Richard Feynman

by John Gribbin

  The Lectures themselves certainly carry you to the heights – the ‘easy pieces’ are chosen because they are indeed easy, and should not be regarded as entirely representative. But where else would you get, for example, a complete special lecture on the Principle of Least Action, an almost verbatim record of a great physicist describing one of his own great loves in physics? Before the end of volume two, Feynman gives his readers a summary, involving just nine equations and taking up less than half a printed page of space, which contains all of classical physics, from Newton to Einstein via Maxwell. And – and this is the point – by this point the reader knows that this half-page really does sum up all of classical physics, and can share Feynman’s joy at the simplicity of its presentation.

  As Feynman himself said in his preface:

  There isn’t any solution to this problem of education other than to realise that the best teaching can be done only when there is a direct individual relationship between a student and a good teacher – a situation in which the student discusses the ideas, thinks about things, and talks about things. But in our modern times we have so many students to teach that we have to try to find some substitute for the ideal. Perhaps my lectures can make some contribution. Perhaps in some small place where there are individual teachers and students, they may get some inspiration or some ideas from the lectures. Perhaps they will have fun thinking them through – or going on to develop some of the ideas further.

  That is exactly what has happened, to thousands of students and teachers of physics. The Feynman Lectures have indeed acted as an inspiration, a source of ideas and a basis for discussion. They have never been out of print in the past three decades, and even provided an inspiration for Feynman himself. Dissatisfied with the lectures on quantum mechanics, he wrote in the preface, ‘maybe I’ll have a chance to do it again someday. Then I’ll do it right.’ He did, twenty years later, in the lectures that formed the basis of his book QED, probably his most successful attempt at making supposedly ‘difficult’ ideas in fundamental physics accessible to a wide audience. Not just accessible, but entertaining – Freeman Dyson wrote, in From Eros to Gaia, that ‘Dick Feynman was a great communicator. I never saw him give a lecture that did not make the audience laugh.’

  By the time of the QED lectures, though, Feynman would be extremely well known as a lecturer, author and publicly visible man of science. He was certainly getting plenty of practice at lecturing. During the academic year 1962–3, as well as giving (twice a week) the lectures that would become volumes two and three of the ‘red books’, every Monday morning in term time Feynman gave a series of postgraduate lectures on gravity, 27 of them in all, summing up his research on the subject.9 And for light relief, every Wednesday he was off to the Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu to give his regular informal lecture there. As if that weren’t enough to keep him busy, remember that Carl was born in 1962, so there must have been a few sleepless nights during the 1962–3 academic year.

  Hot on the heels of the undergraduate lectures at Caltech, in 1964 he accepted an invitation to give a series of lectures at Cornell (in the annual series of Messenger Lectures), choosing as his subject ‘The Character of Physical Law’. The lectures were recorded by the BBC and broadcast on TV as well as being turned into a book of the same title. Among other things, Feynman looked at gravity as the archetypal example of a physical law, the relation of mathematics to physics, quantum theory and the distinction between past and future. The book, aimed at a non-scientific audience, helped to establish Feynman in the eye of a broader public as a kind of homespun philosopher of science (much though he would have abhorred being called a philosopher) who had clear and important things to say about the whole basis of the scientific pursuit of knowledge. The heart of that philosophy is summed up in the last of these Messenger Lectures, in ringing tones that not only set out the stall of physics but also, calculatedly, pull the rug from under mysticism of all kinds and speak up for rationalism:

  In general we look for a new law by the following process. First we guess it. Then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what would be implied if this law that we guessed is right. Then we compare the result of the computation to nature, with experiment or experience, compare it directly with observation, to see if it works. If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong.* In that simple statement is the key to science. It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is – if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong.

  That sentence, if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong, ought to be engraved in large letters on the wall of every science department in the world. Less than a year after Feynman had spoken those words at Cornell, on 21 October 1965 the Nobel Committee acknowledged the paramount example of the best agreement that had ever been found between experiment and theory, when they gave the 1965 Nobel Prize for Physics to Feynman, Schwinger and Tomonaga for their work on QED.

