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

one side.

No one showed Feynman, in return, the genius of Descartes’s strategy in proving the obvious—obvious because he and his contemporaries were supposed to take their own and God’s existence as given. The Cartesian master plan was to reject the obvious, reject the certain, and start fresh from a state of total doubt. Even I might be an il usion or a dream, Descartes declared. It was the first great suspension of belief. It opened a door to the skepticism that Feynman now savored as part of the modern scientific method. Richard stopped reading, though, long before giving himself the pleasure of rejecting Descartes’s final, equal y unsyl ogistic argument for the existence of God: that a perfect being would certainly have, among other excel ent features, the attribute of existence.

Philosophy at MIT only irritated Feynman more. It struck him as an industry built by incompetent logicians. Roger Bacon, famous for introducing scientia experimentalis into philosophical thought, seemed to have done more talking than experimenting. His idea of experiment seemed closer to mere experience than to the measured tests a twentieth-century student performed in his laboratory classes. A modern experimenter took hold of some physical apparatus and performed certain actions on it, again and again, and general y wrote down numbers. Wil iam Gilbert, a less wel -known sixteenth-century investigator of magnetism, suited Feynman better, with his credo, “In the discovery of secret things and in the investigation of hidden

causes, stronger reasons are obtained from sure experiments and demonstrated arguments than from probable conjectures and the opinions of philosophical speculators of the common sort.” That was a theory of knowledge Feynman could live by. It also stuck in his mind that Gilbert thought Bacon wrote science “like a prime minister.” MIT’s physics instructors did nothing to encourage students to pay attention to the philosophy instructors. The tone was set by the pragmatic Slater, for whom philosophy was smoke and perfume, free-floating and untestable prejudice. Philosophy set knowledge adrift; physics anchored knowledge to reality.

“Not from positions of philosophers but from the fabric of nature”—Wil iam Harvey three centuries earlier had declared a division between science and philosophy.

Cutting up corpses gave knowledge a firmer grounding than cutting up sentences, he announced, and the gulf between two styles of knowledge came to be accepted by both camps. What would happen when scientists plunged their knives into the less sinewy reality inside the atom remained to be seen. In the meantime, although Feynman railed against philosophy, an instructor’s cryptic comment about “stream of consciousness” started him thinking about what he could learn of his own mind through introspection.

His inward looking was more experimental than Descartes’s. He would go up to his room on the fourth floor of Phi Beta Delta, pul down the shades, get into bed, and try to watch himself fal asleep, as if he were posting an observer on his shoulder. His father years before had

raised the problem of what happens when one fal s asleep.

He liked to prod Ritty to step outside himself and look afresh at his usual way of thinking: he asked how the problem would look to a Martian who arrived in Far Rockaway and starting asking questions. What if Martians never slept? What would they want to know? How does it feel to fal asleep? Do you simply turn off, as if someone had thrown a switch? Or do your ideas come slower and slower until they stop? Up in his room, taking midday naps for the sake of philosophy, Feynman found that he could fol ow his consciousness deeper and deeper toward the dissolution that came with sleep. His thoughts, he saw, did not so much slow down as fray apart, snapping from place to place without the logical connectives of waking brain work. He would suddenly realize he had been imagining his bed rising amid a contraption of pul eys and wires, ropes winding upward and catching against one another, Feynman thinking, the tension of the ropes wil hold … and then he would be awake again. He wrote his observations in a class paper, concluding with a comment in the form of doggerel about the hal -of-mirrors impossibility of true introspection: “I wonder why I wonder why. I wonder why I wonder. I wonder why I wonder why I wonder why I wonder!”

After his instructor read his paper aloud in class, poem and al , Feynman began trying to watch his dreams. Even there he obeyed a tinkerer’s impulse to take phenomena apart and look at the works inside. He was able to dream the same dream again and again, with variations. He was riding in a subway train. He noticed that kinesthetic feelings

came through clearly. He could feel the lurching from side to side, see colors, hear the whoosh of air through the tunnel.

As he walked through the car he passed three girls in bathing suits behind a pane of glass like a store window.

The train kept lurching, and suddenly he thought it would be interesting to see how sexual y excited he could become.

He turned to walk back toward the window—but now the girls had become three old men playing violins. He could influence the course of a dream, but not perfectly, he realized. In another dream Arline came by subway train to visit him in Boston. They met and Dick felt a wave of happiness. There was green grass, the sun was shining, they walked along, and Arline said, “Could we be dreaming?”

“No, sir,” Dick replied, “no, this is not a dream.” He persuaded himself of Arline’s presence so forcibly that when he awoke, hearing the noise of the boys around him, he did not know where he was. A dismayed, disoriented moment passed before he realized that he had been dreaming after al , that he was in his fraternity bedroom and that Arline was back home in New York.

The new Freudian view of dreams as a door to a person’s inner life had no place in his program. If his subconscious wished to play out desires too frightening or confusing for his ego to contemplate directly, that hardly mattered to Feynman. Nor did he care to think of his dream subjects as symbols, encoded for the sake of a self-protective obscurity. It was his ego, his “rational mind,” that concerned him. He was investigating his mind as an

intriguingly complex machine, one whose tendencies and capabilities mattered to him more than almost anything else. He did develop a rudimentary theory of dreams for his philosophy essay, though it was more a theory of vision: that the brain has an “interpretation department” to turn jumbled sensory impressions into familiar objects and concepts; that the people or trees we think we see are actual y created by the interpretation department from the splotches of color that enter the eye; and that dreams are the product of the interpretation department running wild, free of the sights and sounds of the waking hours.

His philosophical efforts at introspection did nothing to soften his dislike of the philosophy taught at MIT as The Making of the Modern Mind. Not enough sure experiments and demonstrated arguments; too many probable conjectures and philosophical speculations. He sat through lectures twirling a smal steel dril bit against the sole of his shoe. So much stuff in there, so much nonsense, he thought. Better I should use my modern mind.

The Newest Physics

The theory of the fast and the theory of the smal were narrowing the focus of the few dozen men with the suasion to say what physics was. Most of human experience passed in the vast reality that was neither fast nor smal , where relativity and quantum mechanics seemed unnecessary and unnatural, where rivers ran, clouds flowed,

basebal s soared and spun by classical means—but to young scientists seeking the most fundamental knowledge about the fabric of their universe, classical physics had no more to say. They could not ignore the deliberately disorienting rhetoric of the quantum mechanicians, nor the unifying poetry of Einstein’s teacher Hermann Minkowski: