by James Gleick
Instead he proposed a form of jet propulsion, using air as the propellant. Jet technology had just now reached practicality in airplanes. Feynman’s spacecraft would use the outer edges of the earth’s atmosphere as a sort of warm-up track and accelerate as it circled the earth. An atomic reactor would power the jet by heating the air that was sucked into the engine. Wings would be used first to provide lift and then, when the speed rose beyond five miles per second, “flying upside down to keep you from going off the earth, or rather out of the atmosphere.” When the craft reached a useful escape velocity, it would fly off at a tangent toward its destination like a rock from a slingshot.
Yes, air resistance, heating the ship, would be a problem. But Feynman thought this could be overcome by delicately adjusting the altitude as the craft sped up—“if there is enough air to cause appreciable heating by friction there surely is enough to feed the jet engines.” The engines would need impressive engineering to operate in such a wide range of air densities, he admitted. He did not address a problem of symmetry: how such a spacecraft would slow down on reaching an airless destination such as the moon. In any event he could not have anticipated the killing flaw in his idea: that people would lose faith in the innocence of nuclear reactors flying about overhead.
They All Seem Ashes
He visited Far Rockaway just before the fall semester began in 1946 and gave another talk on the atomic bomb at the local Temple Israel the day after Yom Kippur. The synagogue had a glamorous new rabbi, Judah Cahn, who delivered widely admired sermons on modern problems. Feynman’s parents, despite their atheism, had started attending from time to time. Melville’s health seemed slightly better. His uncontrollable high blood pressure had become a constant source of worry to the family, and in the preceding spring he had traveled out to the Mayo Clinic, in Minnesota, where he was enrolled in an early experiment on the effect of diet. He accepted a strict regimen of rice and fruit. It seemed to work. His blood pressure decreased. He returned home and occasionally sneaked out, in violation of doctors’ orders, to play golf with friends. He was fifty-six years old. One day Feynman saw him at the table, staring at a salt shaker. Melville closed one eye, opened it, closed the other eye, and said he had a blind spot. A small blood vessel must have burst in his brain, he said.
The knowledge that sudden death might come at any time hung over the family. Melville and his son almost never wrote each other—Lucille handled the intrafamily correspondence—but when Richard first accepted the Cornell professorship he sent his father a letter expressing twenty-five years of love and gratitude, and Melville, moved, responded in kind. His chest was swelled with pride, he wrote (while Lucille complained that he was wasting paper by writing on only one side):
It is not so easy for a Dope of a father to write to a son who has already arrived to a state of learning and wisdom beyond his… . That was all right when you were small and I had a great advantage over you—but today it would be more equitable if I could bask in the sunlight of your knowledge, and sit by your side and learn from you some of the more wondrous secrets of nature that now are beyond my ken but are known to you.
On October 7 he collapsed from a stroke. He died the next day. Richard signed his second death certificate in two years. Melville Feynman had written him: “The dreams I have often had in my youth for my own development, I see coming true in your career… . I envy the life of culture you will have being constantly with so many other big men of equal culture.”
The interment took place at Bayside Cemetery nearby in Queens, a vast rolling field of gravestones and monuments as far as the eye could see. Lucille’s father had built a mausoleum there, a stone hut like a small bomb shelter. Midway through the ceremony Rabbi Cahn asked Richard, as eldest son, to say the Kaddish with him. Joan watched in anguish as her brother’s face froze. He wanted no part of a mourners’ prayer in praise of God.
He told the rabbi he did not understand the Hebrew. Cahn merely switched to English. Richard listened to the words and refused to repeat them. He did not believe in God; he knew that his father had not believed in God; and the hypocrisy seemed unbearable. His disbelief had nothing of indifference in it. It was a determined, coolly rational disbelief, a conviction that the myths of religion cheated knowledge. He stood there surrounded by stone and grass near the undersized sepulchral vaults, assembled one atop another, that held the bones of his grandparents. One shelf, too, held the remains of his infant brother, Henry, memorialized now for twenty-two years after his life of one month. On Feynman’s face was a look of tension and determination and also, it seemed to Joan at that moment, utter isolation. Leaving his father’s coffin, he exploded in a rage. Their mother broke down and wept.
