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afterward he discovered that she considered that to have been not his first but his second proposal of marriage—he had once said (offhandedly, he thought) that he would like her to be his wife.

Her wel -bred talents for playing the piano, singing, drawing, and conversing about literature and the arts met in Feynman a bristling negatively charged void. He resented art. Music of al kinds made him edgy and uncomfortable.

He felt he had a feeling for rhythm, and he had fal en into a habit of irritating his roommates and study partners with an absentminded drumming of his fingers, a tapping staccato against wal s and wastebaskets. But melody and harmony meant nothing to him; they were sand in the mouth.

Although psychologists liked to speculate about the evident mental links between the gift for mathematics and the gift for music, Feynman found music almost painful. He was becoming not passively but aggressively uncultured. When people talked about painting or music, he heard nomenclature and pomposity. He rejected the bird’s nest of traditions, stories, and knowledge that cushioned most people, the cultural resting place woven from bits of religion, American history, English literature, Greek myth, Dutch painting, German music. He was starting fresh. Even the gentle, hearth-centered Reform Judaism of his parents left him cold. They had sent him to Sunday school, but he had quit, shocked at the discovery that those stories—

Queen Esther, Mordechai, the Temple, the Maccabees, the oil that burned eight nights, the Spanish inquisition, the Jew who sailed with Christopher Columbus, the whole pastel

mosaic of holiday legends and morality tales offered to Jewish schoolchildren on Sundays—mixed fiction with fact.

Of the books assigned by his high-school teachers he read almost none. His friends mocked him when, forced to read a book, any book, in preparing for the New York State Regents Examination, he chose Treasure Island . (But he outscored al of them, even in English, when he wrote an essay on “the importance of science in aviation” and padded his sentences with what he knew to be redundant but authoritative phrases like “eddies, vortices, and whirlpools formed in the atmosphere behind the aircraft …”) He was what the Russians derided as nekulturniy , what Europeans refused to permit in an educated scientist.

Europe prepared its scholars to register knowledge more broadly. At one of the fateful moments toward which Feynman’s life was now beginning to speed, he would stand near the Austrian theorist Victor Weisskopf, both men watching as a light flared across the southern New Mexico sky. In that one instant Feynman would see a great bal of flaming orange, churning amid black smoke, while Weisskopf would hear, or think he heard, a Tchaikovsky waltz playing over the radio. That was strangely banal accompaniment for a yel ow-orange sphere surrounded by a blue halo—a color that Weisskopf thought he had seen before, on an altarpiece at Colmar painted by the medieval master Matthias Grünewald to depict (the irony was disturbing) the ascension of Christ. No such associations for Feynman. MIT, America’s foremost technical school, was the best and the worst place for him. The institute

justified its required English course by reminding students that they might someday have to write a patent application.

Some of Feynman’s fraternity friends actual y liked French literature, he knew, or actual y liked the lowest-common-denominator English course, with its smattering of great books, but to Feynman it was an intrusion and a pain in the neck.

In one course he resorted to cheating. He refused to do the daily reading and got through a routine quiz, day after day, by looking at his neighbor’s answers. English class to Feynman meant arbitrary rules about spel ing and grammar, the memorization of human idiosyncrasies. It seemed like supremely useless knowledge, a parody of what knowledge ought to be. Why didn’t the English professors just get together and straighten out the language? Feynman got his worst grade in freshman English, barely passing, worse than his grades in German, a language he did not succeed in learning. After freshman year matters eased. He tried to read Goethe’s Faust and felt he could make no sense of it. Stil , with some help from his fraternity friends he managed to write an essay on the limitations of reason: problems in art or ethics, he argued, could not be settled with certainty through chains of logical reasoning. Even in his class themes he was beginning to assert a moral viewpoint. He read John Stuart Mil ’s On Liberty (“Whatever crushes individuality is despotism”) and wrote about the despotism of social niceties, the white lies and fake politesse that he so wanted to escape. He read

Thomas Huxley’s “On a Piece of Chalk,” and wrote, instead of the analysis he was assigned, an imitation, “On a Piece of Dust,” musing on the ways dust makes raindrops form, buries cities, and paints sunsets. Although MIT continued to require humanities courses, it took a relaxed view of what might constitute humanities. Feynman’s sophomore humanities course, for example, was Descriptive Astronomy. “Descriptive” meant “no equations.” Meanwhile in physics itself Feynman took two courses in mechanics (particles, rigid bodies, liquids, stresses, heat, the laws of thermodynamics),

two

in

electricity

(electrostatics,

magnetism, …), one in experimental physics (students were expected to design original experiments and show that they understood many different sorts of instruments), a lecture course and a laboratory course in optics (geometrical, physical, and physiological), a lecture course and a laboratory course in electronics (devices, thermionics, photoemission), a course in X rays and crystals, a course and a laboratory in atomic structure (spectra, radioactivity, and a physicist’s view of the periodic table), a special seminar on the new nuclear theory, Slater’s advanced theory course, a special seminar on quantum theory, and a course on heat and thermodynamics that worked toward statistical mechanics both classical and quantum; and then, his docket ful , he listened in on five more advanced courses, including relativity and advanced mechanics. When he wanted to round out his course selection with something different, he took metal ography.

Then there was philosophy. In high school he had entertained the conceit that different kinds of knowledge come in a hierarchy: biology and chemistry, then physics and mathematics, and then philosophy at the top. His ladder ran from the particular and ad hoc to the abstract and theoretical—from ants and leaves to chemicals, atoms, and equations and then onward to God, truth, and beauty.

Philosophers have entertained the same notion. Feynman did not flirt with philosophy long, however. His sense of what constituted a proof had already developed into something more hard-edged than the quaint arguments he found in Descartes, for example, whom Arline was reading.

The Cartesian proof of God’s perfection struck him as less than rigorous. When he parsed I think, therefore I am, it came out suspiciously close to I am and I also think. When Descartes argued that the existence of imperfection implied perfection, and that the existence of a God concept in his own fuzzy and imperfect mind implied the existence of a Being sufficiently perfect and infinite as to create such a conception, Feynman thought he saw the obvious fal acy.

He knew al about imperfection in science—“degrees of approximation.” He had drawn hyperbolic curves that approached an ideal straight line without ever reaching it.

People like Descartes were stupid, Richard told Arline, relishing his own boldness in defying the authority of the great names. Arline replied that she supposed there were two sides to everything. Richard gleeful y contradicted even that. He took a strip of paper, gave it a half twist, and pasted the ends together: he had produced a surface with