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

He resented more than just the hol owness of standardized knowledge. Rote learning drained away al that he valued in science: the inventive soul, the habit of seeking better ways to do anything. His kind of knowledge

—knowledge by doing—“gives a feeling of stability and reality about the world,” he said, “and drives out many fears and superstitions.” He was thinking now about what science meant and what knowledge meant. He told the Brazilians:

Science is a way to teach how something gets to be known, what is not known, to what extent things are

known (for nothing is known absolutely), how to handle doubt and uncertainty, what the rules of evidence are, how to think about things so that judgments can be made, how to distinguish truth from fraud, and from show.

Telescopes, Newtonian or Cassegrainian, had flaws and limitations to go with their wondrous history. An effective scientist—even a theorist—needed to know about both.

Faker from Copacabana

Feynman told people that he had been born tone-deaf and that he disliked most music, despite the conventional observation that mathematical and musical aptitude run side by side. Classical music—music in the European tradition—he found not just dul but positively unpleasant.

Above al it was the experience of listening that he could not stand.

Those who worked near him over the years knew nevertheless about the toneless music that seemed constantly to wel up through his nerve endings, that clattered and pounded through their shared office wal s. He drummed unconsciously as he calculated, and he drummed to attract a crowd at parties. Philip Morrison, who shared an office with him at Cornel , would say half seriously that Feynman was drawn to drumming because it was a noisy, staccato activity, because he had long fingers, and because it went with being a magician. But Morrison also noticed how freakish Western classical music had become by the twentieth century in one respect: of al the world’s musical traditions, the West’s had most decisively cast out improvisation. In Bach’s era mastery of the keyboard stil meant combining composer, performer, and improviser in one person. Even a century later, performers felt free to

experiment with improvising cadenzas mid-concerto, and Franz Liszt toward the end of the nineteenth century gave concertgoers a taste of the athletic thril of hearing music made up on the spot as fast as a pianist could play, hearing impromptu variations and embel ishments along with the false steps and blind al eys from which the performer-composer would have to extricate himself like Houdini.

Improvisation meant audible risk and wrong notes. In modern practice an orchestra or string quartet that plays a half-dozen wrong notes in an hour is judged incompetent.

Having resisted the MIT version of Western culture for engineers, having rejected the liberal arts version of culture at Cornel , Feynman final y began his own process of acculturation in Brazil. Travel for most Americans, physicists included, stil began with the capitals of Europe, where Feynman never ventured until he was thirty-two and a conference brought him to Paris. In the streets of Rio he discovered a taste for the Third World and especial y for the music, the slang, and the art that was not codified in books or taught in school—at least not American schools.

For the rest of his life he preferred traveling to Latin American and Asia. He soon became one of the first American physicists to tour Japan and there, too, headed quickly for the countryside.

In Rio Feynman found a living musical tradition—rhythm-centered, improvisational, and hotly dynamic. The word samba was nowhere to be found in his Encyclopaedia Britannica , but the sound rattled through his windows high above the beach, al brass, bel s, and percussion. Brazilian samba was an African-Latin slum-and-bal room hybrid, played in the streets and nightclubs by members of clubs facetiously cal ed “schools.” Feynman became a sambista.

He joined a local school, Os Farçantes de Copacabana , or,

roughly,

the

Copacabana

Burlesquers—though

Feynman preferred to translate farçantes as “fakers.” There were trumpets and ukuleles, rasps and shakers, snare

were trumpets and ukuleles, rasps and shakers, snare drums and bass drums. He tried the pandeiro , a tambourine that was played with the precision and variety of a drum, and he settled on the frigideira , a metal plate that sent a light, fast tinkle in and around the main samba rhythms, the mood shifting from explosive abstract jazz to shameless pop schmaltz. At first he had trouble mastering the fluid wrist torques of the local players, but eventual y he showed enough competence to win assignments on paid private jobs. He thought he played with a foreign accent that the other musicians found esoteric and charming. He played in beach contests and impromptu traffic-stopping street parades. The climactic event in the yearly samba calendar was Rio’s carneval in February, the raucous flesh-celebrating festival that fil s the nighttime streets with Cariocas half naked or in costume. In the 1952 carneval , amid the crepe paper and outsized jewelry, with revelers hanging from streetcars whose bel s regurgitated the samba beat, a photographer for a local version of Paris Match snapped a carousing American physicist dressed as Mephistopheles.

As hard as he threw himself into life in Rio, he was lonely there. His ham-radio link was not enough to keep in touch with the fast-changing edge of postwar physics. He heard from hardly anyone, not even Bethe. That winter he drank heavily—enough to frighten himself one day into swearing off alcohol one more time, for good—and picked up women on the beach or in nightclubs. He haunted the Miramar Hotel’s outdoor patio bar, where he socialized with an ever-changing group of expatriate Americans and Englishmen.

He took out Pan American stewardesses, who stayed on the Miramar’s fourth floor between flights. And in an act of rash abandon he proposed marriage, by mail, to a woman he had dated at Cornel .

Alas, the Love of Women!

The popular anthropologist Margaret Mead had recently reported what so many popular magazines were already noticing: that the courtship rituals of American culture were in ferment. Mead examined bil board advertisements and motion-picture plots and declared, “The old certainties of the past are gone, and everywhere there are signs of an attempt to build a new tradition …”

In every pair of lovers the two are likely to find themselves wondering what the next steps are in a bal et between the sexes that no longer fol ows traditional lines, a bal et in which each couple must make up their steps as they go along. When he is insistent, should she yield, and how much? When she is demanding, should he resist, and how firmly?

Sometimes Feynman looked at his own mating habits with a similar detachment. Since Arline’s death he had pursued women with a single-mindedness that violated most of the public, if not the private, scruples associated with the sexual bal et. He dated undergraduates, paid prostitutes in whorehouses, taught himself (as he saw it) how to beat bar girls at their own game, and slept with the young wives of several of his friends among the physics graduate students.

He told col eagues that he had worked out a kind of al ’s-fair approach to sexual morality and argued that he was using women as they sought to use him. Love seemed mostly

a

myth—a

species

of

self-delusion,

or

rationalization, or a gambit employed by women in search of husbands. What he had felt with Arline he seemed to have placed on a shelf out of the way.