenly got this treMENdous, strong feeling: ‘That’s just what I want; that’ll fit just right. I’d just love to have a drink right now!’
I started to walk into the bar, and I suddenly thought to myself, ‘Wait a minute! It’s the middle of the afternoon. There’s nobody here. There’s no social reason to drink. Why do you have such a terribly strong feeling that you have to have a drink?’ – and I got scared.
I never drank again … You see, I get such fun out of thinking that I don’t want to destroy this most pleasant machine that makes life such a big kick.7
In Brazil, using that wonderful thinking machine, Feynman taught courses in the mathematical methods of physics, and on electricity and magnetism. He carried out research into the nature of particles known as mesons, in collaboration with Leite Lopes, one of his Brazilian colleagues. He began to think seriously about the puzzling properties of liquid helium (more of this in Chapter 8). He also worked on the theory of the structure of the nuclei of some of the lighter elements.
For this last piece of work he needed to compare the theory with experimental data, just as the theory of quantum electrodynamics developed by making comparisons with experiments such as the measurement of the Lamb shift or the measurement of the magnetic moment of the electron. The way he kept up to date with the latest experiments, being carried out in the Kellogg Radiation Laboratory at Caltech, highlights the way the world has changed, at least as far as communications are concerned, since 1951. Today, a scientist anywhere in the world wishing to get the latest news from another scientist anywhere else in the world would use e-mail and the Internet. You’d get the latest data delivered right into your computer, ready to analyse, without even the chore of keying the numbers in for yourself. In 1951, though, even telephone communication between the United States and Brazil was unreliable and inconvenient. So Feynman communicated with Caltech with the aid of amateur radio operators. About once a week, he would go over to the house of a ham operator in Rio, who would contact a ham in Pasadena, who would pass on the latest news from the Kellogg Lab. ‘The contact I had with Caltech by ham radio was’, said Feynman, ‘very effective and useful to me.’8
The contact he had with the students in Brazil was less effective, as he explains in Surely You’re Joking, because the students had been taught how to learn by rote from books and lectures, without any understanding of what physics was really all about. He explains how the students could recite the definition of Brewster’s Angle, which tells you (if you understand it) that when light is reflected off the sea it becomes polarized. But they were astonished, when he asked them to look at the sea through a polarizing filter, to discover that light reflected from the sea is polarized! There was no contact between their book learning and the real world. It was just like Melville’s story about the ‘Spencer’s warbler’. The students had learned a list of facts, but had no idea what the facts really meant, and no understanding of how to discover new facts.
At the end of his visit, Feynman gave a talk explaining this problem at the core of Brazilian science teaching. Back at Caltech, he wrote this up for Engineering and Science, the Caltech magazine; the article stands today as an explanation of what physics, and physics teaching, is all about:
Science is a way to teach how something gets known, what is not known, to what extent things are known (for nothing is known absolutely), how to handle doubt and uncertainty, what the rules of evidence are, how to think about things so that judgements can be made, how to distinguish truth from fraud, from show … in learning science you learn to handle by trial and error, to develop a spirit of invention and of free inquiry which is of tremendous value far beyond science. One learns to ask oneself: ‘Is there a better way to do it?’9
You can see how this spirit of free inquiry, learning by trial and error, and all the rest, suffused Feynman’s life. One of his favourite anecdotes concerns the way he learned, during his time in Rio, to play in a samba band, developing a skilful technique with a small percussion instrument called the frigideira, a round metal plate on a handle, about six inches across and looking like a little frying pan, that you beat with a little metal stick. He applied himself to this in the same way that he applied himself to physics, and for the same reason – because it was fun. That, deep down, was probably the reason for the gulf between Feynman and the students in Brazil. They were studying because it was the sober, sensible thing to do in order to get on in the system and get a job. He studied physics for the pleasure it gave him.
But there was still a gap in his life. Nineteen fifty-two marked the tenth anniversary of his marriage to Arline, and there was a gap that could not be filled by all the short-term relationships. One day, near the end of his stay in Rio, Feynman took one of the air hostesses to the museum. He was showing her the Egyptian section, explaining everything as they went along, ‘and I thought to myself, “You know where you learned all that stuff? From Mary Lou” – and I got lonely
for her.’10
He got so lonely for her, indeed, that he proposed to her by letter. ‘Somebody who’s wise could have told me that was dangerous: when you’re away and you’ve got nothing but paper, and you’re feeling lonely, you remember all the good things, and you can’t remember the reasons you had the arguments.’ Mary Lou, who was by now teaching at Michigan State University, accepted; but more arguments, about things like furniture and setting up home, continued by letter even before Dick got back to California.
