“I would say his inspiration was that he thought rainbows were beautiful.”
I looked at him sheepishly. He looked at me.
“How’s your work coming?” he asked.
I shrugged. “It’s not really coming.” I wished I was like Constantine. It all came so easily to him.
“Let me ask you something. Think back to when you were a kid. For you, that isn’t going too far back. When you were a kid, did you love science? Was it your passion?”
I nodded. “As long as I can remember.”
“Me, too,” he said. “Remember, it’s supposed to be fun.” And he walked on.
XVI
IN THE BRIEF WINDOW of time I knew Feynman, he had an exaggerated effect on my life. I wasn’t sure why. I knew he wasn’t going to be any kind of mentor. Feynman avoided all departmental and administrative affairs, and did little to help his own postdocs or students. He would even have Helen send an unusual form letter to all junior physicists he worked with two years after they had left Caltech. The letter said he would no longer write them letters of recommendation because for the past two years he hadn’t been following their research. He was diligent in avoiding any activity that he did not find IN-ter-ES-ting. He could be abrupt and abrasive, yet I never lost any of the instant affection that came automatically the first time I met him. Why?
Back then, I did not know the answer. Today, as the father of two young children, I recognize the attraction. Even after the ups and downs of the fifty or so years of adulthood, even in the process of dying, Feynman was still a child. Fresh, gleeful, playful, mischievous, curious . . . IN-ter-ES-ted. Add a few hairs, subtract a few wrinkles, give him his health, and you’d have the same Feynman who yelled fake curses in made-up Italian to scold offending drivers in Brooklyn fifty years earlier.
Hanging around a grown kid like Feynman made you question things. Like all the things we do in life because we have to do them—or at least we think we do. Sitting through boring meetings with colleagues or customers or clients when we’d rather be outside staring at a rainbow, or managing our careers along some path for which we have no passion merely because it is supposed to be the road to success. Like my young boys today, Feynman was startlingly honest with people, including himself, and you couldn’t make him do anything he didn’t want to do, at least not without grumbling. In contrast, there I was, still free to choose my own path, and I was compromising almost before I began. What, for me, was worth doing? What would give meaning to my life? Was it string theory? Lattice theory? Or was it simply “fitting in” at a place like Caltech?
In his office, Feynman told me how he had found his place in life, in physics.
I was supposed to be in physics. You know how I know? You see, I had a lab when I was a kid, and I used to play in the lab. I used to say I did experiments—but I never really did experiments. When I got to college I realized what an experiment really was. An experiment is a measurement to check some sort of idea. But that was not what my experiments were. My experiment was to make a photocell that rings a bell when you walk in front of it, or to make a radio work or something like that. It wasn’t an experiment to find out anything. It was just playing. I used to play in my lab. And I used to repair radios. In this town, in the Depression, and I was only a boy so it didn’t cost so much . . . and I made myself a little kit, and bought parts. I understood what I was doing. I did enjoy very much, just making things.
Then I discovered this ability in theoretical analysis. At first I went to MIT as a freshman in the math department. I went to the head of the math department and asked, sir, “What is the use of higher mathematics if not to teach more higher mathematics?” And he answered, “If you have to ask that question don’t go on in mathematics.”
He was absolutely right. And that taught me something.
I had chosen mathematics only because I discovered I could do math very well. And I had somehow gotten the idea that math was at a higher level. But I really got interested in math because of application science. I hadn’t fully appreciated that.
I was interested in math, and I was interested in all these things in terms of some kinds of use. And by use I meant application, understanding nature—DO something with it. Not just make more of this, this logical stuff, this monster. Of course, there is nothing wrong with it. I’m not trying to put down the mathematician. Everybody has different interests. But I realized that my interest is not in the precision of proofs, but in the thing that is proved, which is not the ordinary attitude of the mathematician. They like to structure the nature of proofs and so on. I was more interested in the facts that were demonstrated about the mathematical relationships. Because I wanted to use them for something, you see. So the attitude was different.
I found my place in physics. That is my life. For me, physics is more fun than anything else or I couldn’t be doing it.
XVII
I STOOD IN MY KITCHEN and sipped strong, sweet, syrupy espresso. I had no inkling that it was the beginning of what would become the worst day of my life.
I was up early because a professor I knew from my undergraduate days was in town. He had been a kind of mentor to me, but I hadn’t seen him in years. We were scheduled to meet at the Athenaeum for a late breakfast, or, as he called it, lunch. Afterward, he had a flight back to Boston and I had to run off to the doctor.
For me, in those days, “up early” meant around ten. Makes me sound like a slacker, but ever since my undergraduate days I had gotten used to working well past midnight. It’s a tradition among physicists that goes back at least as far as René Descartes, in the seventeenth century. Descartes never got up before noon. He must have been a pioneer in this tradition because people didn’t understand, and it earned him the reputation of being lazy. Still, he managed to revolutionize the fields of physics, mathematics, and philosophy. Not bad for a lazy guy.
