Richard Feynman

by John Gribbin

  Early next day, Tuesday 11 February, Feynman dropped by a hardware store and bought a few tools, including a small C-clamp. Then he went over to Graham’s office. All he needed, it turned out, was a pair of pliers to pull the rubber out of the joint. There and then, he tried the experiment (for some reason, in What Do You Care Feynman said he was ‘ashamed’ of having ‘cheated’ by trying the experiment in private first; it seems like a sensible precaution to us!). Then, he put the rubber back into the model joint ready for Graham to present it to the meeting.

  At the meeting, Feynman sat, pliers in one pocket and C-clamp in another, next to General Kutyna. Everything was set – except there was no ice water. Urgent requests produced ice water for everybody, not just Feynman, after the meeting had begun but, fortunately, before the model joint had been displayed. Kutyna was aware something was going on. As the joint was passed around, it came to him and he gave it to Feynman. A NASA spokesman was explaining how the seals worked, while the commissioners pretended they hadn’t heard it all before. When the joint reached Feynman:

  He laid it in front of him, reached in his pocket, and got out a pair of pliers, a screwdriver, and a clamp. I thought, ‘Oh my God, what’s he going to do?’

  He proceeded to take this thing apart. He was going to take a piece of this O ring rubber, put his clamp on it to compress it, like it got compressed in the shuttle joint, then put it in ice water to cool it down to the temperature on the day of the launch, and show that the O ring did not bounce back to its original form.11

  Eager to show his experiment to the world, and relieved that the ice water had, after all, arrived in time, Feynman reached for the red button in front of him. Pressing this would indicate that he wanted to make a contribution, switch his microphone on and get the TV cameras and lights pointing his way. But Kutyna, watching what was going on, realized that the focus of attention was elsewhere. ‘Not now’, he told Feynman. It happened again. Kutyna told Feynman to wait. He flipped through his briefing book, and pointed out a particular diagram to Feynman. ‘When he comes to this slide, here, that’s the right time to do it.’ The moment arrived, and all eyes turned to Feynman. He showed them his experiment and explained what was going on:

  I took this rubber from the model and put it in a clamp in ice water for a while … I discovered that when you undo the clamp, the rubber doesn’t spring back. In other words, for more than a few seconds, there is no resilience in this particular material when it is at a temperature of 32 degrees. I believe that has some significance for our problem.

  The demonstration didn’t make the immediate impact Feynman had expected. His fellow commissioners seemed irritated by what they saw as clowning around, while the media representatives seemed puzzled by it, and the questions they asked Feynman during the lunch break were so mundane (‘Would you explain to us what an O ring is, exactly?’) that he thought they had missed the point, and grumpily blamed Kutyna for not letting him press the red button when he first wanted to. But that night, Feynman’s experiment was on all the major TV networks (it was also shown around the world), and next day it was a major story in the New York Times and the Washington Post. Delighted, Feynman put his arm round the General, and said, ‘Hey, Kutyna! You’re not all bad!’12

  I don’t think any of us could have done the experiment. It just would not have been fitting for a two-star general, or a former Secretary of State, or the first man on the moon, to pull out his beaker of water and do that kind of thing. But Feynman was able to do that. I guess if he had a weakness, it was for showmanship. He was a superb showman.13

  He was also a superb scientist. If it disagrees with experiment, then it is wrong. Wishful thinking might say that the rubber would carry out its job when the temperature fell below freezing, but all it took to prove it wouldn’t was a glass of ice water and a C-clamp. Any of the Thiokol engineers, had they thought in the way Feynman thought, could have done the experiment before the launch. But whether even that would have persuaded NASA to postpone the launch is debatable. The easiest person to fool is yourself, and the NASA bureaucracy had been fooling itself that all was well for far too long.

  Feynman became a national hero and a public figure as a result of his little experiment, which had been carried out less than a week after he arrived in Washington. As Freeman Dyson has commented, it was his ‘finest hour as a communicator’, in which ‘the public saw with their own eyes how science is done, how a great scientist thinks with his hands, how nature gives a clear answer when a scientist asks her a clear question’.14 What the public didn’t see was Feynman’s continuing work with the Commission over the next few months, probing into the problems of management that had allowed the advice of the engineers to be overlooked, and had led to the death of seven astronauts.

  This was, perhaps, the most important part of the Commission’s work, and it was chiefly thanks to Feynman that it got done at all. As Al Hibbs has explained:

  By forcing this into the open, and doing it right there on television for the world to see, the rest of the commission could not avoid it any longer, and they had to say, ‘Yeah, that’s it. Now, why did it happen?’ They might have spent all their time looking at what happened, considering all the technical possibilities, and never getting around to ‘why?’

  I think that he prevented the complete bureaucratic whitewash that it might have turned out to be, saying, ‘Nobody’s really to blame, it was an unfortunate accident,’ and so on. Feynman said, ‘No, that’s not true. Lots of people were to blame. The system was to blame. And you’ve got to say that. You’ve got to say it openly.’15

  The investigation also uncovered other engineering problems, especially with the engines, that took years to correct before the shuttle flew again. Feynman carried out exactly the maverick role that Gweneth had known he would, cutting through the fog, seeking out real facts, even if it meant making himself a nuisance. And he did this with no regard for his own health or wellbeing. It was sadly apparent to all who knew him, when he returned to Caltech, how much it had taken out of him.16

  The story of his struggle to get his own views into the official report of the Commission, and how they eventually appeared as an Appendix, not part of the main body of the report, has been detailed in What Do You Care (which also includes that Appendix to the report of the Rogers Commission). Popular accounts of this investigation often give the impression that Feynman was uniformly critical of NASA; in fact, although he was highly critical of the situation concerning the engines, he was happy with the situation on the avionics side, and positively glowing in his endorsement of the computer experts responsible for flight simulations: they were people who ‘looked like they knew what they were doing’ (very high praise, coming from Feynman). It was a genuinely balanced report, praising the good but not afraid to point the finger at the bad. And its final sentence is a characteristic piece of Feynman wisdom:

  For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.

  As the last word on Feynman’s last piece of technical work, that could not be bettered.

  Notes

  1. Carl Feynman, in No Ordinary Genius.

  2. Conversation with Mehra, 1988.

  3. See the contribution by Hillis to Most of the Good Stuff.

  4. See note 3.

  5. See note 3.

  6. See What Do You Care. Half of that book is taken up by Feynman’s own account of his experiences on the Challenger inquiry, and this is the primary source used, except where stated, in the rest of this chapter.

  7. See Gleick.

  8. Kutyna, in No Ordinary Genius.

  9. See note 8.

  10. See note 8.

  11. See note 8.

  12. He revised his opinion of the General again after the inquiry was over, when Kutyna made a point of confessing how he had deliberately pointed Feynman towards the possibility of cold affecting the O rings; but then Feynman forgave Kutyna. Neither of them, though, seems to have
given full credit to MacDonald, thanks to whom Kutyna’s little subterfuge wasn’t really necessary.

  13. See note 8.

  14. Freeman Dyson, From Eros to Gaia (Pantheon, New York, 1992).

  15. Hibbs, in No Ordinary Genius.

  16. Helen Tuck, interviewed by JG in April 1995, simply said of the Challenger investigation ‘he became very ill, during that’.

  13 The final years

  The quest for Tannu Tuva is one thread of adventure that runs through the last ten years of Feynman’s life; but, as we have seen, there were plenty of other things going on in his life during those ten years, including his work for the Thinking Machines people, and the shuttle investigation. For most of the time, Tuva was well into the background of Feynman’s activities, and the adventure was as much Ralph Leighton’s adventure as it was Richard Feynman’s. But it was always there, in the background, and it was typical both of Feynman’s approach to life and of the way he passed on his enthusiasm to other people that, eventually, the wild scheme of organizing an expedition to visit a remote part of the Soviet Union, chiefly on the grounds that the name of its capital city contains none of the five ordinary vowels, did eventually reach fruition. The fact that this achievement was largely organized by a secondary school teacher who just happened to be a friend of Feynman also shows just how far any of us might go in achieving our wildest dreams, if we took on board a little of the Feynman spirit of adventure.

  In fact, the Tuva adventure got off to a slow start. Although in January 1979 Radio Moscow made a programme about Tuva in response to a letter from Leighton asking for information about the region, it added little to what they had already gleaned from encyclopaedias and other reference books. But Ralph and Dick were delighted and encouraged by the closing comments of the narrator – that Tuva is now ‘easy to reach’ by airliner from Moscow.1 Unfortunately, it later turned out that this meant it was easy for Soviet citizens to fly to Kyzyl, Tuva’s tiny capital; it was not on the officially approved tourist trail for foreigners. In his enthusiasm, Leighton played a tape of the broadcast to his geography class the next day, not stopping to think of the possible repercussions on his career – schoolteachers weren’t expected to play tapes from the programmes of Radio Moscow in class (the Soviet Union was still officially regarded, at that time, as the ‘Evil Empire’). But in this case, nobody seems to have taken exception.

  Later in 1979, they obtained a Tuvan–Mongolian–Russian phrasebook, and laboriously used it to compose a brief letter, in Tuvan, which they sent to the Tuvan Research Institute of Language, Literature and History, in Kyzyl, which had produced the book. By the time a reply came back, well into 1980, the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan, American–Soviet relations had sunk close to an all-time low, and the prospects of a couple of ordinary American citizens getting to visit a remote region of the Soviet Union were more slender than ever. But at least they were in contact with someone in Tuva!

  Freeman Dyson has provided us with a delightful snapshot of life in the Feynman household at the end of 1979, in his book From Eros to Gaia. In a letter describing a visit to the West Coast, he says that ‘the best thing that happened was a supper with Dick Feynman at his home in Pasadena’. This was the first time they had met for twelve years, and Dyson was delighted to find Feynman seemingly in much better health than rumour had led him to expect. ‘He is still the same old Feynman that drove with me to Albuquerque 30 years ago’, he wrote. ‘Feynman has been married for about 20 years to an English wife called Gweneth. He enjoys the domestic life and they have a menagerie very much like ours, 1 horse (for the 12-year-old daughter), 2 dogs, 1 cat, 5 rabbits. But they have temporarily outdone us, for the next few months, by taking on a boa-constrictor who belongs to some neighbours on a leave of absence.’

  As it had been for the previous fifteen years, the other consuming passion in Feynman’s life, after physics and his family, was still drawing. He drew or painted every Monday evening, getting better in a mysteriously erratic fashion, with occasional jewels interspersed with less successful efforts – some of his work, together with the background to Feynman’s interest in art, has now been published as The Art of Richard P. Feynman.

  With Feynman so happy at home and busy with Thinking Machines, drawing and other activities, at first the Tuva project was no more than a pipe dream. By 1981, after three years of intermittent discussion of the scheme, he and Leighton were no closer to Tannu Tuva. Then, in the autumn of 1981, Feynman’s cancer struck again. This particular kind of cancer doesn’t jump from one part of the body to another, leaping from the kidney to, say, the lungs, but spreads out more slowly from its original site. In this case, the cancerous tissue was now wrapped around Feynman’s intestines. Once again, immediate drastic surgery was the only hope of holding its advance at bay.2

  To Feynman, his illness was as much an adventure as anything else that happened to him. He described it, in his characteristic way, as ‘int-er-es-ting’ (he always gave all four syllables of the word their full weight), and studied it the way he would a problem in physics. In this, he seems to have shared his father’s ability to look at his own illness from outside, as it were. Joan Feynman has recalled how Melville, who knew he suffered from dangerously high blood pressure, once said, ‘Have you seen my bloodshot eye? Now, that’s an interesting thing, because …’, ending his explanation of why the blood vessels in his eye were damaged with ‘One day, that’s going to happen in my brain.’3 At the time of his first operation for cancer, Richard instructed the surgeon that if it looked likely that he wasn’t going to recover, he wanted to be brought out of the anaesthetic, so that he could ‘see what it was like to go out’. He felt that it would be cheating to die under anaesthetic. If he was going to die, he wanted to see what it was like.4

