Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

by James Gleick

  His own community had largely left behind questions with the spirit that first drove him toward physics. An intellectual distance had opened between the subatomic particle universe and the realm of ordinary phenomena—the magic that nature reveals to children. In The Feynman Lectures he spoke allegorically of the beauty of a rainbow. Imagine a world in which scientists could not see a rainbow: they might discover it, but could they sense its beauty? The essence of a thing does not always lie in the microscopic details. He supposed that the blind scientists learned that, in some weathers, the intensity of radiation plotted against wavelength at a certain direction in the sky would show a bump, and the bump would shift from one wavelength to another as the angle of the instrument shifted. “Then one day,” he said, “the physical review of the blind men might publish a technical article with the title ‘The Intensity of Radiation as a Function of Angle under Certain Conditions of the Weather.’” Feynman had no quarrel with beauty—our human illusion, our projection of sentiment onto a reality of radiation phenomena.

  “We are all reductionists today,” said Steven Weinberg—meaning that we seek the deepest explanatory principles in the elementary particles that underlie ordinary matter. He spoke for many particle physicists but not for Feynman. Understanding the principles at the lowest level of the hierarchy—the smallest length-scales—is not the same as understanding nature. So much lies outside the accelerators’ domain, even if it is in some sense reducible to elementary particles. Chaotic turbulence; the large-scale structures that emerge in complex systems; life itself: Feynman spoke of “the infinite variety and novelty of phenomena that can be generated from such simple principles”—phenomena that are “in the equations; we just haven’t found the way to get them out.”

  The test of science is its ability to predict. Had you never visited the earth, could you predict the thunderstorms, the volcanoes, the ocean waves, the auroras, and the colorful sunset? …

  The next great era of awakening of human intellect may well produce a method of understanding the qualitative content of equations. Today we cannot. Today we cannot see that the water-flow equations contain such things as the barber pole structure of turbulence that one sees between rotating cylinders. Today we cannot see whether Schrödinger’s equation contains frogs, musical composers, or morality—or whether it does not.

  Physicists’ models are like maps: never final, never complete until they grow as large and complex as the reality they represent. Einstein compared physics to the conception a person might assemble of the interior mechanism of a closed watch: he might build a plausible model to account for the rhythmic ticking, the sweep of the hands, but he could never be certain. “He may also believe in the existence of the ideal limit of knowledge and that it is approached by the human mind,” Einstein said. “He may call this ideal limit the objective truth.” It was a simpler time. In Feynman’s era, knowledge advanced, but the ideal of objective truth receded deeper into the haze beyond the vision of science. Quantum theory had left an impossible question dangling in the air. One physicist chose to answer it by quoting Feynman, “one of the great philosophers of our time, whose view of the matter I have taken the liberty of quoting in the form of the poetry it surely is”:

  We have always had a great deal of difficulty

  understanding the world view

  that quantum mechanics represents.

  At least I do,

  because I’m an old enough man

  that I haven’t got to the point

  that this stuff is obvious to me.

  Okay, I still get nervous with it….

  You know how it always is,

  every new idea,

  it takes a generation or two

  until it becomes obvious

  that there’s no real problem….

  I cannot define the real problem,

  therefore I suspect there’s no real problem,

  but I’m not sure

  there’s no real problem.