As a graduate student I romanticized my work. I would sleep late, work late, and party hard. I might not revolutionize three fields, I thought, but at least in these respects I could be like young Descartes. Given my hours, and the fact that my thoughts and energies were dedicated almost exclusively to my work, I didn’t have much contact with the outside world. Even the parties were mostly with other students. But I was content to feel connected to my peers, both contemporary and through the ages. To me, physicists separated in time like Einstein and Newton—and of course Descartes—were as much a part of my community as physics friends who lived elsewhere. We were all members of a noble society, each contributing whatever bricks he could to the edifice of theoretical physics.
Being on the faculty at Caltech, it was somehow different. The immersion wasn’t there. When I studied string theory I found myself glancing at the clock far too often and seeking distraction whenever possible. I didn’t connect much with my peers, but the night janitor was particularly friendly, so instead of late nights talking physics, I ended up learning quite a lot about professional soccer in Mexico.
What had kept me up late the night before had been the revival of an old diversion—writing. It had all started during one of our late-night Hound of the Baskervilles screening parties. As my neighbors and I watched, we would, as usual, yell out funny alternative lines of dialogue. And then it struck me—this was a film dying to be made fun of. So I started to write a parody of the film, along the lines of Airplane, a movie I had seen five times when it came out a year or so earlier.
Though I’d been writing short stories on and off since I was nine, I was too embarrassed to tell anybody at Caltech about the screenplay. Physicists, especially theorists, were often missionaries, or just plain snobs. Writing literature might be deemed barely acceptable, but a screenplay would definitely come in below zero on the lowbrow scale. I was supposed to be obsessed with physics, not Sherlock Holmes.
I thought about this as I arrived at 11:30 at the Athenaeum to meet my professor friend. We had been close in my undergrad days, and I wondered if I should ask his advice about both my researc
h difficulties and my new interest. I wasn’t sure how he’d react. When he showed up the first thing that struck me was that he looked exactly as I had left him—portly, avuncular, with bushy gray hair and a big beard. I even thought I recognized his sport jacket. The only novelty in his appearance was a crumb in his beard, presumably a leftover from breakfast and not my undergraduate days. I found it strangely endearing.
The waiter, a dressed-up student on work-study, brought us flat bread and butter. We sipped from our elegant water goblets and glanced at the menu. I didn’t ask my former professor what he was working on—he had done some good work twenty years earlier but I didn’t remember him publishing much while I knew him. But I did tell him I was looking at string theory. He knew it from its beginnings in the early seventies, but he was surprised to hear anyone was still working on it. In my mind I filed him in the camp of the oblivious, as opposed to the camp of the skeptics.
“Just be careful how you manage your career,” he said. “You can’t jump around too much from field to field, or you’ll have trouble getting your next job. To establish your name, your research needs to have a certain coherence.”
“Sometimes I think I’ll never write another paper.”
“It can take time. Don’t panic.”
“I’m not panicking. I’m more . . . discouraged.”
“We all go through those times. It’s part of the process.”
“Maybe I’m not cut out for this,” I said.
“Look, I believe in you. Hang in there.”
“Thanks.”
He chuckled. “What else would you do, anyway?”
“I haven’t really thought about that.”
“Of course not.” The way he said it, I didn’t know if he felt me incapable of anything but physics, or simply felt that nothing else existed.
“Well, I am doing some writing,” I said finally.
“Writing?” He seemed puzzled, as if the only kind of writing he could imagine was practicing your penmanship. “What are you writing?” he asked.
“I’ve started a screenplay.”
“What? You’re writing a screenplay?”
He uttered this sentence with a strange cadence, as if he were my father, and he was saying, You mean, this recent procedure you had was . . . a sex change operation?
“Why on earth would you do that?” he said with sudden vehemence.
“I don’t know. ’Cause I like it, I guess.”
I looked down at the menu. This was getting uncomfortable.
I said, “The vichyssoise is really good here.”
The scene felt surreal, and no lame attempt to change the subject was going to get me out of it, but, ever the optimist, I tried anyway.
“You know, we really should order. I have to run off to a doctor’s appointment in a little while.”
“Look,” he said, “you owe it to yourself, and to me and to a lot of people, to keep at your physics. We put countless hours into your training. Years! You can’t just throw it away like that. Your talent. Your schooling. It’s an insult. A disrespect! And for what? Fiction? Worthless Hollywood crap?” His face turned red. The breakfast crumb fell from his beard.
I was caught off guard by his anger. On one hand, I had in no way meant to imply that I was thinking of giving up physics; on the other hand, I felt like saying how dare you tell me what to do with my life? Yet he had tapped into my feelings of being unworthy. Why was I working on such useless Hollywood crap? I tried to backtrack.
“I didn’t exactly say I wanted a job in the movies.”
“Why else would you write a screenplay?”
“It’s just a hobby, that’s all.”
The student waiter came by.
“Just remember your responsibility. You have a talent. You have to make something of your life.”
The waiter flashed me a knowing smile. He must have thought we were father and son.
