Genius (72 page)
Authors: James Gleick
Feynman had begun to have autobiographical thoughts around the time of the Nobel Prize. Historians came by to record his recollections, and they treated his notes as artifacts too important to be piled in boxes or strewn about on the shelves in the home office he had made in his basement. Sitting there was
Arithmetic for the Practical Man
, a relic of his childhood. He still had the adolescent notebook he had sent back and forth to T. A. Welton in the course of reinventing early quantum mechanics. Interviewers set up tape recorders to capture every word of the same stories he had entertained his friends with for decades.
An MIT historian, Charles Weiner, persuaded him to cooperate in what became the most thorough and serious of his interviews. For a while Feynman considered collaborating with Weiner on a biography. They sat in Feynman’s screened back patio while Carl played in a tree house nearby. He not only told his stories but also demonstrated them: “Okay, start your watch,” he told Weiner; then, after they had conversed for eight minutes and forty-two seconds, he interrupted himself and said, “Eight minutes forty-two seconds.” After many hours the conversation sometimes grew intimate. He rummaged through one box and pulled out a photograph of Arline, reclining almost nude, wearing only translucent lingerie. He almost wept. They shut off the tape recorder and remained silent for a time. Feynman kept most of those memories to himself even now.
He began dating his scientific notes as he worked, something he had never done before. Weiner once remarked casually that his new parton notes represented “a record of the day-to-day work,” and Feynman reacted sharply.
“I actually did the work on the paper,” he said.
“Well,” Weiner said, “the work was done in your head, but the record of it is still here.”
“No, it’s not a
record
, not really. It’s
working
. You have to work on paper, and this is the paper. Okay?” It was true that he wrote in astonishing volume as he worked—long trains of thought, almost suitable to serve immediately as lecture notes.
He told Weiner that he had never read a scientific biography he had liked. He thought he would be portrayed either as a bloodless intellectual or a bongo-playing clown. He vacillated and finally let the idea drop. Still, he sat for interviews with historians interested in Far Rockaway and Los Alamos and filled out questionnaires for psychologists interested in creativity. (“Is your scientific problem-solving accompanied by any of the following?” He checked
visual images
,
kinesthetic feelings
, and
emotional feelings
and added “(1) acoustic images, (2) talk to self.” Under “major illnesses” he reported: “Too much to list… . Only adverse effects are laziness during recovery period.”)
For several years he had played drums regularly with a young friend, Ralph Leighton, the son of another Caltech physicist. Leighton had begun taping their sessions, and then he began taping the stories Feynman would tell. He urged him on, calling him Chief and begging to hear the same stories again and again. Feynman told them: how he became known in Far Rockaway as the boy who fixed radios by thinking; how he asked a Princeton librarian for the map of the cat; how his father taught him to see through the tricks of circus mind readers; how he outwitted painters, mathematicians, philosophers, and psychiatrists. Or he would just ramble while Leighton listened. “Today I went over to the Huntington Medical Library,” he said one day—his remaining kidney was presenting problems. “But it’s all interesting, how the kidney works, and everything else. You want me to tell you some interesting things? The damn kidney is the craziest thing in the world!”
Gradually a manuscript began to take shape. Leighton transcribed the tapes and presented them to Feynman for editing. Feynman had strong views about the structure of each story; Leighton realized that Feynman had developed a routine of improvisational performance in which he knew the order and pacing of every laugh. They consciously worked on the key themes. Feynman talked about Arline’s having embarrassed him with a box of “Richard darling, I love you! Putzie” pencils:
R
ICHARD
. And the next morning, all right? Next morning, in the mail, there’s this letter, all right, this postcard, which starts out, “What’s the idea of trying to cut the name off the pencils?”
R
ALPH
. [
Laughs
] Oh, boy! [
Laughs.
]
R
ICHARD
. “What do you care what other people think?”
R
ALPH
. Oh, this is——Yeah, this is a good theme.
R
ICHARD
. Hmmm?
R
ALPH
. This is a good theme, because there’s a theme in here. You know, what other people think …
They knew they had a remarkable central figure, a scientist who prided himself not on his achievements in science—these remained deep in the background—but on his ability to see through fraud and pretense and to master everyday life. He underscored these qualities with an exaggerated humility; he took the tone of a boy calling the grownups Mr. and Mrs. and asking politely dangerous questions. He was Holden Caulfield, a plain old straight shooter trying to figure out why so many other people are phonies.
“Pompous fools—guys who are fools and are covering it all over and impressing people as to how wonderful they are with all this hocus pocus—THAT, I CANNOT STAND!” Feynman said. “An ordinary fool isn’t a faker; an honest fool is all right. But a dishonest fool is terrible!”
His favorite sort of triumph in the world of these stories came in the realm of everyday cleverness—as when he arrived at a North Carolina airport, late for a meeting of relativists, and worked out how to get help from a taxi dispatcher:
“Listen,” I said to the dispatcher. “The main meeting began yesterday, so there were a whole lot of guys going to the meeting who must have come through here yesterday. Let me describe them to you: They would have their heads kind of in the air, and they would be talking to each other, not paying attention to where they were going, saying things to each other like ‘G-mu-nu. G-mu-nu.”’
His face lit up. “Ah, yes,” he said. “You mean Chapel Hill!”
Feynman chose as a title the odd phrase uttered by Mrs. Eisenhart at his first Princeton tea when he asked for both cream and lemon: “Surely you’re
joking
, Mr. Feynman!” Those words had stayed in his mind for forty years, a reminder of how people used manners and culture to make him feel small, and now he was taking revenge. W. W. Norton and Company bought the manuscript for an advance payment of fifteen hundred dollars, a tiny sum for a trade book. Its staff did not like Feynman’s title at all. They proposed
I Have to Understand the World
or
I
Got an Idea
(“a nice Brooklyn ring and a little double meaning,” the editor said). But Feynman would not budge. Norton released
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
in a small first printing early in 1985. It sold out quickly, and within weeks the publisher had a surprising best-seller.
One unhappy reader was Murray Gell-Mann. His attention focused on Feynman’s description of the joy of discovering the “new law” of weak interactions in 1957: “It was the first time, and the only time, in my career that I knew a law of nature that nobody else knew.” Gell-Mann’s rage could be heard through the halls of Lauritsen Laboratory, and he told other physicists that he was going to sue. For late editions of the paperback Feynman added a parenthetical disclaimer: “Of course it wasn’t true, but finding out later that at least Murray Gell-Mann—and also Sudarshan and Marshak—had worked out the same theory didn’t spoil my fun.”
Surely You’re Joking
gave offense in another way. Feynman spoke of women as he always had—“a nifty blonde, perfectly proportioned”; “a cornfed, rather fattish-looking woman.” They appeared as objects of flirtation, nude models for his drawings, or “bar girls” to be tricked into sleeping with him. He knew that his diction was not wholly innocent. Sexual politics had caught up with him before, at the 1972 meeting of the American Physical Society in San Francisco, where he accepted the Oersted Medal for contributions to the teaching of physics. His personal relationships were not the issue, although in the male world of Caltech a part of his glamorous reputation with envious students came from his apparent sway over women. He continued to flirt with young women at parties and encouraged Don Juan–style rumors. He frequented one of the first California topless bars, Gianonni’s—he filled its scalloped paper placemats with chains of equations—and amused the local press by testifying in court on its behalf in 1968. There was genuine machismo in the hero-worship of the male graduate students.
He had received a letter the previous fall suggesting that some of his language tended to “reinforce many ‘sexist’ or ‘male-chauvinist’ ideas.” For example, he told an anecdote about a scientist who was “out with his girl friend the night after he realized that nuclear reactions must be going on in the stars.”
She said “Look at how pretty the stars shine!” He said “Yes, and right now I am the only man in the world who knows
why
they shine.”
The letter writer, E. V. Rothstein, cited another anecdote about a “lady driver” and asked him, please, not to contribute to discrimination against women in science. In replying, Feynman decided not to emphasize his sensitivity:
Dear Rothstein:
Don’t bug me, man!
R. P. Feynman.
The result was a demonstration organized by a Berkeley group at the APS meeting, with women carrying signs and distributing leaflets titled “PR ? TEST” and addressed to “Richard P. (for Pig?) Feynman.”
Despite the women’s movement that emerged in the sixties, science remained forbiddingly male in its rhetoric and its demographics. Barely 2 percent of American graduate degrees in physics went to women. Caltech did not hire its first female faculty member until 1969, and she did not receive tenure until she forced the issue in court in 1976. (Feynman, to the surprise and displeasure of some of his humanities colleagues, had taken her side; he had spent many pleasant hours in her office reading aloud such poems as Theodore Roethke’s “I Knew a Woman”: “I measure time by how a body sways… .”) Like most men in physics, Feynman had known a few women as professional colleagues and believed that he had treated them, individually, as equals. They tended to agree. What more, he wondered, could anyone ask?
The Berkeley protesters had discovered his lady-driver anecdotes but had overlooked other examples of a style of speaking in which, habitually, the scientist is male and nature—her secrets waiting to be penetrated—is female. In his Nobel lecture Feynman had recalled falling in love with his theory: “And, like falling in love with a woman, it is only possible if you do not know much about her, so you cannot see her faults.” And he had concluded:
So what happened to the old theory that I fell in love with as a youth? Well, I would say it’s become an old lady, that has very little attractive left in her and the young today will not have their hearts pound when they look at her anymore. But, we can say the best we can for any old woman, that she has been a good mother and she has given birth to some very good children.
In 1965 a large audience of men and women could listen to these words without taking offense or hearing a politically charged subtext. In 1972 Feynman was able to defuse the protest easily when he took the podium, by declaring: “There is in the world of physics today a tremendous prejudice against women. This is a ridiculous thing and should stop, as there is no sense to it whatsoever. I love the subject of physics and it has always been my desire to try to share the delights of understanding it with any minds that were able to—male or female… .” Many of the demonstrators applauded. In 1985 Feynman once again seemed to some feminists a symbol of male dominance in physics. Real life was complex: one tough-minded Caltech professional would close her door and confide to a stranger that Feynman, even in his sixties, was the sexiest man she had ever known; others, wives of colleagues, resented their husbands for loving him so uncritically. Meanwhile, the status of women in the profession of physics had barely changed.
Despite himself, he was stung by the occasional criticism of
Surely You’re Joking
. He knew, too, that some of the physicists who had known him longest were disappointed by a self-portrait that made Feynman seem more joker than scientist. His old friends in Hans Bethe’s generation were often pained, or shocked, though they did repeat Feynman’s stories about them with relish, detail for detail, as though from their own memory, Feynman’s voice having transplanted itself into their brains. Others saw through to the essence of what they loved in Feynman. Philip Morrison, writing in
Scientific American
, said: “Generally Mr. Feynman is not joking; it is we, the setters of ritual performance, of hypocritical standards, pretenders to care and understanding, who are joking instead. This is the book of a powerful mind honest beyond everything else, a specialist in spade-naming.” Feynman nonetheless upbraided people who called the book his autobiography. He wrote in the margin of a science writer’s draft manuscript about modern particle physics: “Not An Autobiography. Not So. Simply A Set Of Anecdotes.” And when he came across a sentence describing him, at Los Alamos, as “a curiously tragic joker,” he scrawled angrily, “What I really was under such circumstances is far deeper than you are likely to understand.”
