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

‘G-mu-nu. G-mu-nu.”’

His face lit up. “Ah, yes,” he said. “You mean Chapel Hil !”

Feynman chose as a title the odd phrase uttered by Mrs.

Eisenhart at his first Princeton tea when he asked for both cream and lemon: “Surely you’re joking , Mr. Feynman!”

Those words had stayed in his mind for forty years, a

reminder of how people used manners and culture to make him feel smal , and now he was taking revenge. W. W.

Norton and Company bought the manuscript for an advance payment of fifteen hundred dol ars, a tiny sum for a trade book. Its staff did not like Feynman’s title at al . They proposed I Have to Understand the World or I Got an Idea (“a nice Brooklyn ring and a little double meaning,” the editor said). But Feynman would not budge. Norton released Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! in a smal first printing early in 1985. It sold out quickly, and within weeks the publisher had a surprising best-sel er.

One unhappy reader was Murray Gel -Mann. His attention focused on Feynman’s description of the joy of discovering the “new law” of weak interactions in 1957: “It was the first time, and the only time, in my career that I knew a law of nature that nobody else knew.” Gel -Mann’s rage could be heard through the hal s of Lauritsen Laboratory, and he told other physicists that he was going to sue. For late editions of the paperback Feynman added a parenthetical disclaimer: “Of course it wasn’t true, but finding out later that at least Murray Gel -Mann—and also Sudarshan and Marshak—had worked out the same theory didn’t spoil my fun.”

Surely You’re Joking gave offense in another way.

Feynman spoke of women as he always had—“a nifty blonde, perfectly proportioned”; “a cornfed, rather fattish-looking woman.” They appeared as objects of flirtation, nude models for his drawings, or “bar girls” to be tricked into sleeping with him. He knew that his diction was not

into sleeping with him. He knew that his diction was not whol y innocent. Sexual politics had caught up with him before, at the 1972 meeting of the American Physical Society in San Francisco, where he accepted the Oersted Medal for contributions to the teaching of physics. His personal relationships were not the issue, although in the male world of Caltech a part of his glamorous reputation with envious students came from his apparent sway over women. He continued to flirt with young women at parties and encouraged Don Juan–style rumors. He frequented one of the first California topless bars, Gianonni’s—he fil ed its scal oped paper placemats with chains of equations—

and amused the local press by testifying in court on its behalf in 1968. There was genuine machismo in the hero-worship of the male graduate students.

He had received a letter the previous fal suggesting that some of his language tended to “reinforce many ‘sexist’ or

‘male-chauvinist’ ideas.” For example, he told an anecdote about a scientist who was “out with his girl friend the night after he realized that nuclear reactions must be going on in the stars.”

She said “Look at how pretty the stars shine!” He said “Yes, and right now I am the only man in the world who knows why they shine.”

The letter writer, E. V. Rothstein, cited another anecdote about a “lady driver” and asked him, please, not to contribute to discrimination against women in science. In replying, Feynman decided not to emphasize his sensitivity:

Dear Rothstein:

Don’t bug me, man!

R. P. Feynman.

The result was a demonstration organized by a Berkeley group at the APS meeting, with women carrying signs and distributing leaflets titled “PR ? TEST” and addressed to

“Richard P. (for Pig?) Feynman.”

Despite the women’s movement that emerged in the sixties, science remained forbiddingly male in its rhetoric and its demographics. Barely 2 percent of American graduate degrees in physics went to women. Caltech did not hire its first female faculty member until 1969, and she did not receive tenure until she forced the issue in court in 1976. (Feynman, to the surprise and displeasure of some of his humanities col eagues, had taken her side; he had spent many pleasant hours in her office reading aloud such poems as Theodore Roethke’s “I Knew a Woman”: “I measure time by how a body sways… .”) Like most men in physics, Feynman had known a few women as professional col eagues and believed that he had treated them, individual y, as equals. They tended to agree. What more, he wondered, could anyone ask?

The Berkeley protesters had discovered his lady-driver anecdotes but had overlooked other examples of a style of speaking in which, habitual y, the scientist is male and nature—her secrets waiting to be penetrated—is female. In his Nobel lecture Feynman had recal ed fal ing in love with

his theory: “And, like fal ing in love with a woman, it is only possible if you do not know much about her, so you cannot see her faults.” And he had concluded:

So what happened to the old theory that I fel in love with as a youth? Wel , I would say it’s become an old lady, that has very little attractive left in her and the young today wil not have their hearts pound when they look at her anymore. But, we can say the best we can for any old woman, that she has been a good mother and she has given birth to some very good children.

In 1965 a large audience of men and women could listen to these words without taking offense or hearing a political y charged subtext. In 1972 Feynman was able to defuse the protest easily when he took the podium, by declaring:

“There is in the world of physics today a tremendous prejudice against women. This is a ridiculous thing and should stop, as there is no sense to it whatsoever. I love the subject of physics and it has always been my desire to try to share the delights of understanding it with any minds that were able to—male or female… .” Many of the demonstrators applauded. In 1985 Feynman once again seemed to some feminists a symbol of male dominance in physics. Real life was complex: one tough-minded Caltech professional would close her door and confide to a stranger that Feynman, even in his sixties, was the sexiest man she had ever known; others, wives of col eagues, resented their husbands for loving him so uncritical y. Meanwhile, the

status of women in the profession of physics had barely changed.

Despite himself, he was stung by the occasional criticism o f Surely You’re Joking . He knew, too, that some of the physicists who had known him longest were disappointed by a self-portrait that made Feynman seem more joker than scientist. His old friends in Hans Bethe’s generation were often pained, or shocked, though they did repeat Feynman’s stories about them with relish, detail for detail, as though from their own memory, Feynman’s voice having transplanted itself into their brains. Others saw through to the essence of what they loved in Feynman. Philip Morrison, writing in Scientific American , said: “General y Mr. Feynman is not joking; it is we, the setters of ritual performance, of hypocritical standards, pretenders to care and understanding, who are joking instead. This is the book of a powerful mind honest beyond everything else, a specialist in spade-naming.” Feynman nonetheless upbraided people who cal ed the book his autobiography.

He wrote in the margin of a science writer’s draft manuscript about modern particle physics: “Not An Autobiography. Not So. Simply A Set Of Anecdotes.” And when he came across a sentence describing him, at Los Alamos, as “a curiously tragic joker,” he scrawled angrily,

“What I real y was under such circumstances is far deeper than you are likely to understand.”