Quantum Man: Richard Feynman's Life in Science Page 20

  Feynman took up the challenge and then some. He had tirelessly devoted his whole life to rebuilding in his own mind the entire edifice of physical law. The adventure of personal understanding had driven him since his childhood. Now was an opportunity for him to put this picture out there for others. (I have since discovered, while reading through Matthew Sands’s memoirs, that he used almost this same language to convince Feynman to teach the class.) He could put his own brand, not just on physics at the forefront, but on the very basic ideas that form the heart of our physical understanding. Over the next two years he devoted more intense energy and creativity into developing his lectures than he had put into anything since the war.

  The timing was perfect. This expenditure was possible at that time in part because his wanderlust had subsided. With the stability of his marriage and domestic life, he was able to focus less on his own needs and desires, had fewer motivations to seek out adventures to mask his loneliness, and more importantly, could settle down in one place for the time required to sketch out a completely new introduction to the fundamentals of physics. He could show others not only how he personally understood the world, but also what had excited him enough to learn about it. He could make new connections, which is what science is all about, in unraveling the mysteries of the physical universe. He wanted to quickly take students to the exciting forefront mysteries, but at the same time show that they were not all esoteric, that many were connected to real phenomena as immediate as boiling oatmeal, or predicting the weather, or the behavior of water flowing down a tube.

  Every day he arrived at class before the students, smiling and ready to regale them with yet another totally original presentation of everything from classical mechanics to electromagnetism, gravity, fluids, gases, chemistry, and ultimately even quantum mechanics. He would march back and forth behind a huge demonstration table and in front of a mammoth blackboard, yelling and grimacing and cajoling and joking. And by the end of the class he would make sure not only that the entire chalkboard was full, but that he had completed the circle of ideas he had set out at the beginning of class to discuss. And he wanted to show students that their lack of knowledge didn’t need to compromise their understanding, that with hard work even freshmen could address, in exact detail, some modern phenomena.

  Most of all, he wanted to present a guide for understanding or, as he almost called it, “a guide for the perplexed”—after the title of the famous tract by the eleventh-century philosopher Moses Maimonides. As he said,

  I thought to address them [the lectures] to the most intelligent in the class and to make sure, if possible, that even the most intelligent student was unable to completely encompass everything that was in the lectures—by putting in suggestions of applications of the ideas and concepts in various directions outside the main line of attack. For this reason, though, I tried very hard to make all the statements as accurate as possible, to point out in every case where the equations and ideas fitted into the body of physics, and how—when they learned more—things would be modified. I also felt that for such students it is important to indicate what it is that they should—if they are sufficiently clever—be able to understand by deduction from what has been said before, and what is being put in as something new.

  In his excitement he also wanted to connect physics with the rest of science, to show that it was not an isolated island. He introduced the physiology of color vision and the very mechanical engineering applications that had so interested him when he was a student, and of course he described his own discoveries as well.

  The department realized something special was happening, and Feynman was given great support and encouragement. Every week he would meet with other faculty who were assigned, under the supervision of Matthew Sands and Robert Leighton, to devise problem sessions and extra recitations to help the students. Since Feynman wasn’t teaching out of any textbook, it was necessary to have these meetings, and these instructors and assistants had to work full-time, both to keep up and to develop appropriate teaching materials to complement the course.

  Soon, word of what was going on in the large lecture hall at Caltech spread, and graduate students and faculty began to trickle in to listen, even as the terrified and overwhelmed undergraduates stopped coming. As perhaps might have happened only at a school like Caltech, the department urged him to continue lecturing for a second year, in spite of the fact that many of the students couldn’t pass his exams.

  The lectures were also recorded so that Sands and other colleagues, chiefly Leighton, could transcribe and edit them. Ultimately a three-volume set of “red books” appeared for sale around the world. Never before in modern times had someone so comprehensively or so personally re-created from scratch and reorganized the entire knowledge base and presentation of the basic principles of physics. This was reflected in the name given to the set: The Feynman Lectures on Physics.

  This is significant. It ascribed a unique status to a single scientist, and I don’t know of anyone else, in physics at least, for whom such a title would have even been considered. Feynman was in the process of becoming a physics icon, and the title was testimony not only to the nature of the material but also to the special place which Feynman was coming to occupy in the physics world.

  In the end the actual course was a mixed success. Few of the students, even Caltech students, could follow all of the material. However, over time those who were lucky enough to attend the course had memories that mellowed. Many of the former students remembered it as the experience of a lifetime, echoing the words of Nobel laureate Douglas Osheroff, who later said, “The two-year sequence was an extremely important part of my education. Although I cannot say that I understood it all, I think it contributed most to my physical intuition.”