  In Surely You’re Joking, Feynman recounts that he seriously considered refusing to accept the prize. The Nobel Committee does not check out in advance whether somebody actually wants their award, they just announce it to the world, at a convenient time of day in Stockholm – which means the middle of the night in California. The first Feynman heard of it was when he was woken early in the morning, some time before 4am, by the telephone, as people called to offer congratulations and reporters asked for comments. Having taken the phone off the hook and sat down in his study to think about the implications, he wondered if it was worth going through the hoopla and publicity of accepting the prize; he knew that in many cases Nobel Prize-winning physicists had become figureheads, involved in administration, giving guest lectures here and there, and sure of a job for life, but no longer active in scientific research. When he put the phone back on the hook and let it ring again, one of the first calls was from Time magazine. Feynman asked the reporter if there was some way not to accept the prize; the reporter pointed out that it would be a much bigger and more sensational news story if he turned it down than if he accepted.10

  Nobody else had any doubts about the wisdom of accepting the prize. The Caltech students draped the administration building, Throope Hall, with a banner reading ‘WIN BIG, RPF’, and his colleagues were delighted. The interviews were a chore, though, with many reporters asking Feynman to explain his award-winning work for them in one sentence. He later said that he regretted not taking the advice of the representative from Time, who had suggested he told them that if it could be described in a sentence it wouldn’t be worth the Nobel Prize.11 The days following the news were full of the kind of distractions that might well stop any scientist ever getting down to serious work again.

  It wasn’t just the prospect of being regarded as – or, worse, actually being – a has-been once the award was conferred. For all his efforts to appear brashly unconcerned about formality (whenever he dined at the Athenaeum Club on campus at Caltech, even if he had worn a jacket and tie in to work Feynman always made a point of walking over in shirtsleeves, and selecting the most garish of the neckties that the Club held in reserve for diners who had ‘forgotten’ theirs), Feynman was actually worried about how to cope with all the pomp of the occasion of the award ceremony in Stockholm. He would even, after all his father had told him, have to dress up in a kind of uniform, in white tie and tails like something out of a Fred Astaire movie.

  In the end, though, Feynman managed to have fun in Stockholm. He particularly enjoyed a ceremony at a party organized by students, in which the students gave each Nobel Prize-winner the ‘Order of the Frog’, which involved the recipient making an appropriate frog noise. It just happened that Feynman knew exactly how to make a frog noise, having seen his father’s copy of the Aristophanes play The Frogs when he was a boy. In the play, Aristophanes describes frogs as going ‘brekebek, brekebek’; young Richard had thought this was silly, but tried it out and found that it really did sound like a frog. The
never-forgotten skill came in useful in Stockholm.

  The Feynmans got to dine with royalty in Stockholm (a mixed experience, given Richard’s feelings about uniforms and authority) and were treated like royalty themselves for a few days, chauffeured around to see the sights. The award ceremony itself took place on 11 December 1965, and one of the few duties required of the recipients was to give a lecture about their work. Feynman chose not to describe QED itself, leaving that for Schwinger and Tomonaga; instead, he described his path to quantum electrodynamics, the sequence of ideas that had led him to his great work. For later generations, this was far and away the best thing that happened at the 1965 Nobel ceremonies, providing us with an inside view of the development of Feynman’s version of QED, from early ideas about direct action and advanced potentials right through to Feynman’s views on the best way to make progress in theoretical physics, by guessing solutions to problems and comparing the guesses with experiments.12

  ‘All in all,’ Feynman decided, ‘I enjoyed the visit to Sweden, in the end.’13 Not least, of course, because of the fun Gweneth had on the trip, and also because it provided him with a fund of new anecdotes. Before returning to the United States, for example, he went to Switzerland to give a talk at CERN, the European centre for particle physics research. He wore the suit he had worn to have dinner with the King of Sweden, and began his lecture, tongue in cheek, by telling his audience of physicists how he had been changed by the award, and had decided that he rather liked wearing the suit to give a lecture. The audience erupted into jeers and catcalls; Feynman stripped off his jacket and tie, grinning his famous grin, and after the laughter had died down continued his lecture in shirtsleeves, as usual. It was CERN, he liked to say, that had straightened him out after Stockholm; the CERN audience ‘undid everything that they had done in Sweden’.

