The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

by Richard P Feynman

  One of the guys, a fella named John Tukey, said, “I don’t believe you can read, and I don’t see why you can’t talk. I’ll bet you I can talk while counting to myself, and I’ll bet you you can’t read.”

  So I gave a demonstration: They gave me a book and I read it for a while, counting to myself. When I reached 60 I said, “Now!”–48 seconds, my regular time. Then I told them what I had read.

  Tukey was amazed. After we checked him a few times to see what his regular time was, he started talking: “Mary had a little lamb; I can say anything I want to, it doesn’t make any difference; I don’t know what’s bothering you”–blah, blah, blah, and finally, “Okay!” He hit his time right on the nose! I couldn’t believe it!

  We talked about it awhile, and we discovered something. It turned out that Tukey was counting in a different way: He was visualizing a tape with numbers on it going by. He would say, “Mary had a little lamb,” and he would watch it! Well, now it was clear: He’s “looking” at his tape going by, so he can’t read, and I’m “talking” to myself when I’m counting, so I can’t speak!

  After that discovery, I tried to figure out a way of reading out loud while counting–something neither of us could do. I figured I’d have to use a part of my brain that wouldn’t interfere with the seeing or speaking departments, so I decided to use my fingers, since that involved the sense of touch.

  I soon succeeded in counting with my fingers and reading out loud. But I wanted the whole process to be mental, and not rely on any physical activity. So I tried to imagine the feeling of my fingers moving while I was reading out loud.

  I never succeeded. I figured that was because I hadn’t practiced enough, but it might be impossible: I’ve never met anybody who can do it.

  By that experience Tukey and I discovered that what goes on in different people’s heads when they think they’re doing the same thing–something as simple as counting–is different for different people. And we discovered that you can externally and objectively test how the brain works: You don’t have to ask a person how he counts and rely on his own observations of himself; instead, you observe what he can and can’t do while he counts. The test is absolute. There’s no way to beat it; no way to fake it.

  It’s natural to explain an idea in terms of what you already have in your head. Concepts are piled on top of each other: This idea is taught in terms of that idea, and that idea is taught in terms of another idea, which comes from counting, which can be so different for different people!

  I often think about that, especially when I’m teaching some esoteric technique such as integrating Bessel functions. When I see equations, I see the letters in colors–I don’t know why. As I’m talking, I see vague pictures of Bessel functions from Jahnke and Emde’s book, with light-tan js, slightly violet-bluish ns, and dark brown xs flying around. And I wonder what the hell it must look like to the students.

  12

  RICHARD FEYNMAN BUILDS A UNIVERSE

  In a previously unpublished interview made under the auspices of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Feynman reminisces about his life in science: his terrifying first lecture to a Nobel laureate-packed room; the invitation to work on the first atomic bomb and his reaction; cargo-cult science; and that fateful predawn wake-up call from a journalist informing him that he’d just won the Nobel prize. Feynman’s answer: “You could have told me that in the morning.”

  NARRATOR:

  Mel Feynman was a salesman for a uniform company in New York City. On May 11, 1918, he welcomed the birth of his son Richard. Forty-seven years later, Richard Feynman received the Nobel Prize for Physics. In many ways, Mel Feynman had a lot to do with that accomplishment, as Richard Feynman relates.

  FEYNMAN:

  Well, before I was born, he [my father] said to my mother that “this boy is going to be a scientist.” You can’t say things like that in front of women’s lib these days, but that is what they said in those days. But he never told me to be a scientist. . . .I learned to appreciate things I had known. There was never any pressure. . . .Later when I got older, he’d take me for walks in the woods and show me the animals and birds and so on. . . .tell me about the stars and the atoms and everything else. He’d tell me what it was about them that was so interesting. He had an attitude about the world and the way to look at it which I found was deeply scientific for a man who had no direct scientific training.

