The One and Solely | Alan Lightman
Richard Feynman was the Michael Jordan of physics. His mental leaps, seemingly weightless, defied rationalization. One in all his teammates on the highschool math workforce in Far Rockaway, Lengthy Island, recollects that Feynman “would get this unstudied perception whereas the issue was nonetheless being learn out, and his opponents, earlier than they might start to compute, would see him ostentatiously write down a single quantity and draw a circle round it. Then he would set free a loud sigh.” At twenty-three, he amazed a Princeton colleague when he labored out on the blackboard a proof of an vital proposition of physics that had been solely loosely conjectured eight years earlier by the Nobel Prize winner Paul Dirac. In 1960, in his early forties, stressed and unable to discover a physics drawback price engaged on, Feynman taught himself sufficient biology to make an authentic discovery of how mutations work in genes.
Feynman hardly ever learn the scientific literature. When he did, he would learn solely far sufficient into an article to see what the issue was, fold up the journal, after which derive the outcomes on his personal. When a colleague, after maybe months of calculations, walked into Feynman’s workplace with a brand new consequence, he would usually uncover that Feynman already knew not solely that consequence, however a extra sweeping one, which he had saved in his file drawer and thought to be not price publishing. The mathematician Mark Kac has mentioned that “there are two sorts of geniuses, the atypical and the magicians. An atypical genius is a fellow that you simply and I’d be simply pretty much as good as, if we have been solely many instances higher.” However for the second form, “even after we perceive what they’ve executed, the method by which they’ve executed it’s fully darkish….” He referred to as Feynman “a magician of the best caliber.”
Scientific genius alone wouldn’t have defined Feynman’s legend. It was additionally his model. He was cussed, irreverent, unrefined, uncultured, proud, playful, intensely curious, and extremely authentic in virtually every part he did. He had a mystique. There are tons of of “Feynman tales,” some advised by Feynman himself in his well-liked ebook Certainly You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, and others handed alongside by phrase of mouth from one physicist to a different, like beheld visitations handed from one disciple to a different. As a graduate scholar at Princeton, for instance, Feynman would spend lengthy afternoons main ants to a field of sugar suspended by a string, in an try to learn the way ants talk. When Feynman seen that his Ph.D. thesis adviser, John Wheeler, pointedly positioned his pocket watch down on a desk throughout their first assembly, Feynman got here to their second assembly with an inexpensive pocket watch of his personal and positioned it on the desk subsequent to Wheeler’s. At Los Alamos, when he was engaged on the Manhattan Venture, the younger Feynman frequently alarmed different scientists and the army brass by cracking their safes, which have been stuffed with atomic secrets and techniques.
When he was making ready to just accept the Nobel Prize within the presence of the king of Sweden, Feynman nervous that it was forbidden to show one’s again on a king; he would possibly, he was advised, should again up a flight of stairs. He then practiced leaping up steps backward, utilizing each toes without delay. Feynman hated pomp and authority of every kind. After being elected to the distinguished and extremely selective Nationwide Academy of Sciences, he withdrew from the group, saying that its principal operate was solely to raise individuals to its exalted ranks.
There was one thing nearly uncanny about the best way Feynman might get to the center of a query. On February 10, 1986, throughout the public hearings on the Challenger shuttle catastrophe, as a member of the committee of inquiry, he carried out an experiment of lethal simplicity. He dropped one of many shuttle’s O-ring seals right into a glass of ice water, the temperature of the air on the day of the launch, and confirmed that the rubber when squeezed didn’t stretch again underneath such chilly. I can’t resist telling my very own story about Feynman, one of many three professors who performed the oral examination for my Ph.D. in physics on the California Institute of Expertise. Sporting, as common, a white shirt and not using a tie, he started the examination by asking me two questions. The primary query I answered with out a lot bother. The second I struggled with. His two questions had exactly marked the bounds of my information, like artillery shells fired at a small boat, one touchdown simply brief, one lengthy. Throughout the next three hours, he requested no additional questions.
James Gleick, the creator of the broadly learn ebook Chaos, has taken on the tough job of writing about Feynman as each a scientist and a human being. Gleick by no means met Feynman. However he has interviewed over 100 individuals, together with Feynman’s household and lots of the world’s main physicists; he has learn unpublished letters and notes by Feynman and others, talked to quite a lot of Feynman’s girl-friends (who stay discreetly unidentified within the ebook), reviewed paperwork about Feynman obtained from the FBI and CIA underneath the Freedom of Info Act in addition to tons of of pages of unpublished interviews by the science historian Charles Weