The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

by Richard P Feynman

  The Nobel Prize—Was It Worth It?

  [Feynman was awarded a Nobel Prize for his work on quantum electrodynamics.] What I essentially did–and also it was done independently by two other people, [Sinitiro] Tomanaga in Japan and [Julian] Schwinger–was to figure out how to control, how to analyze and discuss the original quantum theory of electricity and magnetism that had been written in 1928; how to interpret it so as to avoid the infinities, to make calculations for which there were sensible results which have since turned out to be in exact agreement with every experiment which has been done so far, so that quantum electrodynamics fits experiment in every detail where it’s applicable–not involving the nuclear forces, for instance–and it was the work that I did in 1947 to figure out how to do that, for which I won the Nobel Prize.

  [BBC: Was it worth the Nobel Prize?] As a (LAUGHS) . . . I don’t know anything about the Nobel Prize, I don’t understand what it’s all about or what’s worth what, but if the people in the Swedish Academy decide that x, y, or z wins the Nobel Prize then so be it. I won’t have anything to do with the Nobel Prize . . . it’s a pain in the . . . (LAUGHS). I don’t like honors. I appreciate it for the work that I did, and for people who appreciate it, and I know there’s a lot of physicists who use my work, I don’t need anything else, I don’t think there’s any sense to anything else. I don’t see that it makes any point that someone in the Swedish Academy decides that this work is noble enough to receive a prize–I’ve already got the prize. The prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out, the kick in the discovery, the observation that other people use it [my work]–those are the real things, the honors are unreal to me. I don’t believe in honors, it bothers me, honors bother, honors is epaulettes, honors is uniforms. My papa brought me up this way. I can’t stand it, it hurts me.

  When I was in high school, one of the first honors I got was to be a member of the Arista, which is a group of kids who got good grades–eh?–and everybody wanted to be a member of the Arista, and when I got into the Arista I discovered that what they did in their meetings was to sit around to discuss who else was worthy to join this wonderful group that we are–okay? So we sat around trying to decide who it was who would get to be allowed into this Arista. This kind of thing bothers me psychologically for one or another reason I don’t understand myself–honors–and from that day to this [it] always bothered me. When I became a member of the National Academy of Sciences, I had ultimately to resign because that was another organization most of whose time was spent in choosing who was illustrious enough to join, to be allowed to join us in our organization, including such questions as [should] we physicists stick together because they’ve a very good chemist that they’re trying to get in and we haven’t got enough room for so-and-so. What’s the matter with chemists? The whole thing was rotten because its purpose was mostly to decide who could have this honor–okay? I don’t like honors.

  The Rules of the Game

  [From 1950 to 1988 Feynman was Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology.] One way, that’s kind of a fun analogy in trying to get some idea of what we’re doing in trying to understand nature, is to imagine that the gods are playing some great game like chess, let’s say, and you don’t know the rules of the game, but you’re allowed to look at the board, at least from time to time, in a little corner, perhaps, and from these observations you try to figure out what the rules of the game are, what the rules of the pieces moving are. You might discover after a bit, for example, that when there’s only one bishop around on the board that the bishop maintains its color. Later on you might discover the law for the bishop as it moves on the diagonal which would explain the law that you understood before–that it maintained its color– and that would be analagous to discovering one law and then later finding a deeper understanding of it. Then things can happen, everything’s going good, you’ve got all the laws, it looks very good, and then all of a sudden some strange phenomenon occurs in some corner, so you begin to investigate that–it’s castling, something you didn’t expect. We’re always, by the way, in fundamental physics, always trying to investigate those things in which we don’t understand the conclusions. After we’ve checked them enough, we’re okay.

  The thing that doesn’t fit is the thing that’s the most interesting, the part that doesn’t go according to what you expected. Also, we could have revolutions in physics: after you’ve noticed that the bishops maintain their color and they go along the diagonal and so on for such a long time and everybody knows that that’s true, then you suddenly discover one day in some chess game that the bishop doesn’t maintain its color, it changes its color. Only later do you discover a new possibility, that a bishop is captured and that a pawn went all the way down to the queen’s end to produce a new bishop–that can happen but you didn’t know it, and so it’s very analagous to the way our laws are: They sometimes look positive, they keep on working and all of a sudden some little gimmick shows that they’re wrong and then we have to investigate the conditions under which this bishop change of color happened and so forth, and gradually learn the new rule that explains it more deeply. Unlike the chess game, though, in [which] the rules become more complicated as you go along, in physics, when you discover new things, it looks more simple. It appears on the whole to be more complicated because we learn about a greater experience–that is, we learn about more particles and new things–and so the laws look complicated again. But if you realize all the time what’s kind of wonderful–that is, if we expand our experience into wilder and wilder regions of experience–every once in a while we have these integrations when everything’s pulled together into a unification, in which it turns out to be simpler than it looked before.

  If you are interested in the ultimate character of the physical world, or the complete world, and at the present time our only way to understand that is through a mathematical type of reasoning, then I don’t think a person can fully appreciate, or in fact can appreciate much of, these particular aspects of the world, the great depth of character of the universality of the laws, the relationships of things, without an understanding of mathematics. I don’t know any other way to do it, we don’t know any other way to describe it accurately . . . or to see the interrelationships without it. So I don’t think a person who hasn’t developed some mathematical sense is capable of fully appreciating this aspect of the world–don’t misunderstand me, there are many, many aspects of the world that mathematics is unnecessary for, such as love, which are very delightful and wonderful to appreciate and to feel awed and mysterious about; and I don’t mean to say that the only thing in the world is physics, but you were talking about physics and if that’s what you’re talking about, then to not know mathematics is a severe limitation in understanding the world.

  Smashing Atoms

  Well, what I’m working on in physics right now is a special problem which we’ve come up against and I’ll describe what it is. You know that everything’s made out of atoms, we’ve got that far already and most people know that already, and that the atom has a nucleus with electrons going around. The behavior of the electrons on the outside is now completely [known], the laws for it are well understood as far as we can tell in this quantum electrodynamics that I told you about. And after that was evolved, then the problem was how does the nucleus work, how do the particles interact, how do they hold together? One of the by-products was to discover fission and to make the bomb. But investigating the forces that hold the nuclear particles together was a long task. At first it was thought that it was an exchange of some sort of particles inside, which were invented by Yukawa, called pions, and it was predicted that if you hit protons–the proton is one of the particles of the nucleus–against a nucleus, they would knock out such pions, and sure enough, such particles came out.

  Not only pions came out but other particles, and we began to run out of names-kaons and sigmas and lamdas and so on; they’re all called hadrons now–and as we increased the energy of the rea
ction and got more and more different kinds, until there were hundreds of different kinds of particles; then the problem, of course–this period is 1940 up to 1950, towards the present–was to find the pattern behind it. There seemed to be many many interesting relations and patterns among the particles, until a theory was evolved to explain these patterns, that all of these particles were really made of something else, that they were made of things called quark–three quarks, for example, would form a proton–and that the proton is one of the particles of the nucleus; another one is a neutron. The quarks came in a number of varieties–in fact, at first only three were needed to explain all the hundreds of particles and the different kinds of quarks–they are called u-type, d-type, s-type. Two Us and a d made a proton, two ds and a u made a neutron. If they were moving in a different way inside they were some other particle. Then the problem came: What exactly is the behavior of the quarks and what holds them together? And a theory was thought of which is very simple, a very close analogy to quantum electrodynamics–not exactly the same but very close–in which the quarks are like the electron and the particles called gluons–which go between the electrons, which makes them attract each other electrically–are like the photons. The mathematics was very similar but there are a few terms slightly different. The difference in the form of the equations that were guessed at were guessed by principles of such beauty and simplicity that it isn’t arbitrary, it’s very, very determined. What is arbitrary is how many different kinds of quark there are, but not the character of the force between them.

  Now unlike electrodynamics, in which two electrons can be pulled apart as far as you want, in fact when they are very far away the force is weakened; if this were true for quarks you would have expected that when you hit things together hard enough the quarks would have come out. But instead of that, when you’re doing an experiment with enough energy that quarks could come out, instead of that you find a big jet–that is, all particles going about in the same direction as the old hadrons, no quarks–and from the theory, it was clear that what was required was that when the quark comes out, it kind of makes these new pairs of quarks and they come in little groups and make hadrons.

  The question is, why is it so different in electrodynamics, how do these small-term differences, these little terms that are different in the equation, produce such different effects, entirely different effects? In fact, it was very surprising to most people that this would really come out, that first you would think that the theory was wrong, but the more it’s studied the clearer it became that it’s very possible that these extra terms would produce these effects. Now we were in a position that’s different in history than any other time in physics, that’s always different. We have a theory, a complete and definite theory of all of these hadrons, and we have an enormous number of experiments and lots and lots of details, so why can’t we test the theory right away to find out whether it’s right or wrong? Because what we have to do is calculate the consequences of the theory. If this theory is right, what should happen, and has that happened? Well, this time the difficulty is in the first step. If the theory is right, what should happen is very hard to figure out. The mathematics needed to figure out what the consequences of this theory are have turned out to be, at the present time, insuperably difficult. At the present time-all right? And therefore it’s obvious what my problem is–my problem is to try to develop a way of getting numbers out of this theory, to test it really carefully, not just qualitatively, to see if it might give the right result.

  I spent a few years trying to invent mathematical things that would permit me to solve the equations, but I didn’t get anywhere, and then I decided that in order to do that I must first understand more or less how the answer probably looks. It’s hard to explain this very well, but I had to get a qualitative idea of how the phenomenon works before I could get a good quantitative idea. In other words, people didn’t even understand roughly how it worked, and so I have been working most recently in the last year or two on understanding roughly how it works, not quantitatively yet, with the hope that in the future that rough understanding can be refined into a precise mathematical tool, way, or algorithm to get from the theory to the particles. You see, we’re in a funny position: It’s not that we’re looking for the theory, we’ve got the theory–a good, good candidate–but we’re in the step in the science that we need to compare the theory to experiment by seeing what the consequences are and checking it. We’re stuck in seeing what the consequences are, and it’s my aim, it’s my desire to see if I can work out a way to work out what the consequences of this theory are (LAUGHS). It’s a kind of a crazy position to be in, to have a theory that you can’t work out the consequences of . . . I can’t stand it, I have to figure it out. Someday, maybe.

  “Let George Do It.”

  To do high, real good physics work you do need absolutely solid lengths of time, so that when you’re putting ideas together which are vague and hard to remember, it’s very much like building a house of cards and each of the cards is shaky, and if you forget one of them the whole thing collapses again. You don’t know how you got there and you have to build them up again, and if you’re interrupted and kind of forget half the idea of how the cards went together–your cards being different-type parts of the ideas, ideas of different kinds that have to go together to build up the idea–the main point is, you put the stuff together, it’s quite a tower and it’s easy [for it] to slip, it needs a lot of concentration–that is, solid time to think–and if you’ve got a job in administrating anything like that, then you don’t have the solid time. So I have invented another myth for myself–that I’m irresponsible. I tell everybody, I don’t do anything. If anybody asks me to be on a committee to take care of admissions, no, I’m irresponsible, I don’t give a damn about the students–of course I give a damn about the students but I know that somebody else’ll do it–and I take the view, “Let George do it,” a view which you’re not supposed to take, okay, because that’s not right to do, but I do that because I like to do physics and I want to see if I can still do it, and so I’m selfish, okay? I want to do my physics.

  Bored by the History

  All those students are in the class: Now you ask me how should I best teach them? Should I teach them from the point of view of the history of science, from the applications? My theory is that the best way to teach is to have no philosophy, [it] is to be chaotic and [to] confuse it in the sense that you use every possible way of doing it. That’s the only way I can see to answer it, so as to catch this guy or that guy on different hooks as you go along, [so] that during the time when the fellow who’s interested in history’s being bored by the abstract mathematics, on the other hand the fellow who likes the abstractions is being bored another time by the history–if you can do it so you don’t bore them all, all the time, perhaps you’re better off. I really don’t know how to do it. I don’t know how to answer this question of different kinds of minds with different kinds of interests–what hooks them on, what makes them interested, how you direct them to become interested. One way is by a kind of force, you have to pass this course, you have to take this examination. It’s a very effective way. Many people go through schools that way and it may be a more effective way. I’m sorry, after many, many years of trying to teach and trying all different kinds of methods, I really don’t know how to do it.

  Like Father, Like Son

  I got a kick, when I was a boy, [out] of my father telling me things, so I tried to tell my son things that were interesting about the world. When he was very small we used to rock him to bed, you know, and tell him stories, and I’d make up a story about little people that were about so high [who] would walk along and they would go on picnics and so on and they lived in the ventilator; and they’d go through these woods which had great big long tall blue things like trees, but without leaves and only one stalk, and they had to walk between them and so on; and he’d gradually catch on [that] that was the rug, the nap of the rug, the blue rug, and
he loved this game because I would describe all these things from an odd point of view and he liked to hear the stories and we got all kinds of wonderful things–he even went to a moist cave where the wind kept going in and out–it was coming in cool and went out warm and so on. It was inside the dog’s nose that they went, and then of course I could tell him all about physiology by this way and so on. He loved that and so I told him lots of stuff, and I enjoyed it because I was telling him stuff that I liked, and we had fun when he would guess what it was and so on. And then I have a daughter and I tried the same thing–well, my daughter’s personality was different, she didn’t want to hear this story, she wanted the story that was in the book repeated again, and reread to her. She wanted me to read to her, not to make up stories, and it’s a different personality. And so if I were to say a very good method for teaching children about science is to make up these stories of the little people, it doesn’t work at all on my daughter–it happened to work on my son–okay?

  “Science Which Is Not a Science . . .”

  Because of the success of science, there is, I think, a kind of pseudoscience. Social science is an example of a science which is not a science; they don’t do [things] scientifically, they follow the forms–or you gather data, you do so-and-so and so forth but they don’t get any laws, they haven’t found out anything. They haven’t got anywhere yet–maybe someday they will, but it’s not very well developed, but what happens is on an even more mundane level. We get experts on everything that sound like they’re sort of scientific experts. They’re not scientific, they sit at a typewriter and they make up something like, oh, food grown with, er, fertilizer that’s organic is better for you than food grown with fertilizer that’s inorganic–may be true, may not be true, but it hasn’t been demonstrated one way or the other. But they’ll sit there on the typewriter and make up all this stuff as if it’s science and then become an expert on foods, organic foods and so on. There’s all kinds of myths and pseudoscience all over the place.