  In October 1987 another abdominal tumor appeared, and his doctors made one last attempt to stall his cancer surgically. When the Los Angeles Times sent him an advance copy of his obituary, he thanked the author but said, “I have decided it is not a very good idea for a man to read it ahead of time: it takes the element of surprise out of it.” He knew he was not recovering. He was sixty-nine years old. Pain wracked one of his legs. He was exhausted. He had no appetite. In January he began awakening in the night with sweats and chills. In one corner of his dusty office blackboard he had written a pair of self-conscious mottoes: “What I cannot create I do not understand” and “Know how to solve every problem that has been solved.” Nearby was a running list under the heading, “TO LEARN” (“Bethe Ansatz Prob., 2D Hall …”). Physics changed; he talked about it once with his old Los Alamos friend Stanislaw Ulam, who had been watching a few white clouds roll against the blue New Mexico sky. Feynman seemed to read his mind: “It is really like the shape of clouds,” he said. “As one watches them they don’t seem to change, but if you look back a minute later, it is all very different.” He had not accumulated much: a hand-knitted scarf, hanging on a peg, from some students in Yugoslavia; a photograph of Michelle with her cello; some black-and-white pictures of the aurora borealis; his deep leather recliner; a sketch he had made of Dirac; a van painted with chocolate-brown Feynman diagrams. On February 3 he entered the UCLA Medical Center again.

  Doctors in the intensive care unit discovered a ruptured duodenal ulcer. They administered antibiotics. But his remaining kidney had failed. One round of dialysis was performed, with little effect. Feynman refused the further dialysis that might have prolonged his life for weeks or months. He told Michelle calmly, “I’m going to die,” in a tone that said: I have decided. He was watched and guarded now by the three women who had loved him longest: Gweneth, Joan, and his cousin Frances Lewine, who had lived with him in the house in Far Rockaway. Morphine for pain and an oxygen tube were their last concessions to medicine. The doctors said it would take about five days. He had watched one death before—trying to be scientific, observing the descent into coma and the sporadic breathing, imagining the brain clouding as it was starved of oxygen. He had anticipated his own—toying with the release of consciousness in dark sensory-deprivation tanks, telling a friend that he had now taught people most of the good stuff he knew, and making his peace with bottomless nature:

  You see, one thing is, I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I’m not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here… .

  I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell. It doesn’t frighten me.

  He drifted toward unconsciousness. His eyes dimmed. Speech became an exertion. Gweneth watched as he drew himself together, prepared a phrase, and released it: “I’d hate to die twice. It’s so boring.” After that, he tried to communicate by shifting his head or squeezing the hand that clasped his. Shortly before midnight on February 15, 1988, his body gasped for air that the oxygen tube could not provide, and his space in the world closed. An imprint remained: what he knew; how he knew.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I never met Feynman. I’ve relied on the published (and semipublished) record; on his own accumulation of personal letters, notes to himself, and other documents, released to me in 1988 by Gweneth Howarth Feynman; on letters shared by other family members and friends; on his office files and other documents stored in the California Institute of Technology Archives in Pasadena; on early material collected at the Niels Bohr Library of the American Institute of Physics in New York. I obtained recently declassified notebooks a
nd papers from the archives of Los Alamos National Laboratory. Other material came from the libraries and manuscript collections of the following institutions: the American Philosophical Society (papers of H. D. Smyth and J. A. Wheeler); the Brooklyn Historical Society; Cornell University (papers of H. A. Bethe); Far Rockaway High School; Harvard University; the Library of Congress (papers of J. R. Oppenheimer); the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Princeton University; Rockefeller University; and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.

  The leading physicists who play the largest roles in this book agreed to provide their own recollections in interviews that sometimes extended over many sessions: Hans Bethe, Freeman Dyson, Murray Gell-Mann, Julian Schwinger, Victor Weisskopf, John Archibald Wheeler, and Robert R. Wilson.

  Feynman’s own voice is everywhere in his published work, of course, and toward the end of his life, wherever he went, tape recorders and video cameras seemed to be running. But several interviews of Feynman by historians and others were especially valuable. The deepest and most comprehensive—a central resource for anyone studying Feynman—is an oral history of many hundreds of pages conducted by Charles Weiner for the American Institute of Physics in 1966 and 1973; I used Feynman’s copy of the transcript, with his handwritten corrections and comments. I also consulted the AIP’s oral-history interviews with Bethe, Dyson, William A. Fowler, Werner Heisenberg, Philip Morrison, and others. The physicist and historian Silvan S. Schweber kindly shared the tape of his revealing 1980 interview on the development of quantum electrodynamics and on Feynman’s style of visualization. Lillian Hoddeson conducted a useful interview of Feynman for her technical history of Los Alamos. Robert Crease gave me the transcript of an interview for his and Charles Mann’s The Second Creation. Christopher Sykes gave me access to the uncut interview he conducted for what became the 1981 BBC-TV production, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. Sali Ann Kriegsman gave me her transcript of Feynman’s recollections of Far Rockaway.

  Ralph Leighton, who drew from Feynman the reminiscences that became Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think?, generously provided the original tapes of these interviews over nearly a decade. These are the stories that Feynman retold and refined over his lifetime—mostly accurate, but strongly filtered. I have tried not to lean on them too heavily, for reasons that I hope emerge in the text.

  Feynman’s family members also spoke with me at length: Gweneth, Joan, Carl, and Michelle Feynman and Frances Lewine. Helen J. Tuck, his secretary of many years, shared her invaluable memories and perceptive comments.

  Among the many other colleagues, students, friends, and observers of Feynman who helped me by submitting to interviews or providing written recollections—and in some cases copies of letters and diary pages—were Jan Anbjørn, Robert Bacher, Michel Baranger, Barry Barish, Henry H. Barschall, Mary Louise Bell, Rose Bethe, Jerry Bishop, James Bjorken, Peter A. Carruthers, Robert F. Christy, Michael Cohen, Sidney Coleman, Monarch L. Cutler, Predrag Cvitanović, Cecile DeWitt-Morette, Russell J. Donnelly, Sidney Drell, Leonard Eisenbud, Timothy Ferris, Richard D. Field, Michael E. Fisher, Evelyn Frank, Steven Frautschi, Edward Fredkin, Sheldon Clashow, Marvin Goldberger, David Goodstein, Frances R. (Rose McSherry) Graham, William R. Graham, Jules Greenbaum, Bruce Gregory, W. Conyers Herring, Simeon Hutner, Albert Hibbs, Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gerald Holton, John L. Joseph, Daniel Kevles, Sándor J. Kovács, Donald J. Kutyna, Janijoy La Belle, Leo Lavatelli, Ralph Leighton, Charles Lifer, Leite Lopes, Edward Maisel, Anne Tilghman Wilson Marks, Robert E. Marshak, Leonard Mautner, Robert M. May, William H. McLellan, Carver Mead, Nicholas Metropolis, Maurice A. Meyer, Philip Morrison, Masako Ohnuki, Paul Olum, Abraham Pais, David Park, John Polkinghorne, Burton Richter, John S. Rigden, Michael Riordan, Daniel Robbins, Matthew Sands, David Sanger, J. Robert Schrieffer, Theodore Schultz, Al Seckel, Barry Simon, Cyril Stanley Smith, Norris Parker Smith, Novera H. Spector, Millard Susman, Kip S. Thome, Yung-Su Tsai, John Tukey, Tom van Sant, Dorothy Walker, Robert L. Walker, Steven Weinberg, Charles Weiner, Theodore A. Welton, Arthur S. Wightman, Jane Wilson, Stephen Wolfram, and George Zweig.

  Two indispensable histories of twentieth-century physics are Kevles, The Physicists, and Pais, Inward Bound.

  I’m especially grateful to Mitchell Feigenbaum and Silvan S. Schweber for patient guidance and sharp insights on matters of physics. I particularly thank Schweber for letting me read the manuscript-in-progress of his forthcoming history of quantum electrodynamics, QED: 1946–1950: An American Success Story. I thank Predrag Cvitanovi? for permission to quote his fable of Quefithe. Robert Chadwell Williams, a biographer of Klaus Fuchs, sent a helpful mass of archival material relating to the Manhattan Project. I benefited from discussions with Joseph N. Straus and Hugh Wolff about genius, music, and music theory.

  Cheryl Colbert lent me her intelligent and resourceful assistance. Emilio Millan shared a useful file of clippings and other documents that he had collected.