  But while the undergraduate guinea pigs at Caltech may have suffered (though Sands disputed this notion and argued that most of the students kept up at some level), the Feynman Lectures became a staple for anyone who planned to become a physicist. I remember buying my own copy when I was an undergraduate, and I would read tidbits at a time, wondering whether I would ever really grasp all the material, and hoping that one of my professors would use the book. Perhaps luckily for me, none of them did. Most who tried, found the experiment to be disappointing. The material was too demanding for the average physics class, and too revolutionary.

  Nevertheless, the books remain in print, a new revised set appeared in 2005, and every year, a new crop of students buys them, opens them up, and begins to experience a whole new world.

  Unfortunately, for Feynman, Sands, and Leighton, however, all royalties continue to go to Caltech (although Feynman’s family later sued Caltech over rights to one of the lectures that Caltech packaged as a book and audiotape). Later on, Feynman commiserated with friend, physicist, and author Philip Morrison, after being called a physics giant, “Are we physics giants, business dwarfs?”

  The experience of teaching this course coincided with a general outburst of popular activity by Feynman, whose charismatic style was beginning to make waves well beyond the confines of the physics community. Already in 1958 he had agreed to be an advisor of a television program that Warner Brothers was producing, and in a letter regarding that production he indicated both his experience with popular outreach and his philosophy: “The idea that movie people know how to present this stuff, because they are entertainment-wise and the scientists aren’t is wrong. They have no experience in explaining ideas, witness all movies, and I do. I am a successful lecturer in physics for popular audiences. The real entertainment gimmick is the excitement, drama, and mystery of the subject matter. People love to learn something, they are ‘entertained’ enormously by being allowed to understand a little bit of something they never understood before.”

  Around that time he also participated in what I believe was his first television interview, which aired shortly before Gweneth arrived in the United States. He was clearly exc
ited about being on television, and advised her, “If you came 2 weeks earlier I’d sure have a lot for you to do—I’m going to be on television, in an interview with a news commentator on June 7th and there may be a lot of letters to answer.” The interview was a masterpiece, far exceeding the quality and intellectual depth of interviews performed nowadays, but because there was a frank discussion of religion in it, the network decided to air it at a different time than advertised, so the viewing audience was smaller.

  The television production he had become an advisor on, called About Time, finally aired on NBC in 1962. It elicited a large reaction among viewers and began to further establish Feynman’s popular credentials. His prowess as a lecturer to lay audiences led to an invitation to give the prestigious Messenger Lectures at Cornell. This set of six lectures became famous and were compiled into a wonderful book titled The Character of Physical Law. (This was the very book that my summer school physics instructor had recommended I read in order to get me more excited about physics.) The lectures were also recorded on film, and recently Bill Gates bought the rights to them so they could be available online. (Gates said that if he had had access to them when he was a student, before he dropped out of Harvard, his life might have changed.) They, more than any other recorded image or document, capture the real Feynman, playful, brilliant, excited, charismatic, energetic, and no nonsense.

  Finally, on October 21, 1965, Feynman was “canonized,” cementing his status forever among scientific and lay audiences. Feynman, along with Sin-Itiro Tomonaga and Julian Schwinger, shared the 1965 Nobel Prize for their “fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics with deep ploughing consequences for the physics of elementary particles.” Like that of every other Nobel laureate, Feynman’s life was forever changed, and he worried about this effect. While there is little doubt he enjoyed celebrity, he didn’t like pomp and circumstance, and motivated from the attitude he had gleaned from his father as a child, he truly distrusted honorific titles. He matched his thoughts with actions. He had decided as a young man, graduating from MIT, that honorary degrees were silly—those being honored with the degrees had not done as much work as he had to attain his—so he refused to accept any that were offered to him. In the 1950s he had been elected to membership in the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, for many scientists the highest recognition they can get from their colleagues. Beginning in 1960, Feynman began a long and involved process to resign from the National Academy because he viewed its prime purpose as to determine who could be “in” and who was not “worthy.” (In a famous episode years later, Carl Sagan was rejected for membership, many think at least in part because of his popularization efforts.) He stopped listing it among his honors (he asked the NBC television people, for example, to remove it from his biographical sketch for the 1962 television program), but it took ten years before the Academy officials finally made his resignation official.

  It is hard to know how serious Feynman was, but he later wrote that for a moment he considered refusing the Nobel Prize for these same reasons—who cared if someone in the Swedish Academy decided that his work was “noble” enough. As he famously said, “The prize is the pleasure of finding things out.” But he quickly realized that this would generate more publicity than getting the prize, and might lead to the impression that he thought he was “too good” for it. He claimed that what the Nobel Committee should do instead is quietly let the prize winners know in advance of its decision, and give them time to back out quietly. According to Feynman, he wasn’t the only one who had this idea. His idol Dirac had felt the same way.

  In spite of his misgivings, Feynman clearly felt some validation by the prize, and as his former student Albert Hibbs said, he probably would have felt worse if he hadn’t gotten it. He also liked the fame the prize and other recognitions brought, not least because it gave him more freedom to act as he wished.

  Be that as it may, in spite of his intense nervousness about messing up during the official ceremony, about bowing and wearing formal attire, and about walking backward in the presence of the Swedish king, Feynman persevered, attended the ceremony, and prepared a beautiful Nobel lecture giving a truly personal history of his journey to discover how to tame the infinities of QED. And even as late as 1965, Feynman still felt the program of renormalization that he had spearheaded was merely a way of sweeping problems of infinities under the rug, not curing them.

  Associated with the awarding of the prize was the question that often comes about because of the phrasing of Mr. Nobel’s will, which seems to imply that only one person can win. It was clear in this case that Julian Schwinger, Freeman Dyson, and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga all deserved a share of the prize, but why didn’t Dyson receive it? He had so skillfully demonstrated the equivalence of the seemingly totally different methods of deriving a sensible form of QED, and had followed that up by essentially providing a guide to teach the rest of the physics world how to do the appropriate calculations. Dyson, you will recall, was also essentially the one whose papers advertised Feynman’s results before Feynman ever wrote his own papers, and who ultimately helped explain to the world that Feynman’s methods were not ad hoc, but as well grounded and much more physically intuitive and calculationally simple than the other approaches. It was thus Dyson who had helped the rest of the world understand QED, while establishing Feynman’s methods as the ones that would ultimately take root and grow.

  If Dyson had bad feelings about not receiving the prize, he never verbalized it. Quite the opposite in fact. As he later put it, “Feynman made the big discoveries, and I was just really a publicizer. I got well rewarded for my part in the business—I got a beautiful job here at the Institute, set up for life, so I’ve nothing to complain about! No, I think that it was entirely right and proper. Feynman’s was one of the best-earned Nobel Prizes there ever was, I would say.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Twisting the Tail of the Cosmos

  I think I’ve got the right idea, to do crazy things . . .

  —RICHARD FEYNMAN

  The years between 1957 and 1965 represented a transitional period in Richard Feynman’s life. Personally, he went from womanizer to family man, from solitary wanderer to domesticated husband and father (though he never stopped seeking adventures, now, more often than not, with his family). Professionally, he went from someone urgently working, essentially for his own immediate pleasure, at the leading edge of physics to someone who had begun to give back to the world the wisdom he had gained from his years of thinking about nature (though he probably would never have claimed that what he had was wisdom).

  In the meantime he had become one of the most well-known and colorful expositors and teachers in physics, and, in part, its conscience. He remained acutely aware, and ensured whenever he could that his colleagues and the public at large did not lose track of what science was and what it wasn’t, what excitement could be gained from studying it, and what nonsense could result from overinterpreting its signals, from unfounded claims, or simply by losing touch with it completely. He felt strongly that science required a certain intellectual honesty, and that the world would be a better place if this was more widely understood and practiced.

  This is not to suggest that Feynman the person changed in any fundamental way. He remained intensely interested in all aspects of physics and, as I just mentioned, he continued to seek out adventures, just adventures of a different kind. Besides exotic trips with his wife, he took up two activities that might be called sublimation. One involved working on his calculations almost every day in a Pasadena strip joint, where he could watch the girls whenever calculations were going badly, and another involved combining a long-standing interest in drawing with a long-standing interest in nude women that he could draw. He actually became fairly accomplished at this, which is paradoxical since as a young man he had scoffed at music and art but, by middle age had taken up both. Equally paradoxical was a new fascination, in the 1960s, with visiting var
ious New Age establishments like Esalen, where he would enjoy both the scenery and the opportunity to relieve the participants of their beliefs in “hokey-pokey” fairy tales, as he put it. Perhaps the attraction of the nude baths, and the fascination with interacting with a completely different sort of individual than he would otherwise, outweighed his own lack of tolerance for those who abused the concepts of physics, like quantum mechanics, to justify their “anything goes” mentality.

  In his professional life, as his fame increased, he moved to aggressively protect his time. He wanted to ensure that he didn’t become a “great man” in the traditional sense, encumbered by a host of administrative responsibilities, which he shirked at every possible moment. He even had recorded a bet with Victor Weisskopf, when he visited CERN in Geneva after he received the Nobel Prize, that within ten years he would not hold a “responsible position”—that is, a position that “by reasons 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.” Needless to say, he won the bet.

  His growing fame encouraged another tendency that had paid off for him in the past, though in the long run it cost him what could have been a great deal more success in continuing to lead in discovering new physics. He became more and more convinced that in order to blaze new paths, he needed to disregard much of what others were doing, and in particular not focus on the “problems du jour.”