by John Gribbin
But even Feynman could not go on for ever, and it was also in 1978 that he had his first encounter with cancer. There would be no more ground-breaking achievements in theoretical physics; but, as we shall see in the rest of this book, Feynman was still far from finished as an original and influential thinker. And even in the 1970s, while making his last great contribution to physics, he had, as ever, found time to follow up his fascination with science and zest for life along distinctly unconventional trails.
Notes
1. Interview with JG, April 1995.
2. Interview with JG, October 1995.
3. Yuval Ne’eman and Yoram Kirsch, The Particle Hunters (Cambridge University Press, 1986).
4. See discussion in John Gribbin, In Search of the Big Bang (Bantam, London, 1986).
5. See note 3.
6. Murray Gell-Mann, The Quark and the Jaguar (Little, Brown, New York, 1994).
7. This means that nobody has yet won a Nobel Prize for predicting the existence of quarks, even though Jerome Friedman, Henry Kendall and Richard Taylor shared the 1990 prize for their experimental confirmation that quarks exist! Feynman himself nominated Gell-Mann and Zweig at least once, and other physicists have done so in the 1990s; there is still time for the Nobel Committee to rectify the omission.
8. Surely You’re Joking.
9. Bjorken, in Most of the Good Stuff.
10. Mehra.
11. Bjorken, personal communication to JG, October 1995.
12. R. Feynman, M. Kislinger and F. Ravndal, Physical Review, volume D3, page 2706, 1971.
13. Quoted by Gleick.
11 Father figure
Although he continued with his fundamental work in physics, by the 1970s Feynman was very much a family man. Even here, though, he did not always follow a conventional path. In Gweneth he had found a kindred spirit with a love for adventure to match his own, and the presence of the young children did not deter them from taking exotic and adventurous holidays. In 1973, at the suggestion of Richard’s close friend Richard Davies, a physicist who worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, they took a spring break in Mexico, visiting Copper Canyon. The plan was to take a train to a remote region of the country, then walk, with backpacks, for two or three days to a village called Cisneguito.1
Davies accompanied the Feynmans on this trip, acting, as he put it, as ‘beast of burden’; this was just as well, because not long before they left Richard had fallen and broken a kneecap, which made walking difficult. It was after he recovered from this injury that he took up jogging to keep fit. In the village, there was a tiny school-house – but the children who showed it to the visitors explained that it was no use, because they didn’t have anyone to teach them. Feynman immediately took up the challenge, and began explaining to the enraptured audience, using the Spanish he had learned long before when he had first planned to visit South America, how light works. He borrowed a magnifying glass from Davies to show how the lens affects light, and held the audience in his grip as easily as he did the students at Caltech. ‘I don’t know’, said Davies, ‘if he could ever take a complete holiday from physics.’2
That sentiment was echoed by Michelle Feynman, recalling her childhood in the 1970s, in her contribution to No Ordinary Genius. ‘You could never separate my father from physics’, she said, commenting that ‘he doodled all the time – on the edges of newspapers, on Kleenex boxes in the car … it seemed very strange, you know, almost a stream-of-consciousness kind of physics, pouring out of him. He had to write it down, and then he could go on to something else. So yes, every Kleenex box, every spare scrap of paper, had some sort of physics on it.’
When the historian Charles Weiner interviewed Feynman about his life and work, Dick told him much the same thing. When Weiner casually remarked that Feynman’s notes on partons were ‘a record of the day-to-day work’, Feynman retorted, ‘I actually did the work on the paper’, explaining ‘it’s not a record, not really, it’s working. You have to work on paper, and this is the paper. Okay?’3
Whether he could leave physics behind or not, the short trip to Mexico was such a success that they all went back for a longer visit in the autumn of 1973. This would involve a longer hike through Copper Canyon – which is deeper and longer than the Grand Canyon in the United States – visiting even more remote communities. Feynman spent some time in the summer preparing for the trip by learning a little of the language of the Raramuri, the people who lived in these remote villages, and Davies recalls how when they encountered one of the locals on the road Feynman was indeed able to communicate, after a fashion, sitting by a little fire with the Raramuri man for hours, exchanging little presents and learning each other’s names. ‘Richard had a kind of gift that way, of communicating whatever the circumstances. It was a great experience, and I think it illustrates the way he went about things in this straightforward, somewhat naive way.’
It was also around this time, in the early 1970s, that Feynman’s longstanding interest in the culture of Central America and in codes enabled him to give another virtuoso demonstration of his communication skills, back at Caltech. Some twenty years earlier, on honeymoon with Mary Lou, he had visited a museum in a little Guatemalan town where one of the exhibits was a copy of the Dresden Codex. The Dresden Codex was a Mayan book which had been looted by the European conquerors of the New World and turned up in a museum in Dresden (at least it wasn’t burned, like nearly all the other Mayan books); it is a kind of almanac and astronomical reference book, giving information about the Mayan calendar and their observations of the heavens. Because much of this information is in the form of numbers and tables, it had been possible to crack the code and translate the document.
The museum had copies of the codex for sale, with the original Mayan version on one page, and a translation into Spanish on the opposite page. It was a challenge Feynman, bored with following Mary Lou around to look at pyramids in the steamy jungle, could not resist. In Surely You’re Joking, he tells how he bought a copy of the codex, determined to crack the code – a system of bars and dots – for himself. Covering up the Spanish translation with a piece of paper, he spent hours in their hotel room happily deciphering the code for himself, while Mary Lou climbed up and down pyramids all day (Davies was right – even on his honeymoon Dick couldn’t take a complete holiday from science!).
The fun continued in Feynman’s spare time back at Caltech. Eventually, he had done as much as he could. He had quickly found that a bar in the Mayan notation was equivalent to five dots, what the symbol for zero was, and how the numbers were added and carried over from one calculation to the next. He found a place in the codex in which the number 584 was very prominent, and identified this with the period of Venus as seen from Earth – 584 days, to the nearest whole number of days. Obviously, Venus was an important object to the Mayans. The 584 was divided up into intervals of 236, 90, 250 and eight days, which could be explained in terms of the time taken for Venus to pass through its different phases, and another prominent number, 2920, could be interpreted both as 584 × 5 (five Venus ‘years’) and as 365 × 8 (eight Earth years), giving it double significance. A table with periods of 11,959 days turned out to be useful for predicting eclipses, but there were other numerical relationships that Feynman only figured out much later, and some which nobody has yet figured out at all.
So Feynman at last turned to the Spanish translation to see how his interpretation compared with that of the experts – only to find that the Spanish text wasn’t a translation at all, but a commentary describing some of the symbols used in the Mayan text. Feynman had to follow up his continuing interest in the Mayans elsewhere, especially in the books of Eric Thompson, and his interest became known to a few of the experts in the field.
In the 1970s, this interest was rekindled. One of the professors at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Nina Byers, had just taken over organizing the weekly meetings known as colloquia, where physicists from other universities usually come to tal
k about their work. She decided that it would be a good thing to broaden the minds of her colleagues by introducing them to subjects outside their own culture, and since Los Angeles is near Mexico, she felt that a good place to start would be to have a colloquium on Mayan mathematics and astronomy. She called a specialist, Otto Neugebauer, of Brown University, to ask if he could recommend somebody on the West Coast who could do the job – and was told that the best person in the LA area was not a professional anthropologist or historian, but an amateur, someone she might have heard of, a certain Richard Feynman.
‘She nearly died!’, Feynman recounts. ‘She’s trying to bring some culture to the physicists, and the only way to do it is to get a physicist!’4
By then, Feynman had lost his copy of the Dresden Codex, and when Byers bit the bullet and asked him to give the talk she provided him with a new, clearer copy, so he could reconstruct his calculations. This time he went a little further than he had in the 1950s, discovering that some of the strange numbers he hadn’t understood earlier were an attempt by the Mayans to get closer to the true Venus cycle of 583.92 days instead of the round 584 days.
The colloquium was such a success that Feynman was asked to give the same talk a little later at Caltech. Shortly before the date of the Caltech lecture, news broke of the discovery of a new codex (only three of these Mayan documents had ever been discovered), and Feynman got hold of a picture of the fragment of supposedly Mayan writing to describe in his talk. He quickly spotted that it was a fake – it used the same numbers as in the Dresden Codex. The odds against two out of four surviving fragments from the vast Mayan literature both referring to the orbit of Venus are so great that the new codex had to be a fake. It was as if the entire Library of Congress had been burned to the ground, with fragments of only four books surviving, and two of them turned out not only to be pages from different editions of the same almanac, but pages from the same chapter of each book!
Feynman was disappointed at the lack of courage and imagination of the hoaxers. He could have done it so much better:
A real hoax would be to take something like the period of Mars, invent a mythology to go with it, and then draw pictures associated with this mythology with numbers appropriate to Mars – not in an obvious fashion; rather, have tables of multiples of the period with some mysterious ‘errors,’ and so on. The numbers should have to be worked out a little bit. Then people would say, ‘Geez! This has to do with Mars!’ In addition, there should be a number of things in it that are not understandable, and are not exactly like what has been seen before. That would make a good fake.5
Feynman got a big kick out of giving this talk. ‘There I was, being something I’m not, again.’ The other big thing that he got a kick out of through being ‘something I’m not’ (apart from drawing) was his drumming. He had originally been self-taught, playing by instinct and copying rhythms he heard on records of African drummers. At Cornell, he had had lessons, and he learned bongo rhythms in Brazil. After he moved to Caltech he had met a Nigerian drummer called Ukonu, who played in a nightclub on LA’s trendy Sunset Strip. Ukonu was a medical student, but a sufficiently talented drummer to have made professional recordings; he gave Feynman some rather chaotic tuition in his own style, and opened up the opportunity to jam with other drummers. Ukonu went back to Nigeria a little before the beginning of the civil war there in 1967, and Feynman never heard from him again. After that, the drumming lapsed a little, while Feynman concentrated on other things (this was about the time he was working on partons, when Michelle was a baby). But in the 1970s it flowered in a quite unexpected way, thanks to his friendship with the Leighton family.
Robert Leighton was a long-time colleague of Feynman, and had worked with him on the Lectures. At a dinner party at the Leightons’ house, Feynman discovered that Robert’s son, Ralph, and Ralph’s friend Tom Rutishauser were keen drummers, as well as being what Dick called ‘real musicians’ – Ralph played piano, and Tom the cello. Ralph recalls that he was around seventeen at the time, and that although Feynman had been ‘introduced’ to Ralph as a baby (and had given him an old typewriter when Ralph was six), this was the first time Ralph really became aware of Richard.
We were at a very impressionable age, in high school, getting tired of our parents telling us what to do, but unconsciously looking for some kind of role model who had been around. So here’s this guy who liked to drum, who had these incredible stories – he cracked the safe that had the secrets of the atomic bomb! This was at the time of the Vietnam War, and he had a story about the draft (a subject of more than passing interest to us): this atomic scientist was rejected by the army as mentally deficient! Tom and I were totally fascinated. I realise now that in the environment I grew up in, the ‘cultural wasteland’ of middle-class America, there was no storytelling tradition. And I also see now that his mother’s way of telling stories – and her sense of humour, her appreciation of irony and absurdity – were all part of a crucial side of him, an essential element of Feynman.6
The growth of that storytelling into two books came much later. At first, the three of them started drumming together once a week, and worked out some good rhythmic patterns. They progressed to playing at schools, providing the rhythms for a dance class and doing other odd gigs under the name ‘The Three Quarks’. Then, after Tom moved to the East Coast to pursue his career as a cellist, Richard’s drumming took a new turn.
