Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

by James Gleick

  His favorite sort of triumph in the world of these stories came in the realm of everyday cleverness—as when he arrived at a North Carolina airport, late for a meeting of relativists, and worked out how to get help from a taxi dispatcher:

  “Listen,” I said to the dispatcher. “The main meeting began yesterday, so there were a whole lot of guys going to the meeting who must have come through here yesterday. Let me describe them to you: They would have their heads kind of in the air, and they would be talking to each other, not paying attention to where they were going, saying things to each other like ‘G-mu-nu. G-mu-nu.”’

  His face lit up. “Ah, yes,” he said. “You mean Chapel Hill!”

  Feynman chose as a title the odd phrase uttered by Mrs. Eisenhart at his first Princeton tea when he asked for both cream and lemon: “Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman!” Those words had stayed in his mind for forty years, a reminder of how people used manners and culture to make him feel small, and now he was taking revenge. W. W. Norton and Company bought the manuscript for an advance payment of fifteen hundred dollars, a tiny sum for a trade book. Its staff did not like Feynman’s title at all. They proposed I Have to Understand the World or I Got an Idea (“a nice Brooklyn ring and a little double meaning,” the editor said). But Feynman would not budge. Norton released Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! in a small first printing early in 1985. It sold out quickly, and within weeks the publisher had a surprising best-seller.

  One unhappy reader was Murray Gell-Mann. His attention focused on Feynman’s description of the joy of discovering the “new law” of weak interactions in 1957: “It was the first time, and the only time, in my career that I knew a law of nature that nobody else knew.” Gell-Mann’s rage could be heard through the halls of Lauritsen Laboratory, and he told other physicists that he was going to sue. For late editions of the paperback Feynman added a parenthetical disclaimer: “Of course it wasn’t true, but finding out later that at least Murray Gell-Mann—and also Sudarshan and Marshak—had worked out the same theory didn’t spoil my fun.”

  Surely You’re Joking gave offense in another way. Feynman spoke of women as he always had—“a nifty blonde, perfectly proportioned”; “a cornfed, rather fattish-looking woman.” They appeared as objects of flirtation, nude models for his drawings, or “bar girls” to be tricked into sleeping with him. He knew that his diction was not wholly innocent. Sexual politics had caught up with him before, at the 1972 meeting of the American Physical Society in San Francisco, where he accepted the Oersted Medal for contributions to the teaching of physics. His personal relationships were not the issue, although in the male world of Caltech a part of his glamorous reputation with envious students came from his apparent sway over women. He continued to flirt with young women at parties and encouraged Don Juan–style rumors. He frequented one of the first California topless bars, Gianonni’s—he filled its scalloped paper placemats with chains of equations—and amused the local press by testifying in court on its behalf in 1968. There was genuine machismo in the hero-worship of the male graduate students.

  He had received a letter the previous fall suggesting that some of his language tended to “reinforce many ‘sexist’ or ‘male-chauvinist’ ideas.” For example, he told an anecdote about a scientist who was “out with his girl friend the night after he realized that nuclear reactions must be going on in the stars.”

  She said “Look at how pretty the stars shine!” He said “Yes, and right now I am the only man in the world who knows why they shine.”

  The letter writer, E. V. Rothstein, cited another anecdote about a “lady driver” and asked him, please, not to contribute to discrimination against women in science. In replying, Feynman decided not to emphasize his sensitivity:

  Dear Rothstein:

  Don’t bug me, man!

  R. P. Feynman.

  The result was a demonstration organized by a Berkeley group at the APS meeting, with women carrying signs and distributing leaflets titled “PR ? TEST” and addressed to “Richard P. (for Pig?) Feynman.”

  Despite the women’s movement that emerged in the sixties, science remained forbiddingly male in its rhetoric and its demographics. Barely 2 percent of American graduate degrees in physics went to women. Caltech did not hire its first female faculty member until 1969, and she did not receive tenure until she forced the issue in court in 1976. (Feynman, to the surprise and displeasure of some of his humanities colleagues, had taken her side; he had spent many pleasant hours in her office reading aloud such poems as Theodore Roethke’s “I Knew a Woman”: “I measure time by how a body sways… .”) Like most men in physics, Feynman had known a few women as professional colleagues and believed that he had treated them, individually, as equals. They tended to agree. What more, he wondered, could anyone ask?

