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

Socializing the Engineer

“Let none say that the engineer is an unsociable creature who delights only in formulae and slide rules.” So pleaded the MIT yearbook. Some administrators and students did worry about the socialization of this famously awkward creature. One medicine prescribed by the masters of student life was Tea, compulsory for al freshmen. (“But after they have conquered their initial fears and learned to balance a cup on a saucer while conversing with the wife of a professor, compulsion is no longer necessary.”) Students also refined their conversational skil s at Bul Session Dinners and their other social skil s at an endless succession of dances: Dormitory Dinner Dances, the Christmas Dance and the Spring Dance, a Monte Carlo Dance featuring a roulette wheel and a Barn Dance offering sleigh rides, dances to attract students from nearby women’s col eges like Radcliffe and Simmons, dances accompanied by the orchestras of Nye Mayhew and Glenn Mil er, the traditional yearly Field Day Dance after the equal y traditional Glove Fight, and, in the fraternity houses that provided the most desirable student quarters, formal dances that persuaded even Dick Feynman to put on a tuxedo almost every week.

The fraternities at MIT, as elsewhere, strictly segregated students by religion. Jews had a choice of just two, and Feynman joined the one cal ed Phi Beta Delta, on Bay State Road in Boston, in a neighborhood of town houses just across the Charles River from campus. One did not simply “join” a fraternity, however. One enjoyed a wooing

process that began the summer before col ege at local smokers and continued, in Feynman’s case, with insistent offers of transportation and lodging that bordered on kidnapping. Having chosen a fraternity, one instantly underwent a status reversal, from an object of desire to an object of contempt. New pledges endured systematic humiliation. Their fraternity brothers drove Feynman and the other boys to an isolated spot in the Massachusetts countryside, abandoned them beside a frozen lake, and left them to find their way home. They submitted to wrestling matches in mud and al owed themselves to be tied down overnight on the wooden floor of a deserted house—though Feynman, stil secretly afraid that he would be found out as a sissy, made a surprising show of resisting his sophomore captors by grabbing at their legs and trying to knock them over. These rites were tests of character, after al , mixed with schoolboy sadism that col eges only gradual y learned to restrain. The hazing left many boys with emotional bonds both to their tormentors and to their fel ow victims.

Walking into the parlor floor of the Bay State Road chapter house of Phi Beta Delta, a student could linger in the front room with its big bay windows overlooking the street or head directly for the dining room, where Feynman ate most of his meals for four years. The members wore jackets and ties to dinner. They gathered in the anteroom fifteen minutes before and waited for the bel that announced the meal. White-painted pilasters rose toward the high ceilings. A stairway bent graceful y up four flights.

Fraternity members often leaned over the carved railing to

shout down to those below, gathered around the wooden radio console in one corner or waiting to use the pay telephone on an alcove wal . The telephone provided an upperclassman with one of his many opportunities to harass freshmen: they were obliged to carry nickels for making change. They also carried individual black notebooks for keeping a record of their failures, among other things, to carry nickels. Feynman developed a trick of catching a freshman nickel-less, making a mark in his black book, and then punishing the same freshman al over again a few minutes later. The second and third floors were given over entirely to study rooms, where students worked in twos and threes. Only the top floor was for sleeping, in double-decker bunks crowded together.

Compulsory Tea notwithstanding, some members argued vehemently that other members lacked essential graces, among them the ability to dance and the ability to invite women to accompany them to a dance. For a while this complaint dominated the daily counsel of the thirty-odd members of Phi Beta Delta. A generation later the ease of postwar life made a place for words like “wonk” and “nerd”

in the col egiate vocabulary. In more class-bound and less puritanical cultures the concept flowered even earlier.

Britain had its boffins, working researchers subject to the derision of intel ectual gentlemen. At MIT in the thirties the nerd did not exist; a penholder worn in the shirt pocket represented no particular gaucherie; a boy could not become a figure of fun merely by studying. This was fortunate for Feynman and others like him, social y inept,

athletical y feeble, miserable in any but a science course, risking laughter every time he pronounced an unfamiliar name, so worried about the other sex that he trembled when he had to take the mail out past girls sitting on the stoop. America’s future scientists and engineers, many of them rising from the working class, valued studiousness without question. How could it be otherwise, in the knots that gathered almost around the clock in fraternity study rooms, fil ing dappled cardboard notebooks with course notes to be handed down to generations? Even so, Phi Beta Delta perceived a problem. There did seem to be a connection between hard studying and failure to dance. The fraternity made a cooperative project of enlivening the potential dul boys. Attendance at dances became mandatory for everyone in Phi Beta Delta. For those who could not find dates, the older boys arranged dates. In return, stronger students tutored the weak. Dick felt he got a good bargain. Eventual y he astonished even the most sociable of his friends by spending long hours at the Raymore-Playmore Bal room, a huge dance hal near Boston’s Symphony Hal with a mirrored bal rotating from the ceiling.

The best help for his social confidence, however, came from Arline Greenbaum. She was stil one of the most beautiful girls he knew, with dimples in her round, ruddy face, and she was becoming a distinct presence in his life, though mostly from a distance. On Saturdays she would visit his family in Far Rockaway and give Joan piano lessons. She was the kind of young woman that people

cal ed “talented”—musical and artistic in a wel -rounded way. She danced and sang in the Lawrence High School revue, “America on Her Way.” The Feynmans let her paint a parrot on the inside door of the coat closet downstairs.

Joan started to think of her as an especial y benign older sister. Often after their piano lesson they went for walks or rode their bicycles to the beach.

Arline also made an impression on the fraternity boys when she started visiting on occasional weekends and spared Dick the necessity of finding a date from among the students at the nearby women’s col eges or (to the dismay of his friends) from among the waitresses at the coffee shop he frequented. Maybe there was hope for Dick after al . Stil , they wondered whether she would succeed in domesticating him before he found his way to the end of her patience. Over the winter break he had some of his friends home to Far Rockaway. They went to a New Year’s Eve party in the Bronx, taking the long subway-train ride across Brooklyn and north through Manhattan and returning, early in the morning, by the same route. By then Dick had decided that alcohol made him stupid. He avoided it with unusual earnestness. His friends knew that he had drunk no wine or liquor at the party, but al the way home he put on a loud, staggering drunk act, reeling off the subway car doors, swinging from the overhead straps, leaning over the seated passengers, and comical y slurring nonsense at them. Arline watched unhappily. She had made up her mind about him, however. Sometime in his junior year he suggested that they become engaged. She agreed. Long