Quantum Man: Richard Feynman's Life in Science (28 page)

When he railed against pseudo-scientists, alien-abduction “experts,” astrologers, and quacks, he tried to remind us that we seem to be hard wired to find that what happens to each of us naturally appears to take on a special significance and meaning, even if it is an accident. We have to guard against this, and the only way to do so is by adhering to the straitjacket of empirical reality. So, when faced with claims that the end of physics was near and the ultimate laws of physics were right around the corner, Feynman simply uttered, with the wisdom of age, “I’ve had a lifetime of that . . . a lifetime of people who believe that the answer is just around the corner.”

If the remarkable professional life of one of the most remarkable scientists of the twentieth century is to teach us anything, it is that the excitement and hubris that naturally follow from the rare privilege of uncovering even a small slice of nature’s hidden mysteries need to be tempered by the realization that however much we have learned, more surprises are in store for us, if we are willing to carry on searching. For a fearless and brilliant adventurer like Richard Feynman, this was the reason for living.

EPILOGUE

Character Is Destiny

The way I think of what we’re doing is, we’re exploring—we’re trying to find out as much as we can about the world . . . my interest in science is to simply find out more about the world, and the more I find out, the better it is.

—R
ICHARD
F
EYNMAN

R
ichard Feynman died shortly before midnight on Februrary 15, 1988, at the age of sixty-nine. In those few years he had managed to change not only the world, or at least our understanding of it, but also the lives of everyone he met. No one who had the privilege of knowing him was untouched. There was something so unique about him that it was impossible to view him as one viewed others. If it is true that character is destiny, he then seemed born to discover great things, even as his discoveries were the product of unbelievably hard work, boundless energy, and a rigid integrity aligned with a brilliant mind.

It may also be true that as much as he achieved, he could have accomplished much more had he been more willing to listen and learn from those around him, and insist less on discovering absolutely everything for himself. But accomplishment was not his purpose. It was learning about the world. He felt the fun lay in discovering something, for himself, even if everyone else in the world already knew it. Time after time, when he found out that someone else had scooped him in a discovery, his reaction was not one of despair, but rather, “Hey, isn’t that great that we got it right?”

Perhaps we can learn the most about a person by the collective reactions of those around him, and so to complete the picture of Richard Feynman, I decided to include some of these reactions that did not make it into the preceding pages, but that might illuminate more fully the remarkable experience of knowing the man, and one or two stories that, for me, capture his essence.

First, consider the experience of a young student, Richard Sherman, who was fortunate enough to spend an afternoon in Feynman’s office:

I can recall one episode that I found particularly awesome. Midway through my first year I was doing research on superconductivity, and one afternoon I went into his office to discuss the results. . . . I started to write equations on the blackboard, and he began to analyze them very rapidly. We were interrupted by a phone call. . . . Feynman immediately switched from superconductivity to some problem in high-energy-particle physics, into the middle of an incredibly complicated calculation that was being performed by somebody else. . . . He talked with that person for maybe five or ten minutes. When he was through, he hung up and continued the discussion on my particular calculations, at exactly the point he had left off. . . . The phone range again. This time it was somebody in theoretical solid-state physics, completely unrelated to anything we had been speaking about. But there he was, telling them, “No. No, that’s not the way to do it. . . . You need to do it this way. . . .” . . . This sort of thing went on over about three hours—different sorts of technical telephone calls, each time in a completely different field, and involving different types of calculations. . . . It was staggering. I have never seen this kind of thing again.

Or a not-too-different experience related by Danny Hillis, after Feynman started his summer job at Thinking Machines:

Often, when one of us asked him for advice, he would gruffly refuse with, “That’s not my department.” I could never figure out just what his department was, but it didn’t matter anyway, because he spent most of his time working on these “not my department” problems. . . . More often than not he would come back a few days after his refusal and remark, “I’ve been thinking about what you asked the other day and it seems to me . . .” . . . But what Richard hated, or at least pretended to hate, was being asked to give advice. So why were people always asking him for it? Because even when Richard didn’t understand, he always seemed to understand better than the rest of us. And whatever he understood, he could make others understand as well. Richard made people feel like children do when a grown-up first treats them as adults. He was never afraid to tell the truth.