  The Berkeley protesters had discovered his lady-driver anecdotes but had overlooked other examples of a style of speaking in which, habitually, the scientist is male and nature—her secrets waiting to be penetrated—is female. In his Nobel lecture Feynman had recalled falling in love with his theory: “And, like falling in love with a woman, it is only possible if you do not know much about her, so you cannot see her faults.” And he had concluded:

  So what happened to the old theory that I fell in love with as a youth? Well, I would say it’s become an old lady, that has very little attractive left in her and the young today will not have their hearts pound when they look at her anymore. But, we can say the best we can for any old woman, that she has been a good mother and she has given birth to some very good children.

  In 1965 a large audience of men and women could listen to these words without taking offense or hearing a politically charged subtext. In 1972 Feynman was able to defuse the protest easily when he took the podium, by declaring: “There is in the world of physics today a tremendous prejudice against women. This is a ridiculous thing and should stop, as there is no sense to it whatsoever. I love the subject of physics and it has always been my desire to try to share the delights of understanding it with any minds that were able to—male or female… .” Many of the demonstrators applauded. In 1985 Feynman once again seemed to some feminists a symbol of male dominance in physics. Real life was complex: one tough-minded Caltech professional would close her door and confide to a stranger that Feynman, even in his sixties, was the sexiest man she had ever known; others, wives of colleagues, resented their husbands for loving him so uncritically. Meanwhile, the status of women in the profession of physics had barely changed.

  Despite himself, he was stung by the occasional criticism of Surely You’re Joking. He knew, too, that some of the physicists who had known him longest were disappointed by a self-portrait that made Feynman seem more joker than scientist. His old friends in Hans Bethe’s generation were often pained, or shocked, though they did repeat Feynman’s stories about them with relish, detail for detail, as though from their own memory, Feynman’s voice having transplanted itself into their brains. Others saw through to the essence of what they loved in Feynman. Philip Morrison, writing in Scientific American, said: “Generally Mr. Feynman is not joking; it is we, the setters of ritual performance, of hypocritical standards, pretenders to care and understanding, who are joking instead. This is the book of a powerful mind honest beyond everything else, a specialist in spade-naming.” Feynman nonetheless upbraided people who called the book his autobiography. He wrote in the margin of a science writer’s draft manuscript about modern particle physics: “Not An Autobiography. Not So. Simply A Set Of Anecdotes.” And when he came across a sentence describing him, at Los Alamos, as “a curiously tragic joker,” he scrawled angrily, “What I really was under such circumstances is far deeper than you are likely to understand.”

  A Disaster of Technology

  In 1958, a hasty four months after Sputnik, Americans entered what was called the space race by sending into orbit the first of a series of Explorer satellites from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Explorer I weighed as much as a fully packed overni
ght bag. It was hurled skyward on January 31 by a four-stage Jupiter-C rocket—more reliable than the navy’s Vanguard rockets, which had been exploding at liftoff. It sent back radio signals much like Sputnik’s.

  Explorer II, bearing a cosmic-ray detector that pushed its weight up to thirty-two pounds, soared skyward five weeks later and disappeared into the clouds. An army team watched under the guidance of Wernher von Braun, resilient veteran of the Nazi rocket program at Peenemünde. They listened to the fading rumble of the rocket and the rising beep of the radio signal transmitted to their squawk box. All seemed well. A half hour after the launch, they held a confident news briefing.