  NARRATOR:

  Richard Feynman is now professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, where he has been since 1950. Part of his time he spends teaching and another part he devotes to theorizing about the tiny fragments of matter from which our universe is built. Throughout his career, his sometimes poetic imagination has carried him into many exotic areas: the mathematics involved in creating an atomic bomb, the genetics of a simple virus, and the properties of helium at extremely low temperatures. His Nobel prize–winning work toward developing the theory of quantum electrodynamics helped solve many physical problems more directly and more efficiently than had ever been possible. But again, what set that long train of accomplishments in motion were long walks in the woods with his father.

  FEYNMAN:

  He had ways of looking at things. He used to say, “Suppose we were Martians and we came down to the earth and then we would see these strange creatures doing things; what would we think? For instance,” he would say, “to take an example, suppose that we never went to sleep. We’re Martians, but we have a consciousness that works all the time, and we find these creatures who for eight hours every day stop and close their eyes and become more or less inert. We’d have an interesting question to ask them. We’d say, ‘How does it feel to do that all the time? What happens to your ideas? You’re running along very well, you’re thinking clearly–and what happens? Do they suddenly stop? Or do they go more and more slowly and stop, or exactly how do you turn off thoughts?’” Then later I thought about that a lot and I did experiments when I was in college to try to find out the answer to that–what happened to your thoughts when you went to sleep.

  NARRATOR:

  In his early days, Dr. Feynman planned to be an electrical engineer, to get his hands into physics and make it do useful things for him and the world around him. It didn’t take him long to realize that he was really more interested in what made things work, in the theoretical and mathematical principles that underlie the operation of the universe itself. His mind became his laboratory.

  FEYNMAN:

  When I was young, what I call the laboratory was just a place to fiddle around, make radios and gadgets and photocells and whatnot. I was very shocked when I discovered what they call a laboratory in a university. That’s a place where you are supposed to measure something very seriously. I never measured a damn thing in my laboratory. I just fiddled around and made things. That was the kind of lab I had when I was young and I thought entirely that way. I thought that was the way I was going to go. Well, in that lab, I had to solve certain problems. I used to repair radios. I had to, for example, get some resistance to put in line with some voltmeters so it would run in different scales. Things like that. So I began to find these formulas, electrical formulas, and a friend of mine had a book with electrical formulas in it and [it] had relations between the resistors. It had things like, the power is the square of the current times the voltage. The voltage divided by the current is the resistance and all; it had six or seven formulas. It seemed to me that they were all related, they really weren’t all independent, that one could come from the other. And so, I got to fiddling about and I understood from the algebra I had been learning in school how to do it. I realized that mathematics was somehow important in this business.

  So I got more and more interested in the mathematical business associated with physics. In addition, mathematics by itself had a great appeal for me. I loved it all my life. [. . .]

  NARRATOR:

  After graduation from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ri
chard Feynman moved approximately 400 miles southwest to Princeton University, where he would eventually get his Ph.D. It was there, at the age of 24 that he gave his first formal lecture. It was a very eventful lecture, as it turned out.

  FEYNMAN:

  When I was an undergraduate I worked with Professor Wheeler* as a research assistant, and we had worked out together a new theory about how light worked, how the interaction between atoms in different places worked; and it was at that time an apparently interesting theory. So Professor Wigner†, who was in charge of the seminars there, suggested that we give a seminar on it, and Professor Wheeler said that since I was a young man and hadn’t given seminars before, it would be a good opportunity to learn how to do it. So this was the first technical talk that I ever gave.

  I started to prepare the thing. Then Wigner came to me and said that he thought the work was important enough that he’d made special invitations to the seminar to Professor Pauli, who was a great professor of physics visiting from Zurich; to Professor von Neumann, the world’s greatest mathematician; to Henry Norris Russell, the famous astronomer; and to Albert Einstein, who was living near there. I must have turned absolutely white or something because he said to me, “Now don’t get nervous about it, don’t be worried about it. First of all, if Professor Russell falls asleep, don’t feel bad, because he always falls asleep at lectures. When Professor Pauli nods as you go along, don’t feel good, because he always nods, he has palsy,” and so on. That kind of calmed me down a bit, but I was still worried. So Professor Wheeler promised me that he would answer all the questions and all that I would do would be to give the lecture.

