Quantum Man: Richard Feynman's Life in Science

by Lawrence M. Krauss

  For Feynman, the process was what he loved. It was a release from the tedium of existence. Stephen Wolfram, who created Mathematica, was a young protégé of Feynman’s for several years while he was a student at Caltech, and he described something similar:

  It was probably 1982. I’d been at Feynman’s house, and our conversation had turned to some kind of unpleasant situation that was going on. I was about to leave. And Feynman stops me and says: “You know, you and I are very lucky. Because whatever else is going on, we’ve always got our physics.” . . . Feynman loved doing physics. I think what he loved most was the process of it. Of calculating. Of figuring things out. . . . It didn’t seem to matter to him so much if what came out was big and important. Or esoteric and weird. What mattered to him was the process of finding it. . . . Some scientists (myself probably included) are driven by the ambition to build grand intellectual edifices. I think Feynman—at least in the years I knew him—was much more driven by the pure pleasure of actually doing the science. He seemed to like best to spend his time figuring things out, and calculating. And he was a great calculator. All around perhaps the best human calculator there’s ever been. I always found it incredible. He would start with some problem, and fill up pages with calculations. And at the end of it, he would actually get the right answer! But he usually wasn’t satisfied with that. Once he’d got the answer, he’d go back and try to figure out why it was obvious.

  When Feynman took an interest in something, or someone, that was it. The effect was magnetic. He focused all of his energy, his concentration, and, it seemed, his brilliance on that one thing or person. That is why so many people were so affected when Feynman came to listen to their seminars and remained to ask questions.

  Because the reactions of colleagues to Feynman were generally so intense, they tended to reflect not only Feynman’s character but also that of the colleagues. For example, I asked David Gross and Frank Wilczek, two very different individuals who discovered asymptotic freedom in QCD, how Feynman had reacted to QCD and their 1973 results. David told me he was irritated that Feynman had not shown enough interest, largely, David felt, because Feynman hadn’t derived the result. Later, when I spoke to Frank about the same subject, he told me how honored and surprised he was by the interest Feynman had displayed. He said Feynman was skeptical, but in those early years Frank thought that that was the appropriate response. I suspect they were both right.

  The most telling story that captures the Richard Feynman that I have come to know in writing this book, and the principles that guided his life and directed the nature of his physics, was told to me by a friend, Barry Barish, who was Richard’s colleague at Caltech for the last twenty years of his life. Barry and Richard lived relatively close by, so they would often see each other. And since they both lived about three miles from campus, they would sometimes walk, rather than drive, to work—sometimes together, sometimes not. One time Richard asked Barry if he had seen a certain house on a certain street and what he thought of it. Barry didn’t know the house because, like most of us, he had found a route he favored and took that route to work and back every journey. Richard, he learned, made a point of doing precisely the opposite. He tried never to take the same path twice.

  Acknowledgments and Sources

  As I indicated in the introduction, one of the reasons why I agreed to write this volume, after the idea was proposed to me by James Atlas, was that it provided me with the opportunity, and motivation, to go back and read, with varying levels of detail, all of Feynman’s scientific papers. I knew the experience, as a physicist, would be enlightening and would allow me to better understand the actual course of physics history, instead of the revisionist version that inevitably develops as physicists refine and simplify techniques that were once obscure.

  Nevertheless, I make no pretense to have performed any sort of fundamental historical scholarship. While I have pursued some historical investigations in the past, which required me to go to archives and search out letters and other primary source documents, in the case of Richard Feynman almost all of the primary material I have needed has been nicely compiled and is available in published form. When this is supplemented by two extraordinary books, one focusing primarily on Feynman’s life and the other on the detailed physics history of his work on quantum electrodynamics, an interested and technically trained reader can have direct access to almost all of the material I used as a basis for this book.

  Outside of these sources, I am grateful to many of my physics colleagues for discussions about their impressions and personal experiences with Feynman. These include, but are not limited to, Sheldon Glashow, Steven Weinberg, Murray Gell-Mann, David Gross, Frank Wilczek, Barry Barish, Marty Block, Danny Hillis, and James Bjorken. In addition, I thank Harsh Mathur for helping, as he often has for me, to act as a preliminary guide to the condensed matter literature, in this case to the work of Feynman in this area.