  Across the continent, where the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena served as the army’s main collaborator in rocket research, a team was struggling with the task of tracking the satellite’s course. They used a room-size IBM 704 digital computer. It was temperamental. They entered the primitively sparse data available for tracking the metal can that the army’s rocket had hurled forward: the frequency of the radio signal, changing Doppler-fashion as the velocity in the line of flight changed; the time of disappearance from the observers at Cape Canaveral; observations from other tracking stations. The JPL team had learned that small variations in the computer’s input caused enormous variations in its output. Albert Hibbs, the laboratory’s young research chief, had complained about this difficulty to his former Caltech thesis adviser: Feynman.

  Feynman bet that he could outcompute the computer, if fed the same data at the same rate. So when Explorer II lifted off the pad at 1:28 P.M., he sat in a JPL conference room, surrounded by staff members rapidly sorting the data for the computer. At one point Caltech’s president, Lee DuBridge, entered the room and was startled to see Feynman—who snapped, Go away, I’m busy. After a half hour Feynman rose to say he was finished: according to his calculations the rocket had plunged into the Atlantic Ocean. He left for a weekend in Las Vegas as the trackers kept trying to coax an unambiguous answer from their computer. Tracking stations at Antigua and Inyokern, California, persuaded themselves that they had picked an orbiting satellite out of the background noise, and “moonwatch” teams in Florida spent the night watching the skies. But Feynman was right. The army finally announced at 5 o’clock the next afternoon that Explorer II had failed to reach orbit.

  The space shuttle Challenger rose from its launching scaffold into a cloudless sky twenty-eight years later, on January 28, 1986. A half second after liftoff, a puff of dark smoke, invisible to human eyes, spurted from the side of one of the shuttle’s two solid-fuel rockets. The launch had been postponed four times. Inside the cabin, as always, the many-gravity acceleration pressed the crew against their seats: the commander, Francis Scobee; the pilot, Michael Smith; the mission specialists, Ellison Onizuka, Judith Resnick, and Ronald McNair; an engineer from the Hughes Aircraft Company, Gregory Jarvis; and a New England schoolteacher, Christa McAuliffe, who had been chosen as “Teacher in Space,” the winner of a NASA public-relations program meant to encourage the interest of children and also congressmen. The cargo bay—large enough to have carried the 1950s Jupiter-C rocket—held a pair of satellites, a fluid-dynamics experiment, and radiation-monitoring equipment. Ice had built up overnight, and new delays had been ordered while an ice inspection team made sure it had time to melt. Seven seconds after liftoff the shuttle rolled over in its characteristic fashion, so that it appeared to be hanging from the back of its giant disposable fuel tank, and headed east over the Atlantic, its percussive roar audible over hundreds of square miles. The breeze barely bent its column of smoke. At the one-minute mark—halfway through the brief expected lifetime of the solid-fuel rockets—a flickering light appeared where it did not belong, at a joint in the shell of the right-side rocket. The main engines reached full power, and Scobee radioed, “Roger. Go at throttle up.” At seventy-two seconds the two rockets began to pull in different directions. At seventy-three seconds the fuel tank burst open and released liquid hydrogen into the air, where it exploded. The shuttle felt an enormous sudden thrust. A cloud of flame and smoke enveloped it. Fragments emerged seconds later: the left wing, like a triangular sail against the sky; the engines, still firing; and somewhere, intact, a plummeting coffin for six men and a woman. The technologies of television, aided by satellites lofted in earlier shuttle missions, let more people witness the event, again and again, than any other disaster in history.

  Machinery out of control. The American space agency had made itself seem a symbol of technical prowess, placing teams of men on the moon and then fostering the illusion that space travel was routine—an illusion built into the very name shuttle. After the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, and the chemical disaster at Bhopal, India, the space-shuttle explosion seemed a final confirmation that technology had broken free of human reins. Did nothing work any more? The dream of technology that held sway over the America of Feynman’s childhood had given way to a sense of technology as not just a villain but an inept villain. Nuclear power plants, once offering the innocent promise of inexhaustible power, had become menacing symbols on the landscape. Automobiles, computers, simple household appliances, or giant industrial machines—all seemed unpredictable, dangerous, untrustworthy. The society of engineers, so hopeful in the America of Feynman’s childhood, had given way to a technocracy, bloated and overconfident, collapsing under the weight of its own byzantine devices. That was one message read in the image replayed hundreds of times that day on millions of television screens—the fragmenting smoke cloud, the twin rockets veering apart like Roman candles.

