Genius ← We Can Solve This

I was born not knowing and have only had a little time to change that here and there. —Richard Feynman

by night wild in love, veering from freshman mixers (where women sidled away from this rubber-legged dancer claiming to be a scientist who had made the atomic bomb)

The scientists had found enough sinew behind their penciled abstractions to change history.

The very idea of mass was unsettled: mass was not exactly stuff, but not exactly energy, either. Feynman toyed with an extreme view. On the last page of his tiny olive-green dime-store address book, mostly for phone numbers of women (annotated dancer beauty or call when her nose is not red), he scrawled a near haiku. Principles You can’t say A is made of B or vice versa. All mass is interaction.

Dirac now asked a question about causality: “Is it unitary?” Unitary! What on earth did he mean? “I’ll explain it to you,” Feynman said, “and then you can see how it works, then you can tell me if it’s unitary.” He went on,

He could not, or would not, distinguish between the prestigious problems of elementary particle physics and the apparently humbler everyday questions that seemed to belong to an earlier era.

scientists—believing themselves to be unforgiving meritocrats—found quick opportunities to compare themselves unfavorably to Feynman. His mystique might have belonged to a gladiator or a champion arm-wrestler. His personality, unencumbered by dignity or decorum, seemed to announce: Here is an unconventional mind.

Isaac Newton spoke of having stood on the shoulders of giants. Feynman tried to stand on his own, through various acts of contortion,

There are two kinds of geniuses, the “ordinary” and the “magicians.” An ordinary genius is a fellow that you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what they have done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians. They are, to use mathematical jargon, in the orthogonal complement of where we are and the working of their minds is for all intents and purposes incomprehensible. Even after we understand what they have done, the process by which they have done it is completely dark. They seldom, if ever, have students because they cannot be emulated and it must be terribly frustrating for a brilliant young mind to cope with the mysterious ways in which the magician’s mind works. Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest caliber.

He despised philosophy as soft and unverifiable. Philosophers “are always on the outside making stupid remarks,” he said,

Feynman’s reinvention of quantum mechanics did not so much explain how the world was, or why it was that way, as tell how to confront the world. It was not knowledge of or knowledge about. It was knowledge how to.

There were other kinds of scientific knowledge, but pragmatic knowledge was Feynman’s specialty. For him knowledge did not describe; it acted and accomplished.

Children and scientists share an outlook on life. If I do this, what will happen?

As Ludwig and Marie learned English they taught the children other routines: the protocols of gardening and formal table manners. If Feynman acquired such skills, he carefully shed them later.

If his mother’s bridge partners asked how she could tolerate the noise, or the chemical smoke, or the not-so-invisible ink on the good linen hand towels, she said calmly that it was worth it. There were no second thoughts in the middle-class Jewish families of New York about the value of ambition on the children’s behalf.

through these stories came a picture of his father as a man transmitting a set of lessons about science. The lessons were both naïve and wise. Melville Feynman placed a high value on curiosity and a low value on outward appearances. He wanted Richard to mistrust jargon and uniforms; as a salesman, he said, he saw the uniforms empty. The pope himself was just a man in a uniform. When Melville took his son on walks, he would turn over stones and tell him about the ants and the worms or the stars and the waves. He favored process over facts. His desire to explain such things often outstripped his knowledge of them; much later Feynman recognized that his father must have invented sometimes.

Someone who trusts science to explain the everyday must continually make connections between textbook knowledge and real knowledge, the knowledge we receive and the knowledge we truly own.

We are told when we are young that the earth is round, that it circles the sun, that it spins on a tilted axis. We may accept the knowledge on faith, the frail teaching of a modern secular religion. Or we may solder these strands to a frame of understanding from which it may not so easily be disengaged.

The adult Feynman asked: If all scientific knowledge were lost in a cataclysm, what single statement would preserve the most information for the next generations of creatures? How could we best pass on our understanding of the world? He proposed, “All things are made of atoms—little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another,” and he added, “In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied.” Although millennia had passed since natural philosophers

At the ancient stone-built universities philosophy remained the coin of the realm. A theory about the spontaneous, whimsical birth of photons in the energy decay of excited atoms—an effect without a cause—gave scientists a sledgehammer to wield in late-evening debates about Kantian causality. Not so in America. “A theoretical physicist in these days asks just one thing of his theories,” Slater said defiantly soon after Feynman arrived at MIT. The theories must make reasonably good predictions about experiments. That is all. He does not ordinarily argue about philosophical implications.... Questions about a theory which do not affect its ability to predict experimental results correctly seem to me quibbles about words, ... and I am quite content to leave such questions to those who derive some satisfaction from them.

The instructors told the students at the outset that the essence of theoretical physics lay not in learning to work out the mathematics, but in learning how to apply the mathematics to the real phenomena that could take so many chameleon forms: moving bodies, fluids, magnetic fields and forces, currents of electricity and water, and waves of water and light.

Einstein’s piety was sincere but neutral, acceptable even to the vehemently antireligious Dirac, of whom Wolfgang Pauli once complained, “Our friend Dirac, too, has a religion, and its guiding principle is ‘There is no God and Dirac is His prophet.’”

The natural philosophers wished to affirm the presence and power of God in every corner of the universe. Yet even more fervently they wished to expose the mechanisms by which planets swerved, bodies fell, and projectiles recoiled in the absence of any divine intervention. No wonder Descartes appended a blanket disclaimer: “At the same time, recalling my insignificance, I affirm nothing, but submit all these opinions to the authority of the Catholic Church, and to the judgment of the more sage; and I wish no one to believe anything I have written, unless he is personally persuaded by the evidence of reason.”

Why does the moon follow its curved path? Because its path is the sum of all the tiny paths it takes in successive instants of time; and because at each instant its forward motion is deflected, like the apple, toward the earth. God need not choose the path. Or, having chosen once, in creating a universe with such laws, He need not choose again. A God that does not intervene is a God receding into a distant, harmless background.

Any reference frame would do for the Lagrangian technique. Feynman refused to employ it. He said he would not feel he understood the real physics of a system until he had painstakingly isolated and calculated all the forces. The problems got harder and harder as the class advanced through classical mechanics. Balls rolled down inclines, spun in paraboloids—Feynman would resort to ingenious computational tricks like the ones he learned in his mathematics-team days, instead of the seemingly blind, surefire Lagrangian method.

At MIT in the thirties the nerd did not exist; a penholder worn in the shirt pocket represented no particular gaucherie; a boy could not become a figure of fun merely by studying

He was what the Russians derided as nekulturniy, what Europeans refused to permit in an educated scientist. Europe prepared its scholars to register knowledge more broadly. At one of the fateful moments toward which Feynman’s life was now beginning to speed, he would stand near the Austrian theorist Victor Weisskopf, both men watching as a light flared across the southern New Mexico sky. In that one instant Feynman would see a great ball of flaming orange, churning amid black smoke, while Weisskopf would hear, or think he heard, a Tchaikovsky waltz playing over the radio.

English class to Feynman meant arbitrary rules about spelling and grammar, the memorization of human idiosyncrasies. It seemed like supremely useless knowledge, a parody of what knowledge ought to be. Why didn’t the English professors just get together and straighten out the language?

His sense of what constituted a proof had already developed into something more hard-edged than the quaint arguments he found in Descartes, for example, whom Arline was reading. The Cartesian proof of God’s perfection struck him as less than rigorous. When he parsed I think, therefore I am, it came out suspiciously close to I am and I also think. When Descartes argued that the existence of imperfection implied perfection, and that the existence of a God concept in his own fuzzy and imperfect mind implied the existence of a Being sufficiently perfect and infinite as to create such a conception, Feynman thought he saw the obvious fallacy. He knew all about imperfection in science—“degrees of approximation.” He had drawn hyperbolic curves that approached an ideal straight line without ever reaching it. People like Descartes were stupid, Richard told Arline, relishing his own boldness in defying the authority of the great names.

“Not from positions of philosophers but from the fabric of nature”—William Harvey three centuries earlier had declared a division between science and philosophy. Cutting up corpses gave knowledge a firmer grounding than cutting up sentences, he announced,

“Schrödinger had been too timid,” Dirac said. Two other men, KLEIN and GORDON, rediscovered the more complete version of the theory and published it. Because they were “sufficiently bold” not to worry too much about experiment, the first relativistic wave equation now bears their names.

Fortunately they had calculators, a new kind that replaced the old hand cranks with electric motors. Not only could the calculators add, multiply, and subtract; they could divide, though it took time. They would enter numbers by turning metal dials. They would turn on the motor and watch the dials spin toward zero. A bell would ring. The chug-chug-ding-ding rang in their ears for hours.

Through quantum mechanics, physics had established a primacy over chemistry—itself formerly the most fundamental of sciences,

Physicists found themselves manipulating a quantity called the “classical electron radius.” Classical

Physicists found themselves manipulating a quantity called the “classical electron radius.” Classical in this context came to mean something like make-believe.

Temporarily, for simple problems, physicists could get reasonable answers by the embarrassing expedient of discarding the parts of the equations that diverged.

It explicitly required an action backward in time. Where was the cause and where was the effect? If Feynman ever felt that this was a deep thicket to enter merely for the sake of eliminating the electron’s self-action, he suppressed the thought. After all, self-action created an undeniable contradiction within quantum mechanics, and the entire profession was finding it insoluble. At any rate, in the era of Einstein and Bohr, what was one more paradox? Feynman already believed that it was the mark of a good physicist never to say, “Oh, whaddyamean, how could that be?”

Meanwhile Wheeler was searching the literature, and he found several obscure precedents for their absorber model. Einstein himself pointed out that H. Tetrode, a German physicist, had published a paper in Zeitschrift für Physik in 1922 proposing that all radiation be considered an interaction between a source and an absorber—no absorber, no radiation. Nor did Tetrode shrink from the tree-falls-in-the-forest consequences of the idea: The sun would not radiate if it were alone in space and no other bodies could absorb its radiation.... If for example I observed through my telescope yesterday evening that star ... 100 light years away, then not only did I know that the light which it allowed to reach my eye was emitted 100 years ago, but also the star or individual atoms of it knew already 100 years ago that I, who then did not even exist, would view it yesterday evening at such and such a time.

Wheeler found another obscure but provocative remark in the literature, from Gilbert N. Lewis, a physical chemist who happened to have coined the word photon. Lewis, too, worried about the seeming failure of physics to recognize the symmetry between past and future implied by its own fundamental equations, and for him, too, the past-future symmetry suggested a source-absorber symmetry in the process of radiation. I am going to make the ... assumption that an atom never emits light except to another atom.... it is as absurd to think of light emitted by one atom regardless of the existence of a receiving atom as it would be to think of an atom absorbing light without the existence of light to be absorbed. I propose to eliminate the idea of mere emission of light and substitute the idea of transmission, or a process of exchange of energy between two definite atoms....

“It’s a very interesting thing in physics,” said Mr. X, “that the laws tell us about permissible universes, whereas we only have one universe to describe.”

He told Feynman that Dirac had meant no such thing. In his view Dirac’s idea had been strictly metaphorical; the Englishman had not meant to suggest that the approach was useful. Jehle told Feynman he had made an important discovery. He was struck by the unabashed pragmatism in Feynman’s handling of the mathematics, so different from Dirac’s more detached, more aesthetic tone. “You Americans!” he said. “Always trying to find a use for something.”

He remained ignorant of the basic literature and unwilling even to read through the papers of Dirac or Bohr. This was now deliberate. In preparing for his oral qualifying examination, a rite of passage for every graduate student, he chose not to study the outlines of known physics. Instead he went up to MIT, where he could be alone, and opened a fresh notebook. On the title page he wrote: Notebook Of Things I Don’t Know About. For the first but not the last time he reorganized his knowledge. He worked for weeks at disassembling each branch of physics, oiling the parts, and putting them back together, looking all the while for the raw edges and inconsistencies. He tried to find the essential kernels of each subject.

