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

magician of the highest caliber.

Feynman resented the polished myths of most scientific history, submerging the false steps and halting uncertainties under a surface of orderly intel ectual progress, but he created a myth of his own. When he had ascended to the top of the physicists’ mental pantheon of heroes, stories of his genius and his adventures became a sort of art form within the community. Feynman stories were clever and comic. They gradual y created a legend from which their subject (and chief purveyor) seldom emerged.

Many of them were transcribed and published in the eighties in two books with idiosyncratic titles, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think? To the surprise of their publisher these became popular best-sel ers. After his death in 1988 his sometime friend, col aborator, office neighbor, foil, competitor, and antagonist, the acerbic Murray Gel -Mann, angered his family at a memorial service by asserting, “He surrounded himself with a cloud of myth, and he spent a great deal of time and energy generating anecdotes about himself.” These were stories, Gel -Mann added, “in which he had to come out, if possible, looking smarter than anyone else.” In these stories Feynman was a gadfly, a rake, a clown, and a naïf. At the atomic bomb project he was the thorn in the side of the military censors. On the commission investigating the 1986 space-shuttle explosion he was the outsider who pushed aside red tape to uncover the true cause. He was the enemy of pomp, convention,

quackery, and hypocrisy. He was the boy who saw the emperor with no clothes. So he was in life. Yet Gel -Mann spoke the truth, too. Amid the legend were misconceptions about Feynman’s accomplishments, his working style, and his deepest beliefs. His own view of himself worked less to il uminate than to hide the nature of his genius.

The reputation, apart from the person, became an edifice standing monumental y amid the rest of the scenery of modern science. Feynman diagrams, Feynman integrals, and Feynman rules joined Feynman stories in the language that physicists share. They would say of a promising young col eague, “He’s no Feynman, but …” When he entered a room where physicists had gathered—the student cafeteria at the California Institute of Technology, or the auditorium at any scientific meeting—with him would come a shift in the noise level, a disturbance of the field, that seemed to radiate from where he was carrying his tray or taking his front-row seat. Even his senior col eagues tried to look without looking. Younger physicists were drawn to Feynman’s rough glamour. They practiced imitating his handwriting and his manner of throwing equations onto the blackboard. One group held a half-serious debate on the question, Is Feynman human? They envied the inspiration that came (so it seemed to them) in flashes. They admired him for other qualities as wel : a faith in nature’s simple truths, a skepticism about official wisdom, and an impatience with mediocrity.

He was widely considered a great educator. In fact few physicists of even the middle ranks left behind so smal a

cadre of students, or so assiduously shirked ordinary teaching duties. Although science remained one of the few domains of true apprenticeship, with students learning their craft at the master’s side, few learned this way from Feynman. He did not have the patience to guide a student through a research problem, and he raised high barriers against students who sought him as a thesis adviser.

Nevertheless when Feynman did teach he left a deep imprint on the subject. Although he never actual y wrote a book, books bearing his name began to appear in the sixties— Theory of Fundamental Processes and Quantum Electrodynamics , lightly edited versions of lectures transcribed by students and col eagues. They became influential. For years he offered a mysterious noncredit course cal ed Physics X, for undergraduates only, in a smal basement room. Some physicists years later remembered this unpredictable free-form seminar as the most intense intel ectual experience of their education. Above al in 1961

he took on the task of reorganizing and teaching the introductory physics course at Caltech. For two years the freshmen and sophomores, along with a team of graduate-student teaching assistants, struggled to fol ow a tour de force, the universe according to Feynman. The result was published and became famous as “the red books”— The Feynman Lectures on Physics . They reconceived the subject from the bottom up. Col eges that adopted the red books dropped them a few years later: the texts proved too difficult for their intended readers. Instead, professors and

working physicists found Feynman’s three volumes reshaping their own conception of their subject. They were more than just authoritative. A physicist, citing one of many celebrated passages, would dryly pay homage to “Book I , Chapter 41, Verse 6.”

Authoritative, too, were Feynman’s views of quantum mechanics, of the scientific method, of the relations between science and religion, of the role of beauty and uncertainty in the creation of knowledge. His comments on such subjects were mostly expressed offhand in technical contexts, but also in two slim models of science writing, again distil ed from lectures: The Character of Physical Law and QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter .

Feynman was widely quoted by scientists and science writers (although he seldom submitted to interviews). He despised philosophy as soft and unverifiable. Philosophers

“are always on the outside making stupid remarks,” he said, and the word he pronounced philozawfigal was a mocking epithet, but his influence was philosophical anyway,

particularly

for

younger

physicists.

They

remembered, for example, his Gertrude Stein–like utterance on the continuing nervousness about quantum mechanics—or, more precisely, the “world view that quantum mechanics represents”:

It has not yet become obvious to me that there’s no real problem. I cannot define the real problem, therefore I suspect there’s no real problem, but I’m not sure there’s no real problem.

or, similarly, what may have been the literature’s most quoted mixed metaphor:

Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, “But how can it be like that?” because you wil get “down the drain,” into a blind al ey from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.

In private, with pencil on scratch paper, he labored over aphorisms that he later delivered in spontaneous-seeming lectures:

Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so each smal piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.

Why is the world the way it is? Why is science the way it is? How do we discover new rules for the flowering complexity around us? Are we reaching toward nature’s simple heart, or are we merely peeling away layers of an infinitely deep onion? Although he sometimes retreated to a stance of pure practicality, Feynman gave answers to these questions, philosophical and unscientific though he knew they were. Few noticed, but his answer to the starkest of science’s metaphysical questions—Is there a meaning, a simplicity, a comprehensibility at the core of things?—

underwent a profound change in his lifetime.

Feynman’s reinvention of quantum mechanics did not so much explain how the world was, or why it was that way, as tel how to confront the world. It was not knowledge of or knowledge about. It was knowledge how to. How to compute the emission of light from an excited atom. How to judge experimental data, how to make predictions, how to construct new tool kits for the new families of particles that were