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

Ever since his return to high-energy physics with his parton model, Feynman had been struggling against the pul of gray-eminence, elder-statesman status. In 1974 he replied unnecessarily to a standard departmental inquiry by writing a one-sentence memorandum: “I have not accomplished anything this year in the way of research!”

Two years later, when a friend, Sidney Coleman, put him on the participant list for a quantum field theory conference sponsored by Werner Erhard’s est Foundation, Feynman summed up his ambivalence about his insider and outsider status by replying in Groucho Marx fashion: What the hel is Feynman invited for? He is not up to the other guys and is doing nothing as far as I know.

If you clean up the invitation list, to just the hard-core workers, I might begin to think about attending.

Coleman duly removed him from the list, and Feynman attended.

He was untroubled by the association with est’s vaguely humbug

sixties-inspired

self-improvement

seminars,

suffused though they were with the pseudoscientific jargon that he ordinarily despised—“another piece of evidence,”

as Coleman had said, “that we are living in the Golden Age of Sil iness.” Erhard’s organization and other postsixties institutions were attracted to quantum theory for what appeared—misleadingly—to be a mystical view of reality, reminiscent, they thought, of Eastern religions and anyway more intriguing than the old-fashioned view that things are more or less what they seem. Such organizations, struggling to emerge from the sixties as ongoing business enterprises, were attracted to quantum physicists for the respectability they could lend. Meanwhile, Feynman was drawn to Erhard and other “flaky people”—as Gweneth referred to some of his new friends—partly because curiosity and nonconformity had long been his own trademarks. The youth movements of the sixties had caught up with him. They had brought his own style into vogue—his tieless, pomp-free outlook, the persona that he and Carl privately spoke of as “aggressive dopiness.” He grew his graying hair in a long mane. As much as he reviled organized psychology for what he considered its slippery use of the forms and methods of experimental science, he

loved the introspective, self-examining kind of psychology.

He let not only Werner Erhard but also John Lil y, an aficionado of dolphins and sensory-deprivation tanks, befriend him. He tried to ignore what he cal ed Lil y’s

“mystic hokey-poke” but nonetheless submerged himself in his tanks in the hope of having hal ucinations, just as he had tried so hard to observe his own dream states forty years before. Death was not far from his thoughts. He recovered the earliest childhood memories he could dredge from his mind. He tried marijuana and (he was more embarrassed about this) LSD. He listened patiently as Baba Ram Das, the former Richard Alpert of Harvard, author of the cult book Be Here Now , instructed him on how to attain out-of-body experiences. He practiced these—OBE’s, in the current jargon—not wil ing to believe any of the mystical paraphernalia but happy and interested to imagine his ego floating here or there, outside himself, outside the room, outside the sixty-five-year-old body that was failing him so grievously.

Physicists did not make natural hippies. They had played too great a role in creating the technology-worshiping, nuclear-shadowed culture against which the counterculture set itself. When Feynman spoke now about his experience in the Manhattan Project, he stressed more than ever his cracking of safes and baiting of censors. He was more a rebel than an ambitious and effective group leader. Other people, “people in higher echelons,” made the decisions, he said, prefacing a 1975 talk at Santa Barbara. “I worried about no big decisions. I was always flittering about

underneath.” He was hardly an enemy of technology; nor, despite his distaste for the bureaucracy of science, was he an enemy of what was now cal ed the military-industrial complex. He had always refused to attach his name to Caltech’s grant proposals to the federal funding agencies that kept al university physics departments solvent. Stil , he would emerge from Lil y’s sensory-deprivation tank, rinse off the Epsom salts in the shower, dress, and drive over to Hughes Aircraft Company, a military contractor, to deliver lectures on physics. He was not guarding his time as he had in the past. Sporadical y, he worked for Hughes and several other companies as a consultant; he advised Hughes on a neural-net project sponsored by the Department of Defense and consulted with 3M Company engineers on nonlinear optical materials. For less than four hours of conversation he earned fifteen hundred dol ars.

These were scattered jobs, chosen with no special thought.

Many of his col eagues arranged their consulting far more careful y and earned far more money. Feynman’s clients often seemed more grateful for the thril of meeting him than for any particular technical contribution he made. He knew he was no businessman. He was Caltech’s highest paid professor, along with Gel -Mann; but Caltech kept al the royalties from The Feynman Lectures on Physics . When his old friend Philip Morrison sent him an advertisement for

“seventeen towering lectures by two physics giants,”

available from Time-Life Films, he wondered whether Morrison received any royalties. “I don’t,” Feynman said.

“Are we physics giants business dwarfs?”

His favorite extracurricular patron in the early 1980s was the Esalen Institute at Big Sur on the California coast, a hub for many varieties of self-actualization, self-enrichment, and self-fulfil ment: Rolfing, Gestalt therapy, yoga, meditation.

Under the giant trees on cliffs overlooking the Pacific were the original hot tubs, fed by natural sulfur springs. For its many patrons Esalen offered an expensive form of relaxation—a “lube job for the mind,” as Tom Wolfe once put it. Feynman described it as a hotbed of antiscience:

“mysticism, expanded consciousness, new types of awareness, ESP, and so forth.” He became a regular visitor. He soaked in the hot tubs, stared gleeful y at the nude young women sunbathing, and learned to give massages. He gave some of his standard lectures, adjusted to fit the mental state of the audience. Barefoot, with his thin legs emerging from khaki shorts, he began his

“Tiny Machines” talk:

It has to do with the question of how smal can you make machinery. Okay? That’s the subject. Because I’ve heard people around, in the baths, saying, “Tiny machines? What’s he talking about?” and I say to them, “You know, very smal machines ” [pinching an invisible tiny machine between thumb and forefinger]

and it doesn’t work. [Pause.]

I am talking about very—tiny—machines. Okay?

And on he would go, to occasional cries of “Al right!” from the audience. In the question period, the conversation

would invariably turn to antigravity devices, antimatter, and faster-than-light travel—if not in the world of physicists then in the spiritual world. Feynman always answered soberly, explaining that faster-than-light travel was impossible, antimatter was routine, and antigravity devices were unlikely—except, as he said, “that pil ow and the floor under your behind wil support you effectively for a long time.” For several years he conducted a workshop in “idiosyncratic thinking.” Esalen’s catalog copy promised a route to

“peace of mind and enjoyment of life’s contradictions” and added: “You are invited to bring rhythm instruments.”

Late in spring 1984, on his way to pick up one of the first available IBM personal computers in Pasadena, he leapt excitedly out of his car, tripped on the sidewalk, and struck his head on the side of the building. A passerby told him he had a gory enough gash to go to the hospital for stitches.