At Cornell the next week he seemed unchanged. Just as at Los Alamos—it had been barely a year before—if he grieved, he showed no one. He was proudly rational as ever—“realistic,” he told himself. Classes began. Cornell’s 1946 fall-term enrollment was its largest ever, nearly double prewar levels. Feynman was already a draw for young physicists, and he lectured with absolute confidence. Then, a few nights into the term—it was October 17—he took a pen and paper, let realism slip away, and wrote one last letter to the only person who could help him now:
D’Arline,
I adore you, sweetheart.
I know how much you like to hear that—but I don’t only write it because you like it—I write it because it makes me warm all over inside to write it to you.
It is such a terribly long time since I last wrote to you—almost two years but I know you’ll excuse me because you understand how I am, stubborn and realistic; & I thought there was no sense to writing.
But now I know my darling wife that it is right to do what I have delayed in doing, and that I have done so much in the past. I want to tell you I love you. I want to love you. I always will love you.
I find it hard to understand in my mind what it means to love you after you are dead—but I still want to comfort and take care of you—and I want you to love me and care for me. I want to have problems to discuss with you—I want to do little projects with you. I never thought until just now that we can do that together. What should we do. We started to learn to make clothes together—or learn Chinese—or getting a movie projector. Can’t I do something now. No. I am alone without you and you were the “idea-woman” and general instigator of all our wild adventures.
When you were sick you worried because you could not give me something that you wanted to & thought I needed. You needn’t have worried. Just as I told you then there was no real need because I loved you in so many ways so much. And now it is clearly even more true—you can give me nothing now yet I love you so that you stand in my way of loving anyone else—but I want you to stand there. You, dead, are so much better than anyone else alive.
I know you will assure me that I am foolish & that you want me to have full happiness & don’t want to be in my way. I’ll bet you are suprised that I don’t even have a girl friend (except you, sweetheart) after two years. But you can’t help it, darling, nor can I—I don’t understand it, for I have met many girls & very nice ones and I don’t want to remain alone—but in two or three meetings they all seem ashes. You only are left to me. You are real.
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.
That he had written such a letter to the woman he loved, two years after her death, could never become part of the iconography of Feynman, the collection of stories and images that was already beginning to follow him about. The letter went into an envelope, the envelope into a box. It was not read again until after his death. Nor did Feynman speak of his graveside outburst at the burial of his father, even to friends, although they would have recognized at least one of its potential morals, his unwillingness to submit to hypocrisy. The Feynman who could be wracked by strong emotion, the man stung by shyness
, insecurity, anger, worry, or grief—no one got close enough any more to see him. His friends heard a certain kind of story instead, in which Feynman was an inadvertent boy hero, mastering a bureaucracy or a person or a situation by virtue of his naïveté, his good humor, his brashness, his commonsense cleverness (not brilliance), and his emperor’s-new-clothes honesty. The stories were true, at least in spirit, though like all stories they were selectively incomplete. They were admired, polished, retold, and once in a while even relived.
Many of his friends at Los Alamos had already heard variations of a draft-examination story, in which he needled an army examiner who asked him to hold out his hands. Feynman held them out: one palm up, the other palm down. The examiner asked him to turn them over, and he did, providing a wise-guy lesson in symmetry: one palm down, the other palm up. Shortly after his first year at Cornell, Feynman got a chance to refine the story. The army was still drafting, and his educational deferments had run their course. The Selective Service scheduled a new physical examination. Feynman’s version of the story, told countless times in the decades that followed, varied from the half serious to the strictly comic. The basic form went like this:
Stripped to his underwear, he goes from booth to booth, until—“Finally, we get to Booth No. 13, Psychiatrist.”