Feynman associated colors with the abstract variables of the formulas he understood so intimately. “As I’m talking,” he once said, “I see vague pictures of Bessel functions from Jahnke and Emde’s book, with light tan j’s, slightly violet-bluish n’s, and dark brown x’s flying around. And I wonder what the hell it must look like to the students.”

He had never known anyone so intuitively at ease with nature—and with nature’s seemingly least accessible manifestations. He suspected that when Feynman wanted to know what an electron would do under given circumstances he merely asked himself, “If I were an electron, what would I do?”

The purest mathematicians had to soil their hands. Stanislaw Ulam lamented that until now he had always worked exclusively with symbols. Now he had been driven so low as to use actual numbers, and, even more humbling, they were numbers with decimal points.

Schwinger, who was ambidextrous, seemed to have fashioned a two-handed blackboard technique that let him solve two equations at once.

Bethe was a natural choice as leader of the theoretical division. His sweeping three-article review of the state of nuclear physics in the thirties had established him as the authoritative theorist in that field.

Bethe’s deputy, Weisskopf, specialized in a particularly oracular sort of guesswork; his office became known as the Cave of the Hot Winds, producing, on demand, unjustifiably accurate cross sections

“He is a second Dirac,” Wigner said, “only this time human.”

It was a democracy by night, too, when inflamed parties brought together cuisines and cocktails of four continents, dramatic readings and political debates, waltzes and square dances (the same Oxonian, bemused amid the clash of cultures, asked, “What exactly is square about it—the people, the room, or the music?”),

Feynman himself could barely endure the more standard tunes of his friend Julius Ashkin’s recorder, “an infernally popular wooden tube,” he called it, “for making noises bearing a one-one correspondence to black dots on a piece of paper—in imitation to music.”

Later he got a lift home with three women. “But they were kind of ugly,” he wrote Arline, “so I remained faithful without even having the fun of exerting will power to do it.” A week later he rebuked

Later he got a lift home with three women. “But they were kind of ugly,” he wrote Arline, “so I remained faithful without even having the fun of exerting will power to do it.”

The nurse recorded the time of death, 9:21 P.M. He discovered, oddly, that the clock had halted at that moment—just the sort of mystical phenomenon that appealed to unscientific people. Then an explanation occurred to him. He knew the clock was fragile, because he had repaired it several times, and he decided that the nurse must have stopped

Prometheus was not the only mythic figure standing in for the scientist; the other was Faust. Lately the Faustian bargain for knowledge and power had not seemed so horrible as it had in medieval times. Knowledge meant washing machines and medicines, and the devil had softened into an amusing character for Saturday cartoons and Broadway musicals. But now the fires in two Japanese cities renewed a primal understanding that the devil was not so tame. It might mean something, after all, to sell him one’s soul.

Oppy’s reminder of their shared credo, a credo now being welded to the most painful act of self-justification they had ever had to perform: When you come right down to it the reason that we did this job is because it was an organic necessity. If you are a scientist you cannot stop such a thing. If you are a scientist you believe that it is good to find out how the world works; that it is good to find out what the realities are; that it is good to turn over to mankind at large the greatest possible power to control the world.... It is not possible to be a scientist unless you believe that the knowledge of the world, and the power which this gives, is a thing which is of intrinsic value to humanity, and that you are using it to help in the spread of knowledge, and are willing to take the consequences.

“The problem is not to control nuclear forces but to control nuclear physicists. They are in tremendous demand, and at a frightful premium.”

My darling wife, I do adore you. I love my wife. My wife is dead. Rich. PS. Please excuse my not mailing this—but I don’t know your new address.

Do you talk to yourself? “I admitted that I do....” (“Incidentally, I didn’t tell him something which I can tell you, which is I find myself sometimes talking to myself in quite an elaborate fashion ... : ‘The integral will be larger than this sum of the terms, so that would make the pressure higher, you see?’ ‘No, you’re crazy.’ ‘No, I’m not! No, I’m not!’ I say. I argue with myself... I have two voices that work back and forth.”)

“Professor Littlewood,” he wrote of one of his famous professors, “when he makes use of an algebraic identity, always saves himself the trouble of proving it; he maintains that an identity, if true, can be verified in a few lines by anybody obtuse enough to feel the need of verification. My object ... is to confute this assertion....” Dyson promised

From one perspective, renormalization amounted to subtracting infinities from infinities, with a silent prayer.

