Genius (2 page)

Facing his elders in the Pocono Manor sitting room, Feynman realized that he was drifting deeper and deeper into confusion. Uncharacteristically, he was nervous. He had not been able to sleep. He, too, had heard Schwinger’s elegant lecture and feared that his own presentation seemed unfinished by comparison. He was trying to put across a new program for making the more exact calculations that physics now required—more than a program, a vision, a dancing, shaking picture of particles, symbols, arrows, and fields. The ideas were unfamiliar, and his slightly reckless style irritated some of the Europeans. His vowels were a raucous urban growl. His consonants slurred in a way that struck them as lower-class. He shifted his weight back and forth and twirled a piece of chalk rapidly between his fingers, around and around and end over end. He was a few weeks shy of his thirtieth birthday, too old now to pass for a boy wonder. He was trying to skip some details that would seem controversial—but too late. Edward Teller, the contentious Hungarian physicist, on his way to heading the postwar project to build the Super, the hydrogen bomb, interrupted with a question about basic quantum physics: “What about the exclusion principle?”

Feynman had hoped to avoid this. The exclusion principle meant that only one electron could inhabit a particular quantum state; Teller thought he had caught him pulling two rabbits from a single hat. Indeed, in Feynman’s scheme particles did seem to violate this cherished principle by coming into existence for a ghostly instant. “It doesn’t make any difference—” he started to reply.

“How do you know?

“I know, I worked from a—”

“How could it be!” Teller said.

Feynman was drawing unfamiliar diagrams on the blackboard. He showed a particle of antimatter going backward in time. This mystified Dirac, the man who had first predicted the existence of antimatter. Dirac now asked a question about causality: “Is it unitary?” Unitary! What on earth did he mean?

“I’ll explain it to you,” Feynman said, “and then you can see how it works, then you can tell me if it’s unitary.” He went on, and from time to time he thought he could still hear Dirac muttering, “Is it unitary?”

Feynman—mystifyingly brilliant at calculating, strangely ignorant of the literature, passionate about physics, reckless about proof—had for once overestimated his ability to charm and persuade these great physicists. Yet in truth he had now found what had eluded all of his elders, a way to carry physics forward into a new era. He had created a private new science that brought past and future together in a starkly majestic tapestry. His new friend Dyson at Cornell had glimpsed it—“this wonderful vision of the world as a woven texture of world lines in space and time, with everything moving freely,” as Dyson described it. “It was a unifying principle that would either explain everything or explain nothing.” Twentieth-century physics had reached an edge. Older men were looking for a way beyond an obstacle to their calculations. Feynman’s listeners were eager for the new ideas of young physicists, but they were wedded to a certain view of the atomic world—or rather, a series of different views, each freighted with private confusion. Some were thinking mostly about waves—mathematical waves carrying the past into the present. Often, of course, the waves behaved as particles, like the particles whose trajectories Feynman sketched and erased on the blackboard. Some merely took refuge in the mathematics, chains of difficult calculations using symbols as stepping stones on a march through fog. Their systems of equations represented a submicroscopic world defying the logic of everyday objects like baseballs and water waves, ordinary objects with, “thank God,” as W. H. Auden put it (in a poem Feynman detested):

sufficient mass
To be altogether there,
Not an indeterminate gruel
Which is partly somewhere else.

The objects of quantum mechanics were always partly somewhere else. The chicken-wire diagrams that Feynman had etched on the blackboard seemed, by contrast, quite definite. Those trajectories looked classical in their precision. Niels Bohr stood up. He knew this young physicist from Los Alamos—Feynman had argued freely and vehemently with Bohr. Bohr had sought Feynman’s private counsel there, valuing his frankness, but now he was disturbed by the evident implications of those crisp lines. Feynman’s particles seemed to be following paths neatly fixed in space and time. This they could not do. The uncertainty principle said so.

“Already we know that the classical idea of the trajectory in a path is not a legitimate idea in quantum mechanics,” he said, or so Feynman thought—Bohr’s soft voice and notoriously vague Danish tones kept his listeners straining to understand. He stepped forward and for many minutes, with Feynman standing unhappily to the side, delivered a humiliating lecture on the uncertainty principle. Afterward Feynman kept his despair to himself. At Pocono a generation of physics was melting into the next, and the passing of generations was neither as clean nor as inevitable as it later seemed.