Feynman returned from Brazil in June 1952, and made the commitment to stay at Caltech. The marriage took place with almost indecent haste, on 28 June 1952. Of course, the timing fitted in with the cycle of the academic year, and gave the couple the chance of a summer honeymoon visiting Mexico and Guatemala. It still looks odd, though, that it should have been exactly one day short of the tenth anniversary of his wedding to Arline, and suggests that Feynman was, consciously or subconsciously, trying to get his life sorted out into some sort of settled order before that landmark. The couple settled in Altadena, just to the north of Pasadena – but settled really isn’t the right word, whatever Dick’s subconscious may have been hoping. Mary Lou liked the idea of being a real professor’s wife, and wanted Richard to act like a real professor, including wearing a jacket and tie and all the stifling social niceties that that implies. When they both visited Brazil in the summer of 1953, when Feynman spent a few weeks at the Centre working with his old friends, his Brazilian friends were amused to notice that he came in fully dressed up in necktie and jacket, until one day he turned up in his shirtsleeves. That was the day that Mary Lou had left Rio.11 She had no time for scientists, and actively tried to cut him off from social contact with them by ‘forgetting’ about invitations. On one widely reported occasion, Feynman missed a chance to meet up with Niels Bohr on a rare visit to Pasadena, Mary Lou only mentioning to him, after it was too late to accept, that he had been invited to have dinner with ‘some old bore’.12 And when she could be persuaded to go along with Dick to a party, she made it quite clear that she disapproved. She would sit quietly in a corner at first, but would get increasingly annoyed when Dick went into his drunk routine – since he had given up alcohol, Feynman would usually play drunk at parties, adjusting his behaviour smoothly to match the increasing alcohol intake of everyone else there. Soon, the reprimands would start coming from Mary Lou’s corner: ‘Richard. Richard! Stop that! You’re acting like a fool, stop that!’13
Somehow the marriage lasted for four years, until the summer of 1956; but the writing had been on the wall from the beginning. Perhaps the best thing about it was the way it ended, with Dick agreeing to admit to extreme cruelty as grounds for the divorce. Since he wasn’t actually a wife-beater, they had to dream up some way of making this stand up in court, and the novelty of the excuse they came up with caught the fancy of the press. The basis of this extreme cruelty was described in the Los Angeles Times on 18 July 1956, under the headline ‘Beat Goes Sour: Calculus and African Drums Bring Divorce’. Mary Lou was quoted as testifying that her husband’s bongo drumming made a terrible noise, and that he not only began working on calculus problems in his head as soon as he awoke, but ‘did calculus while driving his car, while sitting in the living room and while lying in bed at night’. Extreme cruelty, indeed.
In the middle of this short-lived attempt to settle down, some time in the fall of 1954, Feynman once more, and for the last time, considered leaving Caltech. Although he doesn’t say so in Surely You’re Joking, the unsettled state of his marriage must have been a contributory factor, but the trigger was a really bad attack of smog. Conveniently forgetting how much he had hated the winter in upstate New York (as with Mary Lou, distance lent enchantment), he actually called Cornell and asked if he could have his old job back. They made encouraging noises. But the very next day, on his way in to work Feynman was met by a breathless colleague at Caltech, who came running up to Dick with the exciting news that Walter Baade, working at the Mount Wilson Observatory in the nearby San Gabriel Mountains, had found evidence that the Universe was much older than had previously been thought. Even before Feynman had got to his office, another colleague, Matt Meselson, came up and told him about a breakthrough he had just made in the study of DNA. Both were important, fundamental discoveries, at the cutting edge of science, from two widely different disciplines. Feynman realized that he would have to be crazy to leave such a place:
And I realized, as I finally got to my office, that this is where I’ve got to be. Where people from all different fields of science would tell me stuff, and it was all exciting. It was exactly what I wanted, really.14
So he never did move back to Cornell, or on to anywhere else, in spite of offers. Nineteen fifty-four, halfway through the disastrous marriage to Mary Lou, the year in which Feynman received the prestigious Albert Einstein Award (not just prestigious – it brought with it $15,000 and a gold medal), was the year he finally made his own commitment to Caltech, and started to settle down, as far as Feynman could ever settle down.