  The second cancer operation, in which another large chunk of Feynman’s insides was removed, lasted for more than ten hours, and did not go smoothly. An artery near his heart ruptured, and he suffered a massive loss of blood. By chance, two other patients with the same blood group as Feynman (type O) had also needed major transfusions that day, and the blood bank at the UCLA hospital was running low. An emergency call went out, producing a line of 100 volunteers, mainly students and staff from Caltech and JPL, giving their blood to keep Feynman alive. Altogether, he needed nearly 80 pints before the emergency was over.

  Even Feynman couldn’t bounce straight back from an ordeal like that. But he had an incentive to get back on his feet and a target to aim for. In 1982, the yearly Caltech musical production was to be South Pacific, and Feynman and Leighton were asked to provide the drumming for a scene with Tahitian-style dancers. They took lessons from a drummer in Los Angeles who knew Tahiti well (as Feynman was fond of saying, you can find anything in Los Angeles), and Dick even learned a few phrases of Tahitian to shout out during the performance.

  For the show, which took place barely three months after Feynman’s second cancer operation, he was dressed as a tribal chieftain, with a tall headdress of feathers and a long cape. It was during the rehearsals for South Pacific that Leighton, taking his cue from the director of the show, took to referring to Feynman as ‘the Chief’, a name which stuck for the rest of his life. On opening night, Feynman, still weak, had to sleep through most of the show, getting up only to make his contribution on stage. But in his brief appearance he looked to the audience to be fully recovered and in prime form. It was his first public appearance since the operation, and many of the people who had given blood to keep him going through that ordeal were in the audience; hardly surprisingly, the cameo appearance was the highlight of the show, producing a standing ovation.

  It is also hardly surprising that after his second operation Feynman began to take more interest in joining in some activities that others might have regarded as dippy, but which actually echoed his longstanding interest in how the mind works, dating back to his student days. Through his lectures at Hughes, as he describes in Surely You’re Joking, Feynman had met John Lilly, w
ho was carrying out experiments in sensory deprivation, designed to produce hallucinations as the subject floats in a tank of water at body temperature, completely in the dark. Feynman eagerly tried the tanks out, following up his fascination with what happens to the mind as you go to sleep by trying to produce hallucinations while still awake. He succeeded, but never found anything in his ‘out of the body’ experiences to persuade him that it was anything other than an hallucination, produced entirely by the internal workings of the brain, rather than a genuine view of his body from the outside. He also found that although it would usually take about fifteen minutes to produce the hallucination, he could do so much more quickly if he smoked a little marijuana beforehand – the physicist who had given up drinking alcohol because he didn’t want to damage his thinking ability was now prepared, cautiously, to try hallucinogens in his quest to find out how the brain worked, aware that he was living on borrowed time and wouldn’t be using that brain for much longer, anyway.

  In some ways, Feynman’s zest for life increased after his second operation, as he determined to make the most of whatever time was left to him. He became an annual visitor at the Esalen Institute at Big Sur, south of Monterey, a kind of hippie centre for many ‘alternative’ or ‘holistic’ ideas. At Esalen, there are some large baths fed by hot springs, situated on a ledge about 30 feet above the Pacific Ocean. What Feynman described as ‘one of my most pleasurable experiences’ was to sit in those baths watching the waves crashing on to the rocky shore below, and gazing into the clear blue sky above.5 In return for the pleasure he got out of visiting Esalen (where he also learned the art of massage), he gave talks on ‘Idiosyncratic Thinking’, and told the assembled new-agers about tiny machines and quantum mechanics. ‘The Chief never forgot he was living on borrowed time’, says Leighton, who recalls relaxing in the baths with Feynman in the mid-1980s and hearing him suddenly cry out ‘Thank you, Dr Morton!’ Dr Morton was the surgeon who had held the cancer at bay, and Feynman would thank him for his extra years of life ‘in the same way that others would thank God for giving them another fine day’.6