Джеймс Глик - Genius - The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

“See that bird? What kind of bird is that?”

I said, “I haven’t the slightest idea what kind of bird it is.”

He says, “It’s a brown-throated thrush. Your father doesn’t teach you anything!”

But it was the opposite. He had already taught me:

“See that bird?” he says. “It’s a Spencer’s warbler.” (I knew he didn’t know the real name.) “Wel , in Italian, it’s a Chutto Lapittida . In Portuguese, it’s a Bom da Peida . In Chinese, it’s a Chung-long-tah , and in Japanese, it’s a Katano Tekeda . You can know the name of that bird in al the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’l know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You’l only know about humans in different places and what they cal the bird.

So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing —that’s what counts.”

The second story also carried a moral about the difference between the name and the thing named. Richard asks his father why, when he pul s his red wagon forward, a bal rol s to the back.

“That,” he says, “nobody knows. The general principle is that things that are moving try to keep on moving, and things that are standing stil tend to stand stil , unless you push on them hard.” And he says, “This tendency is cal ed inertia, but nobody knows why it’s true.” Now that’s a deep understanding.

Deeper than Melvil e could have known: few scientists or educators recognized that even a complete Newtonian understanding of force and inertia leaves the why unanswered. The universe does not have to be that way. It is hard enough to explain inertia to a child; to recognize that the bal actual y moves forward slightly with respect to the ground while moving backward sharply with respect to the wagon; to see the role of friction in transferring the force; to see that every body perseveres in its state of being at rest or of moving uniformly straight forward, except insofar as it is compelled to change its state by forces impressed upon it. It is hard enough to convey al that without adding an almost scholastical y subtle lesson about the nature of explanation. Newton’s laws do explain why bal s rol to the back of wagons, why basebal s travel in wind-bent parabolas, and even why crystals pick up radio waves, up to a point. Later Feynman became acutely conscious of the limits of such explanations. He agonized over the difficulty of truly explaining how a magnet picks up an iron bar or how the earth imparts the force cal ed gravity to a projectile.

The Feynman who developed an agnosticism about such concepts as inertia had a stranger physics in mind as wel , the physics being born in Europe while father and son talked about wagons. Quantum mechanics imposed a new sort of doubt on science, and Feynman expressed that doubt often, in many different ways. Do not ask how it can be like that. That, nobody knows.

Even when he was young, absorbing such wisdom, Feynman sometimes glimpsed the limits of his father’s understanding of science. As he was going to bed one night, he asked his father what algebra was.

“It’s a way of doing problems that you can’t do in arithmetic,” his father said.

“Like what?”

“Like a house and a garage rents for $15,000. How much does the garage rent for?”

Richard could see the trouble with that. And when he started high school, he came home upset by the apparent triviality of Algebra 1. He went into his sister’s room and asked, “Joanie, if 2 x is equal to 4 and x is an unknown number, can you tel me what x is?” Of course she could, and Richard wanted to know why he should have to learn anything so obvious in high school. The same year, he could see just as easily what x must be if 2 x was 32. The school quickly switched him into Algebra 2, taught by Miss Moore, a plump woman with an exquisite sense of discipline. Her class ran as a roundelay of problem solving, the students making a continual stream to and from the blackboard. Feynman was slightly il at ease among the older students, but he already let friends know that he thought he was smarter. Stil , his score on the school IQ test was a merely respectable 125.

At School

The New York City public schools of that era gained a reputation later for high quality, partly because of the nostalgic reminiscences of famous alumni. Feynman himself thought that his grammar school, Public School 39, had been stultifyingly barren: “an intel ectual desert.” At first he learned more at home, often from the encyclopedia.

Having trained himself in rudimentary algebra, he once concocted a set of four equations with four unknowns and showed it off to his arithmetic teacher, along with his methodical solution. She was impressed but mystified; she had to take it to the principal to find out whether it was correct. The school had one course in general science, for boys only, taught by a blustering, heavyset man cal ed Major Connol y—evidently his World War I rank. Al Feynman remembered from the course was the length of a meter in inches, 39.37, and a futile argument with the teacher over whether rays of light from a single source come out radial y, as seemed logical to Richard, or in paral el, as in the conventional textbook diagrams of lens behavior. Even in grade school he had no doubt that he was right about such things. It was just obvious, physical y—

not the sort of argument that could be settled by an appeal to authority. At home, meanwhile, he boiled water by running 110-volt house current through it and watched the lines of blue and yel ow sparks that flow when the current breaks. His father sometimes described the beauty of the flow of energy through the everyday world, from sunlight to plants to muscles to the mechanical work stored in the

spring of a windup toy. Assigned at school to write verse, Richard applied this idea to a fanciful y bucolic scene with a farmer plowing his field to make food, grass, and hay:

… Energy plays an important part

And it’s used in al this work;

Energy, yes, energy with power so great,

A kind that cannot shirk.

If the farmer had not this energy,

He would be at a loss,

But it’s sad to think, this energy

Belongs to a little brown horse.

Then he wrote another poem, brooding self-consciously about his own obsession with science and with the idea of science. Amid some borrowed apocalyptic imagery he expressed a feeling that science meant skepticism about God—at least about the standardized God to whom he had been exposed at school. Over the Feynmans’ rational and humanistic household God had never held much sway.

“Science is making us wonder,” he began—then on second thought he scratched out the word wonder .

Science is making us wander,

Wander, far and wide;

And know, by this time,

Our face we ought to hide.

Some day, the mountain shal wither, While the val eys get flooded with fire;

Or men shal be driven like horses,

And stamper, like beasts, in the mire.

And we say, “The earth was thrown from the sun,”

Or, “Evolution made us come to be

And we come from lowest of beasts,

Or one step back, the ape and monkey.”

Our minds are thinking of science,

And science is in our ears;

Our eyes are seeing science,

And science is in our fears.

Yes, we’re wandering from the Lord our God, Away from the Holy One;

But now we cannot help it,

For it is already done.

But poetry was (Richard thought) “sissy-like.” This was no smal problem. He suffered grievously from the standard curse of boy intel ectuals, the fear of being thought, or of being, a sissy. He thought he was weak and physical y awkward. In basebal he was inept. The sight of a bal rol ing toward him across a street fil ed him with dread.