  To prove that he was still the same Feynman, Dick accepted a bet from Viktor Weisskopf, then the Director of CERN, during that visit. Feynman agreed in writing that he would pay $10 to Weisskopf if at any time during the next ten years ‘the said Mr Feynman has held a “responsible position”’. Conversely, if Feynman had not held a responsible position in that time, Weisskopf would pay him $10. ‘The term “responsible position” shall be taken to signify a position which, by reason of its nature, compels the holder to issue instructions to other persons to carry out certain acts, notwithstanding the fact that the holder has no understanding whatsoever of that which he is instructing the aforesaid persons to accomplish.’ Weisskopf was obviously drawing on his own experience as an administrator in drafting that definition; but he lost his bet. Feynman collected his $10 from Weisskopf in 1976, and never held a responsible position in his life.14

  As Feynman later observed on many occasions, the lasting pleasure he had found in the Nobel Prize was to discover how many people loved him. ‘He had’, says Mehra, ‘found a genuine thrill in the messages of congratulations, expressing love and affection and admiration, many of them from school children and students.’ But there remained one deep sadness associated with the prize. Melville hadn’t lived to see it. Many years later, during one of their drumming and storytelling sessions, Ralph Leighton asked Feynman, ‘If you could, which figure from the past would you most like to bring back and talk to?’, imagining that Feynman might pick Newton, or Galileo, or some other scientific figure. Richard replied, ‘I’d like to bring back my father, so I could tell him I won the Nobel Prize.’15

  As well as fame, the Nobel Prize brought with it some fortune – a one-third share in $55,000. The Feynmans used it to buy a beach house in Mexico, at Playa de la Mision in Baja California. Gweneth was as adventurous as Dick, and both of them loved travelling, often backpacking and sleeping rough; but a slightly more civilized holiday home was no bad thing with Carl, now three years old, to consider.

  Richard’s relationship with Carl echoed, in many ways, his own relationship with Melville. He would explain things about the way the world worked, expressing his love of science and sharing it with his son, without pushing him in any particular direction. Carl was interested, and responded in the way Richard must have hoped when he made up stories involving scientific insights into the nature of the world. There came a time when, to Feynman’s horror, Carl decided to study philosophy as an undergraduate in college. But it all worked out in the end, because he ended up in computer science, which made his father much happier.

  When Feynman tried the same approach on Michelle, though, it didn’t work. She didn’t want him to make up stories full of interesting insights about the world, but to read familiar stories from a book over and over again. So the Feynman method of encouraging children to become scientists doesn’t always work; it depends on the personality of the child.16

  But although his home life was happy and comfortable, his fame was assured and he had no financial worries, in the years just after he received the Nobel Prize Feynman began to fear that he really was burned out. He tried to cut himself off from all of the distractions associated with his growing prestige; as he had promised himself long ago, when sharing the graduation ceremony at Princeton for the degree he had worked for with honorary graduates who had done nothing to earn their degrees, when offers of honorary degrees started to come his way he turned them all down. The first offer of this kind came at the beginning of 1967, and was politely declined, as were all later offers. The offer came from the University of Chicago, and Feynman replied:

  Yours is the first honorary degree that I have been offered, and I thank you for considering me for such an honor. However, I remember the work I did to get a real degree at Princeton and the guys on the same platform receiving honorary degrees without work – and felt that an ‘honorary degree’ was a debasement of the idea … It is like giving an ‘honorary electrician’s license’. I swore then that if by chance I was ever offered one I would not accept it. Now at last (twenty-five years later) you have given me a chance to carry out my vow.17

  Feynman also turned down invitations to visit research centres around the world to give guest lectures, unless the invitation came from somewhere he liked to visit, such as Brazil or Japan. He was trying to keep himself free from time-consuming commitments, in the hope of making more progress in physics, even though he was now approaching his fiftieth birthday and had been encumbered with the status of a Nobel laureate.

  But this didn’t stop Feynman from having fun. The weekends in Las Vegas might be a thing of the past, but there were plenty of avenues to explore in Pasadena itself. In the 1960s, Feynman’s big interest, outside science and his family, was art, and this led him into one of his most famous escapades.

  The interest in art came about through Feynman’s friendship with Jirayr (‘Jerry’) Zorthian, an artist he met at a party in the late 1950s. Although both Jerry and Dick were extrovert party animals, at first their friendship was based on an attraction of opposites, Jerry intrigued by a chance to get to know how scientists dispassionately view the world, while Dick was fascinated by what he saw as the excessive freedom of the artist, working with so few rules that, it seemed, anything went. He had the attitude, ‘What is this contemporary art? A child can do better’, to which Jerry responded by giving him a crayon and asking him to do better himself.18 The arguments came to a head when Feynman suggested that they resolve the situation by each learning about the other’s craft. On alternate Sundays, he would give Jerry a lesson in science, while Jerry gave him lessons in art on the Sundays in between.19

  Feynman became an accomplished amateur artist, developing from his lessons with Zorthian to more formal tuition, and eventually having an exhibition all of his own. This led to a hilarious encounter. One of the drawings in the exhibition had started out as an exercise in shading, and was a portrait of a nude model lit from below and to one side. For the exhibition, he whimsically gave it the title, ‘Madame Curie Observing the Radiations from Radium’. An art-lover at the showing came up and asked if he drew from photographs, or using live models. Always, Feynman replied, fr
om live models. Then how, came back the puzzled inquiry, did you persuade Madame Curie to pose for you?20

  Zorthian’s attempts to learn science were not so successful, and the experiment petered out almost immediately. That gave Jerry and Dick scope for a new on-going argument: whether Jerry was a better teacher than Dick, or Dick was a better student than Jerry.

  Feynman also sold some of his pictures (he signed them with a pseudonym, ‘Ofey’), and enjoyed the whole new experience of being part of the art scene. Among the many new friends he made through his drawings was Gianonni, the owner of a topless bar in Pasadena. Gianonni’s was only about a mile and a half from Feynman’s home, and Richard found it a convenient place to go and sit, drinking 7-Up and quietly working on some physics problem, or doing a little sketching, in one of the booths at the back. Gweneth was unfazed by this, regarding the bar as Feynman’s equivalent of one of the traditional gentlemen’s clubs back in England. The one drawback about the bar, as far as Feynman was concerned, was the pictures on the walls, crudely titillating efforts in garish colours. He offered Gianonni one of his own nudes instead; the owner of the bar was so pleased that he not only put the picture up on the wall but gave instructions for Feynman to have free 7-Up whenever he came into the place.

  Eventually, towards the end of the 1960s, the bar was raided by the police, and an attempt was made to close it down. There was a big court case, and Gianonni asked all his loyal customers to testify on his behalf, that there was nothing lewd and obscene going on in the bar. Of course, they all made their excuses – except one. So Feynman testified in court that he was a regular at the bar, that many respectable pillars of the community from all walks of life were also regulars there, and that nothing went on that could be regarded as an offence to the community. Hardly surprisingly, the testimony made headlines – ‘Caltech’s Feynman Tells Lewd Case Jury He Watched Girls While Doing Equations’, the local paper gleefully reported on 8 November 1969. Gianonni lost the case, but the bar stayed open pending appeal, and Feynman continued to get his free 7-Ups. It was just as well that Feynman still had a convenient place to do his thinking, because by now, at the end of the 1960s and past his own fiftieth birthday, he was well into his stride as a physicist again, in the process of making his last great contribution to science.