I ordered the vichyssoise and an omelet. The professor had an omelet, too, but skipped the vichyssoise. Apparently he wasn’t interested in culinary recommendations from an intellectual pervert. Halfway through lunch, a fresh crumb took up residence in his beard. We settled into generic small talk. I was relieved when the time finally came that I had to leave for the doctor, though that relief proved to be misguided.
With more perspective, I suppose I could have looked on Professor Breadcrumb’s tirade with amusement. Stuck in his own narrow field, unable to appreciate the creativity of others. But I didn’t have that perspective then, and his tirade really bugged me. Eventually, I talked to Feynman about it. And though he shared a certain scorn for much of modern literature, he respected the writer, just as he seemed to respect all endeavors that require the trait he admired most: imagination.
I once thought about writing fiction for a little while, myself. Of course I’ve given lectures; that is to say I talked where they’ve been recorded. But that’s an easy way out. So at a party at the English department I asked them, for the fun of it, how I would go about writing fiction, and this man who I respected very dearly, a professor, said, “All you have to do is write.”
I got ahold of the Grimm’s Fairy Tales. I said they can’t be very difficult to write . . . they can do whatever they want because they have angels, and trolls, and things like that. So they can do what they want, there is all kinds of magic. So I said, “I’m going to make one of these up.”
I could not make anything up but a combination of what I’d read. I felt unfortunately that when I recombined it, that I didn’t have a deeply different plot, some cleverness, something different, some surprise, whereas the next story had some sort of surprise, not like the other stories. It had trolls in it again, but the nature of the plot, the twist was highly different. . . . And I said, “There’s no more possibility here.” And then I read the next one and it’s entirely different. So I don’t think I have the kind of imagination to make up a new story very well.
That’s not to say I don’t have a good imagination. In fact, I think it’s much harder to do what a scientist does, to figure out or imagine what’s there, than it is to imagine fiction, that is, things that aren’t there. To really understand how things work on a small scale, or a large scale, it turns out it’s so different than you expect, it takes one hell of a lot of imagination to see it! We need a lot of imagination to picture the atom, to imagine that there are atoms, and how they might be operating. Or to make the Periodic Table of Elements.
But the scientist’s imagination always is different from a writer’s in that it is checked. A scientist imagines something and then God says “incorrect” or “so far so good.” God is experiment, of course, and God might say, “Oh no, that doesn’t agree.” You say, “I imagine it works this way. And if it does, then you should see this.” Then other guys look and they don’t see it. That’s too bad. You guessed wrong. You don’t have that in writing.
A writer or artist can imagine something and certainly can be dissatisfied with it artistically, or aesthetically, but that isn’t the same degree of sharpness and absoluteness that the scientist deals with. For the scientist there is this God of Experiment that might say, “That’s pretty, my friend, but it’s not real.” That’s a big difference.
Suppose there was some great God of Aesthetics. And then whenever you made a painting, no matter how much you liked it, no matter how much it satisfied you, no matter what, even if it sometimes didn’t satisfy you, anyway you would submit it to the great God of Aesthetics and the god would say, “This is good,” or, “This is bad.” After a while the problem is for you to develop an aesthetic sense that fits with this thing, not just your own personal feelings about it. That is more analogous to the kinds of creativity we have in science.
Also, writing, unlike math or science, is not one body of knowledge which is expanding and everything is put on together, a big monstrous being built by people together, in which there is a progress. Can you say, “Every day we’re getting to be better writers because we’ve seen what
has been written before?” That we write better because other guys have shown us how to do this or that earlier so now we can go on and carry it further? It is that way in science and math. For instance, I read Madame Bovary, which I thought was wonderful. Of course it was nothing but the description of an ordinary person. I’m not sure of my history, but I think Madame Bovary was in the beginning of writing a novel about ordinary people. I suppose that if other people’s novels looked like that to me I’d be happy. But the modern novel, they’re no longer done with that kind of craftsmanship, with that detail. The few that I’ve looked at, I can’t stand them.
XVIII
MY DOCTOR WORKED at a small clinic in town. It wasn’t far, so after my lunch with Professor Breadcrumb I walked over. The day was beautiful and sunny. The inside of the clinic was somewhere between sterile and tacky. Despite my appointment, I had a forty-minute wait to be seen. As I waited, I played in my head with ideas for my screenplay much in the way I often did with ideas in physics, so I didn’t mind the wait.
The doctor was an older man, a little overweight. His face was round and inviting, like a smiley-face. It added to that image that he was almost completely bald. I was comfortable with this doc, which was a good thing since he had his hand on my testicles. I tend to be choosy about who I let do that. Especially if they are male.
“How long have they been like this?” he asked.
At first I thought it was a funny question.
“Like what?” I asked.
“These lumps?” he said.
Lumps? I was confused. What was he talking about?
“Here,” he said. He showed me.
Technically, he said, they were just suspicious lumps at this stage, but lumps on your testicles that feel like this were almost certainly cancerous.
That was rare in someone my age. And I had one on each testicle, which was so rare, he said, it could be publishable. I thought I detected excitement in his voice. He was, after all, a past president of a prestigious professional society. But I was in such shock his remarks didn’t offend me. All I could think was, this is not possible.
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