The theorists implicitly hoped that when they wrote infinity – infinity = zero nature would miraculously make it so, for once. That their hope was granted said something important about the world. For a while it was not clear just what.

“Visualization—you keep repeating that,” he said to another historian, Silvan S. Schweber, who was trying to interview him. What I am really trying to do is bring birth to clarity, which is really a half-assedly thought-out pictorial semi-vision thing. I would see the jiggle-jiggle-jiggle or the wiggle of the path. Even now when I talk about the influence functional, I see the coupling and I take this turn—like as if there was a big bag of stuff—and try to collect it away and to push it. It’s all visual. It’s hard to explain. “In some ways you see the answer——?” asked Schweber. ——the character of the answer, absolutely. An inspired method of picturing, I guess. Ordinarily I try to get the pictures clearer, but in the end the mathematics can take over and be more efficient in communicating the idea of the picture. In certain particular problems that I have done it was necessary to continue the development of the picture as the method before the mathematics could be really done.

Much relied on guesswork or, as he said, “semi-empirical shenanigans.”

He thought that he now understood Schwinger and that not all Schwinger’s complications were necessary. Graduate students poring over the Pocono notes already suspected this, despite the acclaim their elders were awarding. Later Dyson quoted “an unkind critic” as having said, “Other people publish to show how to do it, but Julian Schwinger publishes to show you that only he can do it.” He seemed to strive for an exceptional ratio of equations to text, and the prose posed serious challenges to the Physical Review’s typesetters.

Feynman bore into town at 70 miles per hour and was immediately arrested for a rapid sequence of traffic violations.

Dyson decided that there would be no prize for timidity and—still in his first weeks at the institute—sent Oppenheimer by interoffice mail an aggressive manifesto.

“The theoretical broadening which comes from having many humanities subjects on the campus is offset by the general dopiness of the people who study these things and by the Department of Home Economics.”

They discover that it is hard to teach a pure concept without clothing it in at least a fragment of narrative: who discovered it; what problem needed solving; what path led from not knowing to knowing.

Science is a way to teach how something gets to be known, what is not known, to what extent things are known (for nothing is known absolutely), how to handle doubt and uncertainty, what the rules of evidence are, how to think about things so that judgments can be made, how to distinguish truth from fraud, and from show.

Under the circumstances Feynman did not relish the prospect of accepting the award from Strauss. But Rabi, who was visiting Caltech, advised him to go ahead. “You should never turn a man’s generosity as a sword against him,” he recalled Rabi saying. “Any virtue that a man has, even if he has many vices, should not be used as a tool against him.”

We have no excuse that there are not enough experiments, it has nothing to do with experiments. Our situation is unlike the field, say, of mesons, where we say, perhaps there aren’t yet enough clues for even a human mind to figure out what is the pattern. We should not even have to look at the experiments.... It is like looking in the back of the book for the answer ... The only reason that we cannot do this problem of superconductivity is that we haven’t got enough imagination.

Finally they came to a clean-looking photograph, and Bethe mentioned the statistical likelihood of errors. Schein said that Bethe’s own formula predicted only a one-in-five chance of error. Yes, Bethe replied, and we’ve already looked at five plates. To Feynman, looking on, it seemed like classic self-deception: a researcher believes in the result he is seeking, and he starts to overweight the favorable evidence and underweight the possible counterexamples. Schein finally said in frustration: You have a different theory for every case, while I have a single hypothesis that explains all at once. Bethe replied, Yes, and the difference is that each of my many explanations is right and your one explanation is wrong.

If a Caltech experimenter told Feynman about a result reached after a complex process of correcting data, Feynman was sure to ask how the experimenter had decided when to stop correcting, and whether that decision had been made before the experimenter could see what effect it would have on the outcome. It was all too easy to fall into the trap of correcting until the answer looked right. To avoid it required an intimate acquaintanceship with the rules of the scientist’s game. It also required not just honesty, but a sense that honesty required exertion.

unpleasant shock when he discussed his work with Feynman. It happened again and again: physicists would wait for an opportunity to get Feynman’s judgment of a result on which they had staked weeks or months of their career. Typically Feynman would refuse to allow them to give a full explanation. He said it spoiled his fun.

