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

For a few days he felt fuzzy, but he told himself nothing was wrong.

More days went by. It seemed to Gweneth that he was behaving strangely. He awoke in the night and wandered through Michel e’s room. He spent forty-five minutes one day looking for his car, which was parked outside the house. At the house of a model he was drawing, he suddenly undressed and tried to go to sleep; she anxiously told him that he was not at his own home. Final y, after beginning a classroom lecture, he suddenly realized he was speaking disjointed nonsense. He stopped, apologized, and left the room.

A scan of his brain revealed a massive subdural

hematoma, slow bleeding inside the skul that was putting strong pressure on the brain tissue. The doctors sent him directly into surgery, where the standard procedure was performed at once: two holes dril ed through the cranium to drain the liquid. By the early hours of the next morning Gweneth was relieved to find him sitting up and speaking normal y. He had no memory of the lost three weeks.

Afterward the specialist who had performed the scan repeated it to rule out a recurrence. He could not resist scrutinizing this remarkably detailed image of Feynman’s brain, the convoluted gray tissue, the wrapped bundles of nerve fiber (“But you can’t see what I am thinking,” Feynman told him), looking for a sign of something different from al the other sixty-five-year-old brains he had scanned. Were the blood vessels larger? The doctor was not sure.

Surely You’re Joking!

Feynman had begun to have autobiographical thoughts around the time of the Nobel Prize. Historians came by to record his recol ections, and they treated his notes as artifacts too important to be piled in boxes or strewn about on the shelves in the home office he had made in his basement. Sitting there was Arithmetic for the Practical Man , a relic of his childhood. He stil had the adolescent notebook he had sent back and forth to T. A. Welton in the course

of

reinventing

early

quantum

mechanics.

Interviewers set up tape recorders to capture every word of

the same stories he had entertained his friends with for decades.

An MIT historian, Charles Weiner, persuaded him to cooperate in what became the most thorough and serious of his interviews. For a while Feynman considered col aborating with Weiner on a biography. They sat in Feynman’s screened back patio while Carl played in a tree house nearby. He not only told his stories but also demonstrated them: “Okay, start your watch,” he told Weiner; then, after they had conversed for eight minutes and forty-two seconds, he interrupted himself and said,

“Eight minutes forty-two seconds.” After many hours the conversation sometimes grew intimate. He rummaged through one box and pul ed out a photograph of Arline, reclining almost nude, wearing only translucent lingerie. He almost wept. They shut off the tape recorder and remained silent for a time. Feynman kept most of those memories to himself even now.

He began dating his scientific notes as he worked, something he had never done before. Weiner once remarked casual y that his new parton notes represented “a record of the day-to-day work,” and Feynman reacted sharply.

“I actual y did the work on the paper,” he said.

“Wel ,” Weiner said, “the work was done in your head, but the record of it is stil here.”

“No, it’s not a record , not real y. It’s working . You have to work on paper, and this is the paper. Okay?” It was true that he wrote in astonishing volume as he worked—long trains

of thought, almost suitable to serve immediately as lecture notes.

He told Weiner that he had never read a scientific biography he had liked. He thought he would be portrayed either as a bloodless intel ectual or a bongo-playing clown.

He vacil ated and final y let the idea drop. Stil , he sat for interviews with historians interested in Far Rockaway and Los Alamos and fil ed out questionnaires for psychologists interested in creativity. (“Is your scientific problem-solving accompanied by any of the fol owing?” He checked visual images , kinesthetic feelings , and emotional feelings and added “(1) acoustic images, (2) talk to self.” Under “major il nesses” he reported: “Too much to list… . Only adverse effects are laziness during recovery period.”) For several years he had played drums regularly with a young friend, Ralph Leighton, the son of another Caltech physicist. Leighton had begun taping their sessions, and then he began taping the stories Feynman would tel . He urged him on, cal ing him Chief and begging to hear the same stories again and again. Feynman told them: how he became known in Far Rockaway as the boy who fixed radios by thinking; how he asked a Princeton librarian for the map of the cat; how his father taught him to see through the tricks of circus mind readers; how he outwitted painters, mathematicians, philosophers, and psychiatrists. Or he would just ramble while Leighton listened. “Today I went over to the Huntington Medical Library,” he said one day—

his remaining kidney was presenting problems. “But it’s al interesting, how the kidney works, and everything else. You

interesting, how the kidney works, and everything else. You want me to tel you some interesting things? The damn kidney is the craziest thing in the world!”

Gradual y a manuscript began to take shape. Leighton transcribed the tapes and presented them to Feynman for editing. Feynman had strong views about the structure of each story; Leighton realized that Feynman had developed a routine of improvisational performance in which he knew the order and pacing of every laugh. They consciously worked on the key themes. Feynman talked about Arline’s having embarrassed him with a box of “Richard darling, I love you! Putzie” pencils:

RICHARD. And the next morning, al right? Next morning, in the mail, there’s this letter, al right, this postcard, which starts out, “What’s the idea of trying to cut the name off the pencils?”

RALPH. [ Laughs ] Oh, boy! [ Laughs. ]

RICHARD. “What do you care what other people think?”

RALPH. Oh, this is——Yeah, this is a good theme.

RICHARD. Hmmm?

RALPH. This is a good theme, because there’s a theme in here. You know, what other people think …

They knew they had a remarkable central figure, a scientist who prided himself not on his achievements in science—

these remained deep in the background—but on his ability to see through fraud and pretense and to master everyday life. He underscored these qualities with an exaggerated humility; he took the tone of a boy cal ing the grownups Mr.

and Mrs. and asking politely dangerous questions. He was Holden Caulfield, a plain old straight shooter trying to figure out why so many other people are phonies.

“Pompous fools—guys who are fools and are covering it al over and impressing people as to how wonderful they are with al this hocus pocus—THAT, I CANNOT STAND!”

Feynman said. “An ordinary fool isn’t a faker; an honest fool is al right. But a dishonest fool is terrible!”

His favorite sort of triumph in the world of these stories came in the realm of everyday cleverness—as when he arrived at a North Carolina airport, late for a meeting of relativists, and worked out how to get help from a taxi dispatcher:

“Listen,” I said to the dispatcher. “The main meeting began yesterday, so there were a whole lot of guys going to the meeting who must have come through here yesterday. Let me describe them to you: They would have their heads kind of in the air, and they would be talking to each other, not paying attention to where they were going, saying things to each other like