It started when Feynman was asked to play a small part, as a bongo player, in a Caltech production of Guys and Dolls. As is often the case with such campus-based amateur theatrical companies, there was a tradition of roping in eminent members of the faculty to play bit parts in the productions, and since there is a nightclub scene in Guys and Dolls, on this occasion the director thought it would be fun to have Feynman playing the part of a musician in the nightclub. Feynman agreed readily, but was petrified to discover that he was actually supposed to read music and play a prearranged drum piece to fit in with the storyline. Since he didn’t read music, the problem looked insurmountable, until he brought Ralph in to interpret the notation for him and teach him his part. Soon, Ralph was enrolled to play the part of another musician in the nightclub scene, and together they pulled it off, to the delight of the audience.
The same scene in the nightclub also involved some dancing, and the wife of one of the faculty at Caltech happened to be a choreographer working for Universal Studios, so she had been roped in to organize the dance. She liked the combined drumming efforts of Ralph and Dick, and to their astonishment asked them to drum in San Francisco for a ballet she was going to choreograph there. The good thing was she didn’t want them to play prearranged music, but intended to listen to their drumming, tape the segments she liked, and use that as the basis for the choreography. The drumming for the show, though, would be live, not prerecorded; and there would be no other musicians involved.
Ever eager for new adventures, Feynman had no trouble persuading Ralph to go along with the idea, but insisted that nobody involved in the San Francisco project should be told that he was a famous professor of physics. If he was going to drum professionally, he wanted to be taken strictly on his merits as a drummer. It always baffled Feynman when he was introduced to an audience as a professor of physics who also played the drums – this happened, for example, when he gave the Messenger Lectures, which were turned into the book The Character of Physical Law. Meaning well, but to Feynman’s irritation, the Provost of Cornell University introduced Feynman on that occasion by commenting that ‘my Caltech friends tell me he sometimes drops in on the Los Angeles night spots and takes over the work of the drummer’ (this was in 1964, during Feynman’s friendship with Ukonu). That is why the first of those Messenger Lectures begins with an unrehearsed comment:
It is odd, but on the infrequent occasions when I have been called upon in a formal place to play the bongo drums, the introducer never seems to find it necessary to mention that I also do theoretical physics. I believe that is probably because we r
espect the arts more than the sciences.7
When the time to drum for the ballet came around, in November 1976, it all worked out – but with some unexpected difficulties, as Feynman describes in Surely You’re Joking. Nobody involved realized he was anything other than a professional drummer, and although the audience was small (about 30 people all told) both they and the dancers were appreciative of the drumming. And he did indeed get paid for the work. ‘For me, who had never had any “culture”, to end up as a professional musician for a ballet was the height of achievement, as it were.’
All this time, in and around his research, his trips abroad and his drumming, Feynman was more than ever a kind of icon or guru to the undergraduates at Caltech. David Goodstein recalls8 that for the best part of two decades Feynman gave an informal ‘course’, known as Physics X, to a class which met every week at 5 o’clock on a Monday or Tuesday afternoon. There were no credits for attending, and no set curriculum, but the room was always full. Feynman simply discussed whatever the students wanted him to discuss, and the only rule was that no members of the faculty were allowed to attend. Many students felt that it was like having a hot line to God, as Feynman always attempted to explain even the most esoteric ideas in physics in a clear-cut, down-to-earth manner. Alas, because of its informal nature, no record of exactly what went on in Physics X was ever kept.
The students also had unlimited access to Feynman, whenever he was around, on a one-to-one basis. Just as in the old days at Cornell, as Dyson had learned back in the 1940s, if Feynman was really busy on some tricky aspect of physics the casual visitor to his office would be greeted with a shout of ‘Go away, I’m busy.’ Otherwise, though, his secretary Helen Tuck (who worked with him from 1971 onwards) had unconditional instructions that he was always available to any student who wanted to see him.