  The major sources of information that interested readers can turn to, and which incidentally provide every Feynman quote one can find in this book, include published primary source material by Feynman and about Feynman. These include, as I have described, a comprehensive technical presentation of not only Feynman’s work on QED but also reproductions of all of his major papers, and a wonderful and definitive personal biography of his life. In addition, there are several excellent references including a recent illuminating compilation of Feynman’s letters and various compendia of reflections on Feynman by those who knew him, scientists and otherwise:

  QED and the Men Who Made It, Sylvan S. Schweber, Princeton University Press, 1994.

  Selected Papers of Richard Feynman, Laurie Brown (ed.), World Scientific, 2000.

  Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, James Gleick, Pantheon, 1992.

  Perfectly Reasonable Deviations: The Letters of Richard Feynman, M. Feynman (ed.), Basic Books, 2005.

  Most of the Good Stuff: Memories of Richard Feynman, Laurie Brown and John Rigden (eds.), Springer Press, 1993 (proceedings of an all-day workshop in 1988 in which key scientists wrote their reflections of Feynman).

  No Ordinary Genius: The Illustrated Richard Feynman, Christopher Sykes (ed.), W. W. Norton, 1994.

  The Beat of a Different Drum: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, Jagdish Mehra, Oxford University Press, 1994.

  Three useful additional sources include historical studies of physics and other physicists:

  Pions to Quarks: Particle Physics in the 1950s, Laurie M. Brown, Max Dresden, Lillian Hoddeson (eds.), Cambridge University Press, 1989.

  Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in the Twentieth Century Physics, G. Johnson, Vintage, 1999.

  Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics, David Kaiser, University of Chicago Press, 2005.

  Finally, useful scientific books by Feynman include:

  QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, Princeton University Press, 1985.

  The Character of Physical Law, MIT Press, 1965.

  The Feynman Lectures on Computation, A. J. G. Hey and R. W. Allen (eds.), Perseus, 2000.

  The Feynman Lectures on Gravitation, with F. B. Morinigo, and W. G. Wagner; B. Hatfield (ed.), Addison-Wesley, 1995.

  Statistical Mechanics: A Set of Lectures, Addison-Wesley, 1981.

  Theory of Fundamental Processes, Addison-Wesley, 1961.

  Quantum Electrodynamics, Addison-Wesley, 1962.

  Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals, with A. Hibbs, McGraw-Hill, 1965.

  The Feynman Lectures on Physics, with R. B. Leighton and M. Sands, Addison-Wesley, 2005.

  Nobel Lectures in Physics, 1963–72, Elsevier, 1973.

  Elementary Particles and the Laws of Physics: The 1986 Dirac Memorial Lectures, with S. Weinberg, Cambridge University Press, 1987.

  The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen Scientist
, Helix Books, 1998.

  Feynman’s Thesis: A New Approach to Quantum Theory, Laurie Brown (ed.), World Scientific, 2005.

  Index

  Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations.

  About Time, 229

  Abrikosov, Alexei, 190

  absolute zero, 170, 174–75, 185–86

  absorption theory, 28–32, 38, 69, 110–20, 114, 121, 126, 130–31

  aces (particles), 292–93, 295, 299–300

  acoustics, 54

  action-at-a-distance principle, 40

  Albuquerque, N.Mex., 80, 88–89

  algae-to-gasoline project, 269

  algorithms, 273, 278–79, 283, 284, 286

  “Alternative Formulation of Quantum Electrodynamics” (Feynman), 144–46

  American Physical Society (APS), 143–44, 154, 157, 263–72, 273

  amplitude, 54–56

  Anderson, Carl, 106–7

  angular momentum, 100–102, 121

  see also spin

  anti-K-zero particles, 201–2

  antimatter, xii, 41

  antiparticles, 106–7, 110–11, 113–14, 131–40, 144–46, 197–98, 201–2

  anti-Semitism, 22–23, 36–37

  Arithmetica (Diophantus), 9

  astrophysics, 20, 82–85, 106–7, 239, 240, 255–61

  asymptomatic freedom, 306–7, 309, 312, 319

  atomic bomb, 20, 46–47, 67–68, 72, 74, 76–95, 108, 122, 163–64, 194, 273–74, 283

  atomic force microscopes, 269–70

  atomic number, 66

  atomic-scale machines, 270–72

  “atomic tweezers,” 270

  atoms, 19, 23–35, 84, 107, 171–79, 181–82, 240, 267–72, 294

  automata, 278

  axial vector (A) interaction, 212–16, 292

  “baby universes,” 256

  Bacher, Robert, 164, 223

  background radiation, 240

  backward-in-time reaction, xii, 34–35, 38–42, 47–48, 107, 129–40, 144–46, 148–54, 169, 173, 193

  Bader, Mr. (teacher), 8–9, 14, 16–17, 74

  Bardeen, John, 189

  Barish, Barry, 218–19, 319–20

  bar magnets, 203–4

  Bell, John, 281

  Bell, Mary Louise, 168

  Bell Laboratories, 284

  Bennett, Charles, 281–82

  beta decay, 194, 208, 210, 213–15

  Bethe, Hans, 37, 81–86, 90, 92–93, 95, 97, 110, 122–23, 125–27, 129, 139–40, 145, 148, 154, 168, 273–74, 288, 308

  Bethe, Rose, 90

  Bethe-Feynman formula, 81

  Bhagavad Gita, 90–91

  “big bang” theory, 240

  biology, xii, 20, 222, 267–68

  Biology on the Atomic Scale (Feynman), 267–68

  bits, information, 265

  Bjorken, James, 297, 298–99, 306

  Blackett, Patrick, 106–7

  black holes, 249–51, 252

  Block, Martin, 206–7

  Boehm, Felix, 214

  Bogan, Louise, 47

  Bohr, Niels, 61–62, 100, 112, 119–20, 145–46, 173, 186–87

  Boltzmann, Ludwig, xi–xii

  Bose, Satyendra, 102, 175

  Bose-Einstein condensation, 175–76, 180, 189

  bosons, 102, 175, 176, 182, 184, 303–5

  branes (higher dimensional objects), 253–54

  Brazil, 109–10, 164–67, 168, 169, 212

  Brookhaven Laboratory, 301

  bubble chambers, 4–5, 169

  Buddha, 289–90

  cages, atomic, 182

  calculating machines, 20, 87, 274–75

  calculus, 5, 7, 9

  “Calculus for the Practical Man, The” (Feynman), 7

  California, University of:

  at Berkeley, 92–93, 154, 164

  at Los Angeles (UCLA), 214

  California Institute of Technology (Caltech), xiv, 143, 164, 165, 168–69, 193, 195, 202, 206, 214–18, 220, 223–29, 244, 263–64, 277, 278, 293–94, 315–20

  Cambridge University, 106, 148

  Canadian Undergraduate Physics Association, xiii–xiv

  cancer, 309, 317

  carbon dioxide, 269

  carbon nanotubes, 271

  cariocas (Brazilian locals), 166, 167

  Case (physicist), 156–57

  celestial mechanics, 16

  cellular automata, 278

  centrifuges, 68

  Centro Brasiliero de Pesquisas Fisicas, 164–66

  CERN, 124, 235, 292, 305

  chain reactions, 68, 77, 84

  Challenger investigation, xv, 309

  Chandrasekhar, Subrahmanyan, 241

  Character of Physical Law, The (Feynman), xi–xii, 229

  chemistry, 8, 101, 225, 270

  Chicago, University of, 68, 77–78, 164, 194–95, 197, 202, 207

  Church, George, 269

  Clotilde (friend), 165

  clusters, galaxy, 260

  coal, 83

  cobalt 60, 208

  cold war, 181

  Coleman, Sidney, 236–37, 256, 306

  “color,” 305–8

  color charges, 306–7

  color vision, 226

  Columbia University, 119, 128, 142, 208–9

  Commonwealth Graduate Fellowship, 149

  complex differential equations, 86, 273

  complex numbers, 116

  computers, 186, 266–67, 273–86, 308–9, 316

  computer science, 276–77

  condensed matter, 172–79, 181–82, 183, 190–91

  conducting polymers, 271

  Conference on the Foundations of Quantum Theory (1947), 122–23, 124, 143

  Connection Machine, 308

  Cooper, Leon, 189

  Copacabana, 165, 166–67

  Corben, Bert, 98–99

  Corben, Mulaika, 98–99

  Cornell University, 37, 92–97, 109, 126–27, 148, 152, 156–57, 163, 164, 165, 168, 223, 229, 288

  cosines, 7

  cosmic rays, 20, 106–7, 240

  cosmological constant, 239

  cosmology, 20, 82–85, 106–7, 239, 240, 255–61

  current, electric, 171

  cyclotrons, 154

  “dead spots,” 54

  decouplets, 290

  deep inelastic scattering, 298–99

  Delbrück, Max, 222

  dense materials science, 172–79, 181–82, 183, 190–91

  density, 182, 183

  density waves, 183

  differential equations, 86, 273

  Diophantus, 9

  Dirac, Paul, 19, 59–65, 76, 83–84, 97, 102, 103–7, 108, 110–12, 114–16, 118–19, 120, 121, 124, 131, 138, 157, 158, 192, 210, 211, 231, 257

  “Dirac sea,” 104–7, 114, 126, 127, 131, 157

  dissipation, energy, 173–74, 181–82, 185, 247–48, 281–82, 295–300, 310

  DNA, 267–68

  down quarks, 291–92, 305

  Dyson, Freeman, 37, 98–99, 109, 141, 148–54, 231–32

  E=mc2, 29–30, 102, 103–4

  eclipses, 241

  Eddington, Arthur Stanley, 83, 241

  Edson, Lee, 287

  effective theory, 310–12

  Ehrenfest, Paul, xi–xii

  eightfold way, 289–91

  Einstein, Albert, 6–7, 19, 22, 27, 39–42, 60, 93, 95, 97, 102, 175, 238, 239–40, 248, 251, 280–81

  Einstein Prize, 221

  elec
trical engineering, 6

  electrical resistance, 170–71

  electric motors, 272–73

  electromagnetism, 47, 49, 52–53, 56, 58, 62, 63, 69, 71, 72–73, 100, 131, 142, 173. 224–25, 243

  see also quantum electrodynamics (QED)

  electronics, 67–68

  electron microscopes, 269–70, 272

  electron-positron (particle-antiparticle) pairs, 113–14, 133–40, 137, 197–98

  electrons, 19, 23–35, 38, 54–58, 66, 81, 97, 100–107, 111, 113–14, 126, 127, 128–40, 137, 143–44, 154–56, 157, 173–74, 181–82, 186–88, 190, 197–98, 208–10, 212–13, 294, 297–98, 301

  electroweak unification, 304–6, 312

  encryption, 284–85

  Encyclopaedia Britannica, 264–65

  energy:

  alternative sources of, 269

  atomic levels of, 26–27

  conservation of, 199–200

  dissipation of, 173–74, 181–82, 185, 247–48, 281–82, 295–300, 310

  kinetic, 15–16, 49–50, 177, 258–59

  levels of, 49–50, 119–23, 126, 182–88, 189

  matter vs., 27, 29–30, 102, 103–6, 113, 125, 126, 151, 177, 238–39, 241, 250–51, 257–60, 306–7, 309–13

  negative, 102–7, 114, 126, 127, 131, 157

  nonzero, 174

  positive, 102–3, 114, 174

  potential, 15–16, 49–50, 257–59, 309–13

  quanta of, 28

  radiation of, 27–28, 33, 35, 173, 247–48 250–251, 281–82, 295–300, 310

  reabsorption of, 29–32, 38

  self-, 23–24, 30, 41–42, 111–12, 115–23, 124, 136–39, 137, 150–51, 159

  solar, 82–85

  states of, 102–6, 113, 125, 126, 151, 170–75, 177, 181–85, 187–88

  thermal, 174, 183, 248, 250–51, 275

  total, 257–58

  transfer of, 29

  zero, 102–3, 118, 257–58, 306–7

  engineering, 6, 67, 81, 226, 263, 270–73

  Engineering and Science, 263

  entropy, xi–xii

  Esalen, 234

  Escher, M. C., 199

  Euclidean space, 258