  This book owes an enormous obligation to the skills of my editor, Daniel Frank, and my agent, Michael Carlisle.

  As always, the indescribable debt is to Cynthia Crossen, who for so long endured, among other things, that strange, persistent presence of an extra soul in our household.

  J. G.

  Brooklyn, New York

  8 July 1992

  NOTES

  ABBREVIATIONS

  AIP: Niels Bohr Library, Center for the History of Physics, American Institute of Physics.

  BET: H. A. Bethe papers, Cornell University.

  CIT: California Institute of Technology Archives.

  CPL: The Character of Physical Law.

  F-H: Interview with Lillian Hoddeson and Gordon Baym, 16 April 1979. LANL.

  F-L: Interviews with Ralph Leighton. Tapes courtesy of Leighton.

  F-Sch: Interview with Silvan S. Schweber, 13 November 1988. Tape courtesy of Schweber.

  F-Sy: Interview with Christopher Sykes, recorded in preparation for The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, BBC-TV, 1981. Tape courtesy of Sykes.

  F-W: Interviews with Charles Werner, 4 March 1966, 27–28 June 1966, and 4 February 1973. AIP.

  FOI: Feynman’s FBI files and documents from other federal agencies, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

  LANL: Los Alamos National Laboratory Archives.

  Lectures: The Feynman Lectures on Physics.

  LOC: Library of Congress.

  MIT: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries.

  NL: “The Development of the Space-Time View of Quantum Electrodynamics.” Nobel lecture (Feynman 1965a; cf. Feynman 1965b and 1965c). For convenience, page numbers refer to the Weaver 1987 reprint.

  OPP: J. R. Oppenheimer papers. LOC.

  PERS: Personal papers obtained by the author.

  PUL: Princeton University Libraries.

  QED: QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter.

  SMY: H. D. Smyth papers, American Philosophical Society.

  SYJ: Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!

  WDY: What Do You Care What Other People Think?

  WHE: J. A. Wheeler papers, American Philosophical Society.

  PROLOGUE

  The account of the Pocono meeting is based on interviews with several of the participants (Hans Bethe, Robert Marshak, Abraham Pais, Julian Schwinger, Victor Weisskopf, and John Archibald Wheeler), on Feynman’s account in Physics Today (Feynman 1948d) and his recollections in F-W, on Wheeler’s handwritten and mimeographed notes (Wheeler 1948), on correspondence in the J. R. Oppenheimer papers, on historical essays by Silvan S. Schweber (1985 and forthcoming), and on my visit to the site.

  3 NOTHING IS CERTAIN: Feynman to Arline Feynman, 9 May 1945, PERS.

  3 IT GNAWED AT HIM: Feynman 1975, 132.

  3 WOMEN SIDLED AWAY: AIP, 423.

  3 HALF GENIUS AND HALF BUFFOON: Freeman Dyson to his parents, 8 March 1948; Dyson, interview, Princeton, N.J.

  4 NO TRANSCRIPT: John Archibald Wheeler made and later circulated sever
al dozen pages of handwritten notes, however (Wheeler 1948).

  5 PRINCIPLES: “Addresses,” notebook, PERS.

  6 THE MOST BRILLIANT YOUNG PHYSICIST: “He is by all odds the most brilliant young physicist here, and everyone knows this.” Smith and Weiner 1980, 268.

  6 THE KEY EQUATION: Hans Bethe, interview, Ithaca, N.Y.

  6 TWISTING A CONTROL KNOB: Victor Weisskopf had brought the trains from Russia. “He played the following game. The guy with the switches has to avoid an accident and the other one has to produce an accident. It was the most nervewracking game you can imagine, and Dick was absolutely into it. It didn’t matter which role he played.” Weisskopf, interview, Cambridge, Mass.

  6 WHAT ABOUT THE EXCLUSION PRINCIPLE?: F-W, 471.

  7 IS IT UNITARY?: Ibid., 472.