  So I remember coming in–you can imagine that first time, it was like going through fire. I had written all the equations on the blackboard way ahead of time so that all the blackboards were full of equations. People don’t want so many equations . . . they want to understand the ideas better. And then I remember getting up to talk and there were these great men in the audience and it was frightening. And I can still see my own hands as I pulled out the papers from the envelope that I had them in. They were shaking. As soon as I got the paper out and started to talk, something happened to me which has always happened since and which is a wonderful thing. If I’m talking physics, I love the thing, I think only about physics, I don’t worry where I am; I don’t worry about anything. And everything went very easily. I simply explained the whole business as best I could. I didn’t think about who was there. I was thinking only about the problem I was explaining. And then at the end when the question time came, I had nothing to worry about because Professor Wheeler was going to answer them. Professor Pauli stood up–he was sitting next to Professor Einstein. He said, “I do not think this theory can be right because of this and this and that and the other thing and so forth, don’t you agree, Professor Einstein?” Einstein said, “No-o-o-o,” and that was the nicest no I ever heard.

  NARRATOR:

  It was at Princeton that Richard Feynman learned that even if he lived his entire life in the world of mathematics and theoretical physics, there was another world out there that would insist on making very practical demands of him. In those years the world was at war, and the United States had just begun to work on the atomic bomb.

  FEYNMAN:

  Just about that time, Bob Wilson came into my room to tell me about a project he was starting that had to do with making uranium for atomic bombs. He said there was a meeting at 3:00 and it was a secret, but he knew that when I knew what the secret was I would have to go along with it, so there was no harm in telling me. I said, “You made a mistake in telling me the secret. I am not going along with you. I’m just going back and do my work–back to working on my thesis.” He went out of the room saying “We’re going to have a meeting at 3:00.” That [happened] in the morning. I started to pace the floor and think about the consequences of the bomb being in the hands of the Germans and all that stuff and decided that it was very exciting and important to do. So I was at the meeting at 3:00 and I stopped working on my degree.

  The problem was that you had to separate the isotopes of uranium in order to make a bomb. The uranium came in two isotopes and U235 was the reactive one and you wanted to separate them. Wilson had invented a scheme for doing the separation–making a beam of ions and bunching the ions–the velocity of the two isotopes at the same energy is slightly different. So if you make little lumps and they go down a long tube, one gets ahead of the other and you can separate them that way. That’s the plan he had. I was theoretical by that time. What I was originally set to do was find out if the device as it was designed was at all practical; could it be done at all? There were a lot of questions about space charge limitations and so on and I deduced that it could be done.

  NARRATOR:

  Even though Feynman deduced that Wilson’s method for separating uranium isotopes was indeed theoretically possible, another method was eventually used to produce uranium-235 for the atomic bomb. Nevertheless, there was still plenty for Richard Feynman and his high-level theorizing to do at the main laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, charged with developing the bomb. After the war, he joined the staff of the Laboratory of Nuclear Studies at Cornell University. Today, he has mixed emotions about the work he did toward making the atomic bomb possible. Had he done the right thing or the wrong thing?

  FEYNMAN:

  No, I don’t think that I was wrong exactly at the time I made the decision. I thought about it and I think correctly that it was very dangerous if the Nazis got it. There was, however, I think, an error in my thought in that after the Germans were defeated–that was much later, three or four years later–we were working very hard. I didn’t stop; I didn’t even consider that the motive for originally doing it was no longer there. And that’s one thing I did learn, that if you have some reason for doing something that’s very strong and you start working at it, you must look around every once in a while and find out if the original motives are still right. At the time I made the decision, I think that was right, but to continue without thinking about it may have been wrong. I don’t know what would have happened if I had thought about it. I may have decided to continue anyway, I don’t know. But the point of not thinking about it when the original conditions that made [me make] the original decision had changed, that’s a mistake.