  President Ronald Reagan immediately announced his determination to continue the shuttle program and expressed his support for the space agency. Following government custom, he appointed an investigatory commission that would repeatedly be described as independent—the White House officially declared it “an outside group of experts, distinguished Americans who have no ax to grind”—although in actuality it was composed mostly of insiders and figures chosen for their symbolic value: its chairman, William P. Rogers, who had served as attorney general and secretary of state in Republican, administrations; Major General Donald J. Kutyna, who had headed shuttle operations for the Department of Defense; several NASA consultants and executives of aerospace contractors; Sally Ride, the first American woman in space; Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon; Chuck Yeager, a famous former test pilot; and, a last-minute choice, Richard Feynman, a professor who brought to the next day’s newspaper accounts the tag “Nobel Prize winner.” Armstrong said on the day of his appointment that he did not understand why an independent commission was necessary. Rogers said even more baldly, “We are not going to conduct this investigation in a manner which would be unfairly critical of NASA, because we think—I certainly think—NASA has done an excellent job, and I think the American people do.”

  The White House named Rogers and selected the rest of the commission from a list provided by the space agency’s acting administrator, William R. Graham. As it happened, Graham had attended Caltech thirty years before and had often sat in on Physics X, which he remembered as the best course at Caltech. Later he had attended Feynman’s lectures at Hughes Aircraft. But he did not think of Feynman for the shuttle commission until his wife, who had accompanied him to some of the Hughes lectures, suggested the name. When Graham called, Feynman said, “You’re ruining my life.” Only later did Graham realize what he had meant: You’re using up my very short time. Feynman was now suffering from a second rare form of cancer: Waldenström’s macroglobulinemia, involving the bone marrow. In this cancer, one form of B lymphocyte, a white blood cell, becomes abnormal and produces large amounts of a protein that makes the blood sticky and thick. Clotting becomes a danger, and the blood flows poorly to some parts of the body. Feynman’s past kidney damage was a complication. He seemed gray and wan. There was little his doctors could propose. They could not explain the presence of two such unusual cancers. Feynman himself refused to consider the speculation tha
t the cause might lie forty years in the past, at the atomic bomb project.

  He immediately arranged a briefing with his friends at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. The day after his appointment was announced, he sat in a small room in the central engineering building and met with a succession of engineers. The laboratory, with its advanced image-processing facilities, already had the original negatives of the thousands of photographs taken by the range cameras as the shuttle drove skyward.

  The shuttle’s solid rocket boosters were made in sections, assembled one atop another at the launch site. The joints holding the sections together had to be sealed to prevent the escape of hot gasesfrom inside the rocket. Pairs of O-rings-a quarter-inch thickspanned the 37-foot circumference. The pressure of the gas was supposed to wedge them tightly into the joints, creating the seal.

  Feynman examined technical drawings and heard from engineers who had worked on the early design studies, on the solid rocket boosters, and on the engines. He learned that the shuttle’s engineers, forming a community across the administrative boundaries that separated NASA’s various departments and subcontractors, shared a knowledge that every launch was at risk. Recurring cracks had appeared in the turbine blades of the shuttle’s engines, at the very edge of engine technology. That first day, February 4, Feynman noted that there were well-known problems with the rubber O-rings that sealed the joints between sections of the tall solid-fuel rockets. These rings represented a remarkable scaling-up of everyday engineering for the high-technology shuttle: they were ordinary rubber rings, thinner than a pencil yet thirty-seven feet long, the circumference of the rocket. They were meant to take the pressure of hot gas and form a seal by squeezing tight into the metal joint. “O-Rings show scorching in Clevis check …” Feynman wrote in a shaky, aging hand. “Once a small hole burn thru generates a large hole very fast! few seconds catastrophic failure.” He flew to Washington that night.