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

“orange bal s of light, blue spheres which bounce on the floor, gray fogs which disappear, gossamer-like streams which evaporate into the air, thin, round flat things out of which objects come with funny shapes that are something like a human being.” It was fantastical y improbable, he noted, that alien visitors should come in near-human form and just at the moment in history when people discovered the possibility of space travel.

He subjected other forms of science and near-science to the same scrutiny: tests by psychologists, statistical sampling of public opinion. He had developed pointed ways of il ustrating the slippage that occurred when experimenters al owed themselves to be less than rigorously skeptical or failed to appreciate the power of coincidence. He described a common experience: an experimenter notices a peculiar result after many trials—

rats in a maze, for example, turn alternately right, left, right, and left. The experimenter calculates the odds against something so extraordinary and decides it cannot have been an accident. Feynman would say: “I had the most remarkable experience… . While coming in here I saw license plate ANZ 912. Calculate for me, please, the odds that of al the license plates …” And he would tel a story from his days in the fraternity at MIT, with a surprise ending.

I was upstairs typewriting a theme on something about philosophy. And I was completely engrossed, not thinking of anything but the theme, when al of a sudden in a most mysterious fashion there swept through my mind the idea: my grandmother has died.

Now of course I exaggerate slightly, as you should in al such stories. I just sort of half got the idea for a minute… . Immediately after that the telephone rang downstairs. I remember this distinctly for the reason you wil now hear… . It was for somebody else. My grandmother was perfectly healthy and there’s nothing to it. Now what we have to do is to accumulate a large

number of these to fight the few cases when it could happen.

Feynman, who had once astonished the Princeton admissions committee with his low scores in every subject but physics and mathematics, did believe in the primacy of science among al the spheres of knowledge. He would not concede that poetry or painting or religion could reach a different kind of truth. The very idea of different, equal y valid versions of truth struck him as a modern form of cant, another misunderstanding of uncertainty.

That any particular knowledge—quantum mechanics, for example—must be provisional and imperfect does not mean that competing theories cannot be judged better or worse. He was not what philosophers cal ed a realist—by one definition, someone who, in asserting the existence of, say, electrons, adds “a desk-thumping, foot-stamping shout of ‘Real y!’” Real though electrons seemed, Feynman and some other physicists recognized that they are part of a never-perfect, always-changing scaffolding. Do electrons really travel backward in time? Are those nanosecond resonances really particles? Do particles real y spin? Do they real y have strangeness and charm? Many scientists believed in a straightforward reality. Others, including Feynman, felt that in the late twentieth century it was not necessary or possible to answer a final yes . It was preferable to hold one’s models delicately in the mind, weighing alternative viewpoints and letting assumptions slide here and there. But to physicists the scaffolding was

no t all . It did imply a truth within, toward which humans might perpetual y strive, however imperfectly. Feynman did not believe, as many philosophers did, that the now-famous

“conceptual revolutions” or “paradigm shifts” to which science seemed so prone—Einstein’s relativity replacing Newton’s dynamics—amounted to the replacing of one social y bound fashion by another, like hemlines rising and fal ing year to year. Like most members of his community, he could not abide in his business what one philosopher, Arthur Fine, cal ed “the great lesson of twentieth-century analytic and continental philosophy, namely, that there are no general methodological or philosophical resources for deciding such things.” Scientists do have methods. Their theories are provisional but not arbitrary, not mere social constructions. By means of the peculiar stratagem of refusing to acknowledge that any truth may be as valid as any other, they succeed in preventing any truth from becoming as valid as any other. Their approach to knowledge differs from al others—religion, art, literary criticism—in that the goal is never a potpourri of equal y attractive realities. Their goal, though it always recedes before them however they approach it, is consensus.

The Swedish Prize

When Einstein won the 1921 Nobel Prize, it did not create a stir. Although Einstein could command front-page coverage in the New York Times merely by delivering a

public lecture, the detail of the prize impressed the editors only to the extent of a one-sentence notice inside the newspaper, lumping him with the next year’s winner, a more obscure professor whose name they misspel ed: The Nobel Committee has awarded the physics prize for 1921 to Professor Dr. Albert Einstein of Germany, identified with the theory of relativity, and that for 1922 to Professor Neils Bohr, Copenhagen.

Gradual y the awards gained in stature. Longevity contributed: there were other prizes, but the foresighted Alfred Nobel, inventor of dynamite, had established his early. The particular contributions of scientists grew more difficult to describe to a lay public, and the awarding of such a distinguished international honor provided a useful benchmark. A physicist’s obituary in the late twentieth century would almost have to begin with the phrase “won the Nobel Prize for …” or the phrase “worked on the atomic bomb,” or both. The prize committee arrived at its judgments with care: it made errors, sometimes serious ones, but it general y reflected a conservative consensus of leading scientists in many countries. Scientists began to covet the prize with an intensity that they suppressed as wel as they could. Their interest could be felt nonetheless in the ways scientists did and did not discuss the prize. Any potential prizewinner exhibited an extreme reluctance to mention its name. The distinguished group of those who had almost won revealed a forlorn tendency to rehearse for

the rest of their lives the slight contingencies that had stood between them and the prize—the indecision that made them delay a paper for a crucial few months, or the timidity that kept them from joining a team embarked on an al -too-promising experiment. Even winners showed how much they cared through smal mannerisms, such as the euphemism winkingly employed by Gel -Mann, among others: “the Swedish prize.” The winners formed an elite group—but elite was too weak a word. A sociologist assessing the prize’s stature found herself having to multiply superlatives: “As the ne plus ultra of honors in science, the Nobel Prize elevates its recipients not merely to the scientific elite but to the uppermost rank of the scientific ultra-elite, the thin layer of those at the top of the stratification hierarchy of elites who exhibit especial y great influence, authority, or power and who general y have the highest prestige within what is a prestigious col ectivity to begin with.” Physicists always knew who among their col eagues had won and who had not.

Few scientists after Einstein, if any, remained larger than the prize—capable of adding as much to its stature as it added to theirs. In 1965 several active physicists at least seemed to be sure future winners, as much because of their dominance in the community as because of their particular accomplishments. Feynman, Schwinger, Gel -