  NARRATOR:

  After five stimulating years at Cornell, Dr. Feynman, like many other easterners before and after him, was lured to California and the equally stimulating surroundings of the California Institute of Technology. And there were other reasons.

  FEYNMAN:

  First of all, the weather is no good in Ithaca. Secondly, I kind of like going out to nightclubs and stuff like that.

  Bob Bacher invited me to come out here to give a series of lectures on some work I had developed at Cornell. So I gave the lecture and then he said, “May I lend you my car?” I enjoyed that and I took his car and every night I went to Hollywood and the Sunset Strip and hung around there and had a good time, and that mixture of good weather and a wider horizon than is available in a small town in upper New York State is what finally convinced me to come here. It wasn’t very hard. It wasn’t a mistake. There was another decision that wasn’t a mistake.

  NARRATOR:

  On the California Institute of Technology faculty, Dr. Feynman serves as Richard Chace Tolman Professor of Theoretical Physics. In 1954 he received the Albert Einstein Award, and in 1962 the Atomic Energy Commission gave him the E. O. Laurence Award for “especially meritorious contributions to the development, use or control of atomic energy.” Finally, in 1965, he received the greatest scientific award of all, the Nobel Prize. He shared it with Sin-Itiro Tomonaga of Japan and Julian Schwinger of Harvard. For Dr. Feynman, the Nobel Prize was a rude awakening.

  FEYNMAN:

  The telephone rang, the guy said [he was] from some broadcasting company. I was very annoyed to be awakened. That was my natural reaction. You know, you’re half awake and you’re annoyed. So the g
uy says, “We’d like to inform you that you’ve won the Nobel Prize.” And I’m thinking to myself–I’m still annoyed, see–it didn’t register. So I said, “You could have told me that in the morning.” So he says, “I thought you’d like to know.” Well, I said I was asleep and put the telephone back. My wife said, “What was that?” and I said, “I won the Nobel Prize.” And she said, “Go on, you’re kidding me.” I’ve often tried to fool her but I can never fool her. Every time I try to fool her she sees through me, so this time she was wrong. She thought I was kidding. She thought it was some student, some drunken student or something. So she didn’t believe me. But when the second telephone call came ten minutes later from another newspaper, I said to that fellow, “Yes, I’ve already heard it, leave me alone.” Then I took the receiver off the hook and I thought I’d just go back to sleep and by 8:00 I’d put the receiver back on the hook. I couldn’t go back to sleep and my wife couldn’t either. I got up and walked around, and finally I put the receiver back and started to answer the phone.

  Some short time after that, I had a ride in a taxi somewhere and the taxi driver is talking and I’m talking and I’m telling him my problems about how these guys ask me and I don’t know how to explain it. He says, “I heard an interview of yours. I saw it on TV. The guy says to you, ‘Would you please explain what you did to get the prize in two minutes.’ And you tried to do it and you’re crazy. You know what I would have said? ‘Hell, man, if I could have told you in two minutes, I wouldn’t be worth the Nobel Prize.’” So that’s the answer I gave after that. When somebody asks me, I always tell them, look, if I could explain it that easily, it wouldn’t have been worth the Nobel Prize. It’s not really fair, but it’s kind of a fun answer.

  NARRATOR:

  As mentioned earlier, Dr. Feynman received the Nobel Prize for his contributions to developing a theory that would define the newly emerging field of quantum electrodynamics. It is, as Dr. Feynman puts it, “the theory of everything else.” It does not apply to nuclear energy or the forces of gravity, but it does apply to the interaction of electrons with particles of light called photons. It underlies the way electricity flows, the phenomenon of magnetism, and the way that X-rays are produced and interact with other forms of matter. The “quantum” in quantum electrodynamics recognizes a theory of the mid-twenties which states that the electrons surrounding the nucleus of every atom are limited to certain quantum states or energy levels. They can exist only at those levels and nowhere in between. These quantized energy levels are determined by the intensity of the light that falls on the atom, among other things.