Architect of quantum theories, brash young group leader on the atomic bomb project, inventor of the ubiquitous Feynman diagram, ebullient bongo player and storyteller, Richard Phillips Feynman was the most brilliant, iconoclastic, and influential physicist of modern times. He took the half-made conceptions of waves and particles in the 1940s and shaped them into tools that ordinary physicists could use and understand. He had a lightning ability to see into the heart of the problems nature posed. Within the community of physicists, an organized, tradition-bound culture that needs heroes as much as it sometimes mistrusts them, his name took on a special luster. It was permitted in connection with Feynman to use the word
genius
. He took center stage and remained there for forty years, dominating the science of the postwar era—forty years that turned the study of matter and energy down an unexpectedly dark and spectral road. The work that made its faltering appearance at Pocono tied together in an experimentally perfect package all the varied phenomena at work in light, radio, magnetism, and electricity. It won Feynman a Nobel Prize. At least three of his later achievements might also have done so: a theory of superfluidity, the strange, frictionless behavior of liquid helium; a theory of weak interactions, the force at work in radioactive decay; and a theory of partons, hypothetical hard particles inside the atom’s nucleus, that helped produce the modern understanding of quarks. His vision of particle interaction kept returning to the forefront of physics as younger scientists explored esoteric new domains. He continued to find new puzzles. He could not, or would not, distinguish between the prestigious problems of elementary particle physics and the apparently humbler everyday questions that seemed to belong to an earlier era. No other physicist since Einstein so ecumenically accepted the challenge of all nature’s riddles. Feynman studied friction on highly polished surfaces, hoping—and mostly failing—to understand how friction worked. He tried to make a theory of how wind makes ocean waves grow; as he said later, “We put our foot in a swamp and we pulled it up muddy.” He explored the connection between the forces of atoms and the elastic properties of the crystals they form. He assembled experimental data and theoretical ideas on the folding of strips of paper into peculiar shapes called flexagons. He made influential progress—but not enough to satisfy himself—on the quantum theory of gravitation that had eluded Einstein. He struggled for years, in vain, to penetrate the problem of turbulence in gases and liquids.

Feynman developed a stature among physicists that transcended any raw sum of his actual contributions to the field. Even in his twenties, when his published work amounted to no more than a doctoral thesis (profoundly original but little understood) and a few secret papers in the Los Alamos archives, his legend was growing. He was a master calculator: in a group of scientists he could create a dramatic impression by slashing his way through a difficult problem. Thus scientists—believing themselves to be unforgiving meritocrats—found quick opportunities to compare themselves unfavorably to Feynman. His mystique might have belonged to a gladiator or a champion arm-wrestler. His personality, unencumbered by dignity or decorum, seemed to announce: Here is an unconventional mind. The English writer C. P. Snow, observing the community of physicists, thought Feynman lacked the “
gravitas
” of his seniors. “A little bizarre … He would grin at himself if guilty of stately behaviour. He is a showman and enjoys it … rather as though Groucho Marx was suddenly standing in for a great scientist.” It made Snow think of Einstein, now so shaded and dignified that few remembered the “merry boy” he had been in his creative time. Perhaps Feynman, too, would grow into a stately personage. Perhaps not. Snow predicted, “It will be interesting for young men to meet Feynman in his later years.”

One team of physicists, assembled for the Manhattan Project, met him for the first time in Chicago, where he solved a problem that had baffled them for a month. It was “a shallow way to judge a superb mind,” one of them admitted later, but they had to be impressed, by the unprofessorial manner as much as the feat itself: “Feynman was patently not struck in the prewar mold of most young academics. He had the flowing, expressive postures of a dancer, the quick speech we thought of as Broadway, the pat phrases of the hustler and the conversational energy of a finger snapper.” Physicists quickly got to know his bounding theatrical style, his way of bobbing sidelong from one foot to the other when he lectured. They knew that he could never sit still for long and that when he did sit he would slouch comically before leaping up with a sharp question. To Europeans like Bohr his voice was as American as any they had heard, a sort of musical sandpaper; to the Americans it was raw, unregenerate New York. No matter. “We got the indelible impression of a star,” another young physicist noted. “He may have emitted light as well as words… . Isn’t
areté
the Greek word for that shining quality? He had it.”

Originality was his obsession. He had to create from first principles—a dangerous virtue that sometimes led to waste and failure. He had the cast of mind that often produces cranks and misfits: a willingness, even eagerness, to consider silly ideas and plunge down wrong alleys. This strength could have been a crippling weakness had it not been redeemed, time and again, by a powerful intelligence. “Dick could get away with a lot because he was so goddamn smart,” a theorist said. “He really
could
climb Mont Blanc barefoot.” Isaac Newton spoke of having stood on the shoulders of giants. Feynman tried to stand on his own, through various acts of contortion, or so it seemed to the mathematician Mark Kac, who was watching Feynman at Cornell:

There are two kinds of geniuses, the “ordinary” and the “magicians.” An ordinary genius is a fellow that you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what they have done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians. They are, to use mathematical jargon, in the orthogonal complement of where we are and the working of their minds is for all intents and purposes incomprehensible. Even after we understand what they have done, the process by which they have done it is completely dark. They seldom, if ever, have students because they cannot be emulated and it must be terribly frustrating for a brilliant young mind to cope with the mysterious ways in which the magician’s mind works. Richard Feynman is a 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 intellectual 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 gradually 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-sellers. After his death in 1988 his sometime friend, collaborator, office neighbor, foil, competitor, and antagonist, the acerbic Murray Gell-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, Gell-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 Gell-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 illuminate than to hide the nature of his genius.

The reputation, apart from the person, became an edifice standing monumentally 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 colleague, “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 colleagues 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 well: a faith in nature’s simple truths, a skepticism about official wisdom, and an impatience with mediocrity.