It was easier to settle down at one permanent home base, of course, because he was in such demand to attend international conferences and to give guest lectures at other universities, not just in the United States but around the world. In September 1953, he visited Japan for the first time, for a meeting which took place partly in Tokyo and partly in Kyoto; Mary Lou stayed behind on this occasion. Typically, Feynman entered enthusiastically into the spirit of the adventure, learning some Japanese, practising eating with chopsticks before he left California, and insisting on staying in traditional Japanese-style hotels where he could absorb the atmosphere. He went back to Japan (this time with Mary Lou) in the summer of 1955, on a lecture tour of Japanese universities; in between, in March 1954, he visited the University of Chicago and gave a series of lectures as a guest professor. And he visited Europe on several occasions, as well as making trips back to Brazil – all officially working visits, quite separate from his real holidays.
There were, though, irritations associated with his growing fame. One of his most annoying encounters, to Feynman himself, was with the US National Academy of Sciences, which elected him a member in April 1954. He had never heard of the organization, which made no significant contribution to science, published what he discovered to be, when he looked at it, a distinctly second-rate journal, and seemed to be nothing more than an honorary society, which existed chiefly for the incestuous purpose of deciding who else was grand enough to be allowed to join its ranks. He was persuaded that by refusing to accept membership he would embarrass many of his friends, and that it was better to accept quietly. But when he went along to a meeting of the society, giving them a fair chance, it was deeply depressing. The main topic of conversation was who else should be elected to this honorary society, while the experiments that were reported were, in many cases, totally unscientific. Feynman was particularly unimpressed by an experiment in which rats had been observed drowning, with their efforts to survive being timed and monitored – a cruel and needless experiment with no scientific value.15 He eventually resigned from the NAS, but without making a great deal of fuss.
After the divorce from Mary Lou in 1956, he established a nice routine. He had his research to do at Caltech, ample opportunity to visit research centres around the world, and he could return to his old haunts in Las Vegas for relaxation. By contrast with the hassles during his ill-fated second marriage, it was a good life, and he found his second wind as a bachelor, at least on the surface. By now, though, he was in his late thirties, and the gap in his life that Mary Lou had so conspicuously failed to fill was still there.
In the summer of 1958, Feynman was in Europe again, on a visit culminating in a contribution to the United Nations ‘Atoms for Peace’ conference in Geneva, in the first two weeks of September. He was on his own, and rather than stay in a big hotel with the other scientists and dignitaries attending the conference, he sought out a little place called the Hotel City – the same kind of l
ittle place that he had stayed in with Freeman Dyson, the night they were marooned by floods in Vinita. The ‘hotel’ was delighted to have a real guest – especially one who received telephone calls from the UN.
As told by Feynman, it was all another great prank.16 Although he had just turned 40, he’d had a highly productive few years as a scientist (more of this in Chapter 8), and he seemed to be as happy as ever. But maybe his subconscious was at work again when, during a break from the conference, he struck up a conversation with a young woman in a blue polka dot bikini on the beach of Lake Geneva. She turned out to be Gweneth Howarth, a 24-year-old Englishwoman from a small village in Yorkshire, with a streak of adventure that rivalled Feynman’s own.
Gweneth had had a routine upbringing in Yorkshire, becoming a school librarian and facing the prospect of a routine, humdrum life. Her sister Jacqueline recalls17 that the children had a happy childhood in a close-knit family community, even though their mother had died when Gweneth was only six weeks old. Their father brought up the two girls with the aid of four aunts, and they enjoyed a comfortable childhood filled with music and dancing lessons, country walks, a succession of pet animals and all the benefits of country life. Gweneth was particularly fond of animals, and interested in gardening (much later, she became a landscape gardener).
Both girls passed the examination for the local grammar school, and after school Gweneth trained as a librarian, seen as a good occupation at that time (in the 1950s) for an independent, lively minded woman. Jacqueline remembers that the two sisters both had wanderlust, and that although they had not escaped to any Feynman-type adventures, they both travelled abroad on holiday much more often than was common at the time (Jacqueline still has this wanderlust; when we interviewed her she had just returned from Goa). But Gweneth was strongly attached to her surroundings and her family, and also formed a longstanding relationship with a boy from Halifax. It was only after this relationship ended that she decided to see the world, and set off intending to go to Australia.