Solving problems was not a choice for Feynman, it was a necessity, as his college chum Ted Welton realized early on. Feynman couldn’t have stopped if he tried, and he didn’t try because he was so good at it. Not even a fatal illness could stop him. Consider a story his Caltech colleague David Goodstein told to the filmmaker Christopher Sykes:

One day Feynman’s secretary Helen Tuck called me up to tell me quietly that Dick had cancer and that he would be going into the hospital for an operation the following Friday. . . . This particular Friday, a week before the operation . . . I told him that somebody had found an apparent error in a calculation that we had done . . . and I didn’t know what the error was. Would he be willing to spend some time with me to look for it? And he said, “Sure.” . . . On Monday morning we met in my office and he sat down and started working. . . . Most of the time I just sat there looking at him, and thinking to myself, “Look at this man. He faces the abyss. He doesn’t know whether he is going to live through this week, and here is this really unimportant problem in two-dimensional elastic theory.” But he was consumed by it, and he worked on it all day long. . . . Finally, at six o’clock in the evening, we decided that the problem was intractable . . . so we gave up and went home. . . . Two hours later, he called me at home to say that he had solved the problem. He hadn’t been able to stop working on it, and finally he had found the solution to this utterly obscure problem . . . he was exhilarated, absolutely walking on air. . . . This was four days before the operation. I think that tells you a little bit about what drove the man to do what he did.

For Feynman, the process was what he loved. It was a release from the tedium of existence. Stephen Wolfram, who created Mathematica, was a young protégé of Feynman’s for several years while he was a student at Caltech, and he described something similar:

It was probably 1982. I’d been at Feynman’s house, and our conversation had turned to some kind of unpleasant situation that was going on. I was about to leave. And Feynman stops me and says: “You know, you and I are very lucky. Because whatever else is going on, we’ve always got our physics.” . . . Feynman loved doing physics. I think what he loved most was the process of it. Of calculating. Of figuring things out. . . . It didn’t seem to matter to him so much if what came out was big and important. Or esoteric and weird. What mattered to him was the process of finding it. . . . Some scientists (myself probably included) are driven by the ambition to build grand intellectual edifices. I think Feynman—at least in the years I knew him—was much more driven by the pure pleasure of actually doing the science. He seemed to like best to spend his time figuring things out, and calculating. And he was a great calculator. All around perhaps the best human calculator there’s ever been. I always found it incredible. He would start with some problem, and fill up pages with calculations. And at the end of it, he would actually get the right answer! But he usually wasn’t satisfied with that. Once he’d got the answer, he’d go back and try to figure out why it was obvious.

When Feynman took an interest in something, or someone, that was it. The effect was magnetic. He focused all of his energy, his concentration, and, it seemed, his brilliance on that one thing or person. That is why so many people were so affected when Feynman came to listen to their seminars and remained to ask questions.

Because the reactions of colleagues to Feynman were generally so intense, they tended to reflect not only Feynman’s character but also that of the colleagues. For example, I asked David Gross and Frank Wilczek, two very different individuals who discovered asymptotic freedom in QCD, how Feynman had reacted to QCD and their 1973 results. David told me he was irritated that Feynman had not shown enough interest, largely, David felt, because Feynman hadn’t derived the result. Later, when I spoke to Frank about the same subject, he told me how honored and surprised he was by the interest Feynman had displayed. He said Feynman was skeptical, but in those early years Frank thought that that was the appropriate response. I suspect they were both right.

The most telling story that captures the Richard Feynman that I have come to know in writing this book, and the principles that guided his life and directed the nature of his physics, was told to me by a friend, Barry Barish, who was Richard’s colleague at Caltech for the last twenty years of his life. Barry and Richard lived relatively close by, so they would often see each other. And since they both lived about three miles from campus, they would sometimes walk, rather than drive, to work—sometimes together, sometimes not. One time Richard asked Barry if he had seen a certain house on a certain street and what he thought of it. Barry didn’t know the house because, like most of us, he had found a route he favored and took that route to work and back every journey. Richard, he learned, made a point of doing precisely the opposite. He tried never to take the same path twice.

Acknowledgments and Sources

As I indicated in the introduction, one of the reasons why I agreed to write this volume, after the idea was proposed to me by James Atlas, was that it provided me with the opportunity, and motivation, to go back and read, with varying levels of detail, all of Feynman’s scientific papers. I knew the experience, as a physicist, would be enlightening and would allow me to better understand the actual course of physics history, instead of the revisionist version that inevitably develops as physicists refine and simplify techniques that were once obscure.

Nevertheless, I make no pretense to have performed any sort of fundamental historical scholarship. While I have pursued some historical investigations in the past, which required me to go to archives and search out letters and other primary source documents, in the case of Richard Feynman almost all of the primary material I have needed has been nicely compiled and is available in published form. When this is supplemented by two extraordinary books, one focusing primarily on Feynman’s life and the other on the detailed physics history of his work on quantum electrodynamics, an interested and technically trained reader can have direct access to almost all of the material I used as a basis for this book.

Outside of these sources, I am grateful to many of my physics colleagues for discussions about their impressions and personal experiences with Feynman. These include, but are not limited to, Sheldon Glashow, Steven Weinberg, Murray Gell-Mann, David Gross, Frank Wilczek, Barry Barish, Marty Block, Danny Hillis, and James Bjorken. In addition, I thank Harsh Mathur for helping, as he often has for me, to act as a preliminary guide to the condensed matter literature, in this case to the work of Feynman in this area.

The major sources of information that interested readers can turn to, and which incidentally provide every Feynman quote one can find in this book, include published primary source material by Feynman and about Feynman. These include, as I have described, a comprehensive technical presentation of not only Feynman’s work on QED but also reproductions of all of his major papers, and a wonderful and definitive personal biography of his life. In addition, there are several excellent references including a recent illuminating compilation of Feynman’s letters and various compendia of reflections on Feynman by those who knew him, scientists and otherwise:

QED and the Men Who Made It
, Sylvan S. Schweber, Princeton University Press, 1994.

Selected Papers of Richard Feynman
,
Laurie Brown (ed.), World Scientific, 2000.

Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman
,
James Gleick, Pantheon, 1992.

Perfectly Reasonable Deviations: The Letters of Richard Feynman
,
M. Feynman (ed.), Basic Books, 2005.

Most of the Good Stuff: Memories of Richard Feynman
, Laurie Brown and John Rigden (eds.), Springer Press, 1993 (proceedings of an all-day workshop in 1988 in which key scientists wrote their reflections of Feynman).

No Ordinary Genius: The Illustrated Richard Feynman
, Christopher Sykes (ed.), W. W. Norton, 1994.

The Beat of a Different Drum: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman
, Jagdish Mehra, Oxford University Press, 1994.

Three useful additional sources include historical studies of physics and other physicists:

Pions to Quarks: Particle Physics in the 1950s
, Laurie M. Brown, Max Dresden, Lillian Hoddeson (eds.), Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in the Twentieth Century Physics
, G. Johnson, Vintage, 1999.

Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics
, David Kaiser, University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Finally, useful scientific books by Feynman include:

QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter
, Princeton University Press, 1985.

The Character of Physical Law
, MIT Press, 1965.

The Feynman Lectures on Computation
,
A. J. G. Hey and R. W. Allen (eds.), Perseus, 2000.

The Feynman Lectures on Gravitation
, with F. B. Morinigo, and W. G. Wagner; B. Hatfield (ed.), Addison-Wesley, 1995.

Statistical Mechanics:
A Set of Lectures
, A
ddison-Wesley, 1981.

Theory of Fundamental Processes
, Addison-Wesley, 1961.

Quantum Electrodynamics
, Addison-Wesley, 1962.

Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals
, with A. Hibbs, McGraw-Hill, 1965.

The Feynman Lectures on Physics
, with R. B. Leighton and M. Sands, Addison-Wesley, 2005.

Nobel Lectures in Physics, 1963–72
,
Elsevier, 1973.

Elementary Particles and the Laws of Physics: The 1986 Dirac Memorial Lectures
,
with S. Weinberg, Cambridge University Press, 1987.

The Meaning of It All
:
Thoughts of a Citizen Scientist
, Helix Books, 1998.

Feynman’s Thesis: A New Approach to Quantum Theory
, Laurie Brown (ed.), World Scientific, 2005.