Genius (12 page)

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 spelling 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. Still, 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 Mill’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 full, 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 metallography.

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 fallacy. He knew all 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 gleefully 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 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 illusion 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, equally unsyllogistic argument for the existence of God: that a perfect being would certainly have, among other excellent 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 generally wrote down numbers. William Gilbert, a less well-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”—William 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, pull down the shades, get into bed, and try to watch himself fall asleep, as if he were posting an observer on his shoulder. His father years before had raised the problem of what happens when one falls 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 fall 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 follow 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 pulleys and wires, ropes winding upward and catching against one another, Feynman thinking, the tension of the ropes will 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 hall-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 all, 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 sexually 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 all, 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 actually 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 small steel drill 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 small 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 small, where relativity and quantum mechanics seemed unnecessary and unnatural, where rivers ran, clouds flowed, baseballs 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: “Space of itself and time of itself will sink into mere shadows, and only a kind of union between them shall survive.”

Later, quantum mechanics suffused into the lay culture as a mystical fog. It was uncertainty, it was acausality, it was the Tao updated, it was the century’s richest fount of paradoxes, it was the permeable membrane between the observer and the observed, it was the funny business sending shudders up science’s all-too-deterministic scaffolding. For now, however, it was merely a necessary and useful contrivance for accurately describing the behavior of nature at the tiny scales now accessible to experimenters.

Nature had seemed so continuous. Technology, however, made discreteness and discontinuity a part of everyday experience: gears and ratchets creating movement in tiny jumps; telegraphs that digitized information in dashes and dots. What about the light emitted by matter? At everyday temperatures the light is infrared, its wavelengths too long to be visible to the eye. At higher temperatures, matter radiates at shorter wavelengths: thus an iron bar heated in a forge glows red, yellow, and white. By the turn of the century, scientists were struggling to explain this relationship between temperature and wavelength. If heat was to be understood as the motion of molecules, perhaps this precisely tuned radiant energy suggested an internal oscillation, a vibration with the resonant tonality of a violin string. The German physicist Max Planck pursued this idea to its logical conclusion and announced in 1900 that it required an awkward adjustment to the conventional way of thinking about energy. His equations produced the desired results only if one supposed that radiation was emitted in lumps, discrete packets called quanta. He calculated a new constant of nature, the indivisible unit underlying these lumps. It was a unit, not of energy, but of the product of energy and time—the quantity called action.

Five years later Einstein used Planck’s constant to explain another puzzle, the photoelectric effect, in which light absorbed by a metal knocks electrons free and creates an electric current. He, too, followed the relationship between wavelength and current to an inevitable mathematical conclusion: that light itself behaves not as a continuous wave but as a broken succession of lumps when it interacts with electrons.