It happened again and again: physicists would wait for an opportunity to get Feynman’s judgment of a result on which they had staked weeks or months of their career. Typically Feynman would refuse to allow them to give a full explanation. He said it spoiled his fun.

Feynman immediately rose, astonishingly, to say that such objects would be gravitationally unstable. Furthermore, he said that the instability followed from general relativity. The claim required a calculation of the subtle countervailing effects of stellar forces and relativistic gravity. Fowler thought he was talking through his hat. A colleague later discovered that Feynman had done a hundred pages of work on the problem years before. The Chicago astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar independently produced Feynman’s result—it was part of the work for which he won a Nobel Prize twenty years later. Feynman himself never bothered to publish. Someone with a new idea always risked finding, as one colleague said, “that Feynman had signed the guest book and already left.”

A great physicist who accumulated knowledge without taking the trouble to publish could be a genuine danger to his colleagues. At best it was unnerving to learn that one’s potentially career-advancing discovery had been, to Feynman, below the threshold of publishability.

A person with a mysterious storehouse of unwritten knowledge was a wizard.

Where the first writers on genius had noticed in Homer and Shakespeare a forgivable disregard for the niceties of prosody, the romantics of the late nineteenth century saw powerful, liberating heroes, throwing off shackles, defying God and convention. They also saw a bent of mind that could turn fully pathological. Genius was linked with insanity—was insanity. That feeling of divine inspiration, the breath of revelation seemingly from without, actually came from within, where melancholy and madness twisted the brain.

The genius, disturbed as he is, makes errors and wrong turns that the ordinary person avoids.

the lunatic-genius-wizard did not play as well in America, notwithstanding the relatively unbuttoned examples of writers like Whitman and Melville. There was a reason. American genius as the nineteenth century neared its end was not busy making culture, playing with words, creating music and art, or otherwise impressing the academy. It was busy sending its output to the patent office. Alexander Graham Bell was a genius. Eli Whitney and Samuel Morse were geniuses. Let European romantics celebrate the genius as erotic hero (Don Juan) or the genius as martyr (Werther). Let them bend their definitions to accommodate the genius composers who succeeded Mozart, with their increasingly direct pipelines to the emotions.

“Mr. Edison is not a wizard,” reported a 1917 biography.

Much of what passes for genius is mere excellence, the difference a matter of degree.

Perhaps genius was an artifact of a culture’s psychology, a symptom of a particular form of hero worship. Reputations of greatness come and go, after all, propped up by the sociopolitical needs of an empowered sector of the community and then slapped away by a restructuring of the historical context.

There are lots of people who are too original for their own good, and had Feynman not been as smart as he was, I think he would have been too original for his own good. There was always an element of showboating in his character. He was like the guy that climbs Mont Blanc barefoot just to show that it can be done. A lot of things he did were to show, you didn’t have to do it that way, you can do it this other way. And this other way, in fact, was not as good as the first way, but it showed he was different.

To master—as modern particle physicists must—the machinery of group theory and current algebra, of perturbative expansions and non-Abelian gauge theories, of spin statistics and Yang-Mills, is to sustain in one’s mind a fantastic house of cards, at once steely and delicate. To manipulate that framework, and to innovate within it, requires a mental power that nature did not demand of scientists in past centuries.

Scientists still ask the what if questions. What if Edison had not invented the electric light—how much longer would it have taken? What if Heisenberg had not invented the S matrix? What if Fleming had not discovered penicillin? Or (the king of such questions) what if Einstein had not invented general relativity? “I always find questions like that ... odd,” Feynman wrote to a correspondent who posed one. Science tends to be created as it is needed. “We are not that much smarter than each other,” he said.

Imagine yourself standing before the mirror, he suggested, with one hand pointing east and the other west. Wave the east hand. The mirror image waves its east hand. Its head is up. Its west hand lies to the west. Its feet are down. “Everything’s really all right,” Feynman said. The problem is on the axis running through the mirror. Your nose and the back of your head are reversed: if your nose points north, your double’s nose points south. The problem now is psychological. We think of our image as another person. We cannot imagine ourselves “squashed” back to front, so we imagine ourselves turned left and right, as if we had walked around a pane of glass to face the other way. It is in this psychological turnabout that left and right are switched. It is the same with a book. If the letters are reversed left and right, it is because we turned the book about a vertical axis to face the mirror. We could just as easily turn the book from bottom to top instead, in which case the letters will appear upside down.

he could be devastatingly cruel. He summarized one text by writing, “Mr. Beard is very courageous when he gives freely so many references to other books, because if a student ever did look at another book, I am sure he would not return again to continue reading Beard,”

enough to mention it from the audience during five minutes cadged

Age was no friend of the physicist. Wisdom counted for nothing.

younger theorists applied the notion with real success. “We very much need a guiding principle like renormalizability to help us pick the quantum field theory of the real world out of the infinite variety of conceivable quantum field theories,” said Steven Weinberg years later—recognizing, however, that he was begging the question of why? Why should the correct theories be the computable ones? Why should nature make matters easy for human physicists?

“We very much need a guiding principle like renormalizability to help us pick the quantum field theory of the real world out of the infinite variety of conceivable quantum field theories,” said Steven Weinberg years later—recognizing, however, that he was begging the question of why? Why should the correct theories be the computable ones? Why should nature make matters easy for human physicists?

Feynman himself remained nearly as uncomfortable as Dirac. He continued to say that renormalization was “dippy” and “a shell game” and “hocus-pocus.”

The difference is 1042, a number that defied even Feynman’s ability to find illustrative analogies. “The gravitational force is weak,” he said at one conference, introducing his work on quantizing gravity. “In fact, it’s damned weak.”

Learn by trying to understand simple things in terms of other ideas—always honestly and directly. What keeps the clouds up, why can’t I see stars in the daytime, why do colors appear on oily water, what makes the lines on the surface of water being poured from a pitcher, why does a hanging lamp swing back and forth—and all the innumerable little things you see all around you. Then when you have learned what an explanation really is, you can then go on to more subtle questions.

Many first-year physics courses did begin with history: physics in ancient Greece; the pyramids of Egypt and the calendars of Sumeria; medieval physics through nineteenth-century

science risked becoming a historical subject. Many first-year physics courses did begin with history: physics in ancient Greece; the pyramids of Egypt and the calendars of Sumeria; medieval physics through nineteenth-century physics. Virtually all began with some form of mechanics.

“When you have learned what an explanation really is,” Feynman had said, “you can then go on to more subtle questions.”

The why seemed to fall in their domain. “With this question philosophy began and with this question it will end,” Martin Heidegger had recently said, “provided that it ends in greatness and not in an impotent decline.”

What validates the law of gravitation? Feynman expressed the scientist’s modern view, a blend of the pragmatic and the aesthetic. He cautioned that even so beautiful a law was provisional: Newton’s law of gravitation gave way to Einstein’s, and a necessary quantum modification eluded physicists even now. That is the same with all our other laws—they are not exact. There is always an edge of mystery, always a place where we have some fiddling around to do yet. This may or may not be a property of Nature, but it certainly is common to all the laws as we know them today.

Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her pattern, so each small piece of the fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.

With all these traditional virtues removed—or worse, partly removed while still partly necessary—it fell to science to build a new understanding of the nature of explanation. Or so Feynman argued: the philosophers themselves, he said, were always a tempo behind, like tourists moving in after the explorers have left.

A theorist who can juggle different theories in his mind has a creative advantage, Feynman argued, when it comes time to change the theories. The path-integral formulation of quantum mechanics might be empirically equivalent to other formulations and yet—given less-than-omniscient human physicists—find more natural-seeming application to realms of science not yet explored.

Different theories tended to give a physicist “different ideas for guessing,”

To get something that would produce a slightly different result it had to be completely different. In stating a new law you cannot make imperfections on a perfect thing; you have to have another perfect thing.

the original problem. He would challenge a young theorist: What can you explain that you didn’t set out to explain?

What can you explain that you didn’t set out to explain?

What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it.

“I have argued flying saucers with lots of people,” Feynman once said. “I was interested in this: they keep arguing that it is possible. And that’s true. It is possible. They do not appreciate that the problem is not to demonstrate whether it’s possible or not but whether it’s going on or not.”

The Nobel committee traditionally found it easier to identify worthy candidates than to pinpoint their most worthy particular achievements.

In a private moment a reporter for Time made a suggestion he loved: that he simply say, “Listen, buddy, if I could tell you in a minute what I did, it wouldn’t be worth the Nobel Prize.”

Feynman called Tomonaga in Japan and then reported to a student journalist a capsule caricature of the Nobel Prize–day telephone conversation: [FEYNMAN:] Congratulations. [TOMONAGA:] Same to you. How does it feel to be a Nobel Prize winner? I guess you know. Can you explain to me in layman’s terms exactly what it was you did to win the prize? I am very sleepy.

James Watson. Watson gave Feynman a manuscript tentatively titled Honest Jim. It was a tame memoir by later standards, but when it was published—under a different title, The Double Helix—it caused an enormous popular stir. With a candor that shocked many of Watson’s colleagues, it portrayed the ambition, the competitiveness, the blunders, the miscommunications, and the raw excitement of real scientists. Feynman read it in his room at the Chicago faculty club, skipping the cocktail party in his honor, and found himself moved. Later he wrote Watson: Don’t let anybody criticize that book who hasn’t read it through to the end. Its apparent minor faults and petty gossipy incidents fall into place as deeply meaningful.... The people who say “that is not how science is done” are wrong.... When you describe what went on in your head as the truth haltingly staggers upon you and passes on, finally fully recognized, you are describing how science is done. I know, for I have had the same beautiful and frightening experience

Physicists kept finding new ways to describe the contrast between them. Murray makes sure you know what an extraordinary person he is, they would say, while Dick is not a person at all but a more advanced life form pretending to be human to spare your feelings.

Their personal styles spill over into their theoretical work, too. Gell-Mann insists on mathematical rigor in all his work, often at the expense of comprehensibility.... Where Gell-Mann disdains vague, heuristic models that might only point the way toward a true solution, Feynman revels in them. He believes that a certain amount of imprecision and ambiguity is essential to communication.

SU(3) should have had, along with its various eight-member and ten-member and other families, a most-basic three-member family. This seemed a strange omission. Yet the rules of the group would have required this threesome to carry fractional electric charges: 2/3 and –1/3. Since no particle had ever turned up with anything but unit charge, this seemed implausible even by modern standards.

Feynman, meanwhile, had disregarded so much of the decade’s high-energy physics that he had to make a long-term project of catching up. He tried to pay more attention to experimental data than to the methods and language of theorists. He tried, as always, to read papers only until he understood the issue and then to work out the problem for himself.

For almost two decades he also taught a course, listed in no catalog, known as Physics X: one afternoon a week, undergraduates would gather to pose any scientific question they wished, and Feynman would improvise. His effect on these students was immense; they often left the Lauritsen Laboratory basement feeling that they had had a private pipeline to an oracle with an earthy kind of omniscience. He believed—in the face of the increasing esotericism of his own subject—that true understanding implied a kind of clarity. A physicist once asked him to explain in simple terms a standard item of the dogma, why spin-one-half particles obey Fermi-Dirac statistics. Feynman promised to prepare a freshman lecture on it. For once, he failed. “I couldn’t reduce it to the freshman level,” he said a few days later, and added, “That means we really don’t understand it.”

Feynman summed up his ambivalence about his insider and outsider status by replying in Groucho Marx fashion: What the hell is Feynman invited for? He is not up to the other guys and is doing nothing as far as I know. If you clean up the invitation list, to just the hard-core workers, I might begin to think about attending. Coleman duly removed him from the list, and Feynman attended.

Physicists did not make natural hippies. They had played too great a role in creating the technology-worshiping, nuclear-shadowed culture against which the counterculture set itself.