Genius (49 page)

In recent years several new particles have been discovered which are currently assumed to be “elementary,” that is, essentially structureless. The probability that all such particles should be really elementary becomes less and less as their number increases.

It is by no means certain that nucleons, mesons, electrons, neutrinos are all elementary particles… .

Feynman had made his escape shortly after arriving in Pasadena. He accepted Caltech’s offer of an immediate sabbatical year and fled to the most exotic place he could find. The State Department subsidized his salary. For the first time since Far Rockaway he could spend days at the beach, where he looked over the crowds in sandals and bathing suits and gazed at the endless waves and sky. He had never before seen a beach where mountains loomed just behind. At night the Serra da Carioca were black humps in the moonlight. Royal palms like dressed-up telephone poles—taller by far than the palms of Pasadena—lined the coast and the broad avenues of Rio. Feynman went down to the sea for inspiration. Fermi teased him: “I wish I could also refresh my ideas by swimming off Copacabana.” Feynman liked the idea of helping build a new seat of physics at the Centro Brasiliero de Pesquisas Físicas. Fifteen years before, physics had hardly existed in Brazil or elsewhere in South America. A few lesser German and Italian physicists had grafted branches in the middle 1930s, and within a decade their students’ students were creating new facilities with the support of industry and government agencies.

Feynman taught basic electromagnetism to students at the University of Brazil in Rio, who disappointed him by meekly refusing to ask questions. Their style seemed rote and hidebound after freewheeling Americans. European influence had dominated the construction of a curriculum. The nascent graduate programs did not have the luxury of a liberal mix of confident instructors. Memorization replaced understanding, or so it seemed to Feynman, and he began to proselytize the Brazilian educational establishment. Students learned names and abstract formulations, he said. Brazilian students could recite Brewster’s Law: “Light impinging on a material of index
n
is 100 percent polarized with the electric field perpendicular to the plane of incidence if the tangent …” But when he asked what would happen if they looked out at the sunlight reflecting off the bay and held up a piece of polarized film and turned the film this way and that, he got blank stares. They could define “triboluminescence”—light emitted by crystals under mechanical pressure—and it made Feynman wish the professors would just send them into a dark room with a pair of pliers and a sugar cube or a Life Saver to see the faint blue flash, as he had when he was a child. “Have you got science? No! You have only told what a word means in terms of other words. You haven’t told them anything about nature—
what
crystals produce light when you crush them,
why
they produce light… .” An examination question would read, “What are the four types of telescope?” (Newtonian, Cassegrainian, …) Students could answer, and yet, Feynman said, the real telescope was lost: the instrument that helped begin the scientific revolution, that showed humanity the humbling vastness of the stars.

Words about words: Feynman despised this kind of knowledge more intently than ever, and when he returned to the United States he found out again how much it was a part of American education, a mind-set showing itself not just in the habits of students but in quiz shows, popular what-should-you-know books, and textbook design. He wanted everyone to share his strenuous approach to knowledge. He would sit idly at a café table and cock his ear to listen to the sound sugar made as it struck the surface of his iced tea, something between a hiss and a rustle, and his temper would flare if anyone asked what the phenomenon was called—even if someone merely asked for an explanation. He respected only the not-knowing, first-principles approach: try sugar in water, try sugar in warm tea, try tea already saturated with sugar, try salt … see when the whoosh becomes a fizz. Trial and error, discovery, free inquiry.

He resented more than just the hollowness of standardized knowledge. Rote learning drained away all 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 dull but positively unpleasant. Above all 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 well up through his nerve endings, that clattered and pounded through their shared office walls. He drummed unconsciously as he calculated, and he drummed to attract a crowd at parties. Philip Morrison, who shared an office with him at Cornell, 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 all the world’s musical traditions, the West’s had most decisively cast out improvisation. In Bach’s era mastery of the keyboard still 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 thrill of hearing music made up on the spot as fast as a pianist could play, hearing impromptu variations and embellishments along with the false steps and blind alleys 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 Cornell, Feynman finally began his own process of acculturation in Brazil. Travel for most Americans, physicists included, still 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 especially 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, all brass, bells, and percussion. Brazilian samba was an African-Latin slum-and-ballroom hybrid, played in the streets and nightclubs by members of clubs facetiously called “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 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 eventually 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 fills 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 bells 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 Cornell.

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 billboard 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 ballet between the sexes that no longer follows traditional lines, a ballet 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 ballet. 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 colleagues that he had worked out a kind of all’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.

Women told him that they loved him for his mind, for his looks, for the way he danced, for the way he did try to listen to them and understand them. They loved the company of his intellectual friends. They understood that work came first with him, and they loved that about him, although Rose McSherry, the New Mexican woman he courted intensely by mail at the height of his work on quantum electrodynamics, resented it when he returned from the Pocono conference and wrote her that work would always be his “first love.” She would never marry a man to slave for him, she said. Sometimes she worried that he thought of women as mere recreation. She wished she could feel that he did his work because of her and for her. So many women wanted to be his muse.

The changing rules caught Feynman’s lovers in a bind. The language of illicit sex relied on awkward euphemisms and old-fashioned labels,
spooning
and
jilting
,
heels
and
tramps
, defining their roles and leaving them at a disadvantage. In his first summer at Cornell, a woman he had met in Schenectady let him know as indirectly as possible that she was pregnant and then that the pregnancy was over. “I have been quite indisposed—something unusual for me—but I think you have undoubtedly guessed the reason.” As she wrote, she knew that he was renewing a fling with his “Rose of Sharon.” She knew she was supposed to hate him, but she preferred not to think of men as “heels.” She assured him that she was not “in love.”

I almost envy you the wonderful and supreme happiness that you must have enjoyed before your wife passed away. Such happiness comes to so few people—I wonder—can it happen twice in one’s lifetime?

She did offer him a warning, saying sarcastically that she was
sure
he would recognize a bit of Byron:

Alas, the love of women! it is known

    To be a lovely and a fearful thing; …

    And their revenge is as the tiger’s spring,

Deadly, and quick, and crushing; yet, as real

    Torture is theirs—what they inflict they feel.

They are right; for man, to man so oft unjust,