Witch doctor. Baloney. Faker. Feynman held an extreme view of psychiatry. His mind was his bailiwick, and he liked to think himself in control. Sensitive psychiatrists might have noted his tendency to deny the occasional roiling undercurrents; the undercurrents and the denial were their bailiwick. He preferred to stress the unscientific hocus-pocus of their enterprise (conveniently shifting terminology, lack of reproducible experiments), as reflected in a movie he had seen recently, Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound, in which “a woman” (Ingrid Bergman), “her hand is stuck and she can’t play the piano … she used to be a great pianist… .” Certainly he never considered whether he (himself at that moment unable to work) might have had any but the most rational of reasons for feeling: “It’s boring as hell… .” The woman ducks off-screen with her psychiatrist, comes back, sits down at the piano, and plays. “Well, this kind of baloney, you know, I can’t stand it. I’m very anti. Okay?” Apart from everything else, psychiatrists are doctors, and Feynman has his reasons for holding doctors in contempt.
The psychiatrist looks at his file and says with a smile, Hello, Dick! Where do you work? (“Well, what the hell is he calling me Dick for? You know, he don’t know me that well.”)
Feynman says coldly, Schenectady. (This is temporarily true. He and Bethe are supplementing their Cornell salaries by working that summer at General Electric.)
Where at Schenectady, Dick?
Feynman tells him.
You like your work, Dick? “I couldn’t like him less, you know? Like a guy bothering you in a bar.”
Now a fourth question—Do you think people talk about you?—and Feynman detects that this is the routine: three innocent questions and then down to business.
“So I say, Yeah …” At this point Feynman, relating the story, takes on a tone of misunderstood innocence. He is scrupulously honest. If only the psychiatrist would forget the formulas, forget the mumbo jumbo, and try to understand him. “I wasn’t trying to fake it… . I meant in the sense that my mother talks to her friends… . I tried to explain—honest… .” The psychiatrist makes a note.
Do you think people stare at you? Feynman would say no—honest—but the psychiatrist adds, For example, do you think that any of the fellows sitting on the benches are looking at us now. Well, Feynman has sat on one of those benches, and there was not much else to look at. He does some mental arithmetic. “So I figure … there are about twelve guys in the thing and about three of them are looking—well, that’s all they’ve got to do—so I say, to be conservative, ‘Yeah, maybe two of them are looking at us.’”
He turns around to check, and sure enough. But the psychiatrist, “this nincompoop, this nincompoop … doesn’t bother to turn around and find out if it’s true or not.” (No scientist he.)
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.”)
I see you lost a wife recently. Do you talk to her? (The resentment that this question must stir goes beyond the comic bounds of the anecdote.)
Do you hear voices in your head? “No,” Feynman says. “Very rarely.” He admits a few occasions. Sometimes, in fact, just as he was falling asleep, he would hear Edward Teller, with a distinctive Hungarian accent, in Chicago giving him his first briefing on the atomic bomb.
There was much more: an argument about the nature of insanity, an argument about the value of life—Feynman in both cases continuing to get under the examiner’s skin. Feynman acknowledged that one of his mother’s sisters was mentally ill. And then the punch line, more serious than Feynman’s audiences tended to realize.
Well, Dick, I see you have a Ph.D. Where did you study?
MIT and Princeton. Where did you study?
Yale and London. And what did you study, Dick?
Physics. And what did you study?
Medicine.
And this is medicine?
The story never included several plausible points. Feynman never pleaded that, having contributed three years of wartime service in the Manhattan Project, he ought to be exempt from a further contribution. Nor did he mention how destructive it would have been to his career as a theoretical physicist if he had been conscripted now, at the age of twenty-eight. He had to walk a narrow line. There was nothing amusing or stylish in the summer of 1946 about evading the draft. For most people, to be declared mentally deficient by one’s draft board was a more frightening possibility than army service—far more damaging to one’s civilian prospects. So the Selective Service established few safeguards against fakery in the psychiatric examination. It did not expect to see records of a previous history of mental illness, for example; in any case private psychiatric treatment was far more unusual than it became in the next generation. Examiners felt they could rely on a subject’s naïve self-description to answer their checklist questions. Feynman repeated his answers to a second psychiatrist. His ability to conjure the voice of Teller was recorded as hypnagogic hallucinations. It was noted that the subject had a peculiar stare. (“I think it was probably when I said, ‘And this is medicine?’”) He was rejected.
It occurred to him that the Selective Service would examine its own files and discover a series of official letters requesting deferment so that Feynman could conduct essential research in physics during the war. More recent letters stated that he was performing an important service educating future physicists at Cornell. Might someone conclude that he was deliberately trying to deceive the examiners? To protect himself, he wrote a letter, carefully phrased, stating for the record that he believed no weight should be given to the finding of psychiatric deficiency. The Selective Service replied with a new draft card: 4-F.
Around a Mental Block
Princeton was celebrating the bicentennial of its founding with a grand explosion of pomp that fall: parties, processions, and a series of formal conferences that drew scholars and dignitaries from long distances. Dirac had agreed to speak on elementary particles as part of a three-day session on the future of nuclear science. Feynman was invited to introduce his one-time hero and lead a discussion afterward.
He disliked Dirac’s paper, a restatement of the now-familiar difficulties with quantum electrodynamics. It struck him as backward-looking in its Hamiltonian energy-centered emphasis—a dead end. He made so many nervous jokes that Niels Bohr, who was due to speak later in the day, stood up and criticized him for his lack of
seriousness. Feynman made a heartfelt remark about the unsettled state of the theory. “We need an intuitive leap at the mathematical formalism, such as we had in the Dirac electron theory,” he said. “We need a stroke of genius.”
As the day wore on—Robert Wilson speaking about the high-energy scattering of protons, E. O. Lawrence lecturing on his California accelerators—Feynman looked out the window and saw Dirac lolling on a patch of grass and gazing at the sky. He had a question that he had wanted to ask Dirac since before the war. He wandered out and sat down. A remark in a 1933 paper of Dirac’s had given Feynman a crucial clue toward his discovery of a quantum-mechanical version of the action in classical mechanics. “It is now easy to see what the quantum analogue of all this must be,” Dirac had written, but neither he nor anyone else had pursued this clue until Feynman discovered that the “analogue” was, in fact, exactly proportional. There was a rigorous and potentially useful mathematical bond. Now he asked Dirac whether the great man had known all along that the two quantities were proportional.
“Are they?” Dirac said. Feynman said yes, they were. After a silence he walked away.
Feynman’s reputation was traveling around the university circuit. Job offers floated his way. They seemed perversely inappropriate and did nothing to help his mood of frustration. Oppenheimer had invited him to California for the spring semester; now he turned the invitation down. Cornell promoted him to associate professor and raised his salary again. The chairman of the University of Pennsylvania’s physics department needed a new chief theorist. Here Bethe stepped in paternalistically: he had no intention of letting go of Feynman, and he was sensitive to his protégé’s mood. He thought it would be harmful for this suddenly unproductive twenty-eight-year-old to take on the psychological responsibility of a lead role in a university theory group. More than anything, he thought Feynman needed shelter. (He told the Pennsylvania administrator that Feynman was the second-best young physicist around: second to Schwinger.) For Feynman the most surprising—and oppressive—offer came from the Institute for Advanced Study, Einstein’s institute in Princeton, in the spring. Oppenheimer had now been named as the institute’s director, and he wanted Feynman. H. D. Smyth, Feynman’s old chairman at Princeton, wanted him, too, and the two institutions had sounded him out about a special joint appointment. His anxiety about failing to live up to such expectations was reaching a peak. He experimented with various tactics to break his mental block. For a while he got up every morning at 8:30 and tried to work. Looking in the mirror one morning as he shaved, he told himself the Princeton offer was absurd—he could not possibly accept, and furthermore he could not accept the responsibility for their impression of him. He had never claimed to be an Einstein, he told himself. It was their mistake. For a moment he felt lighter. Some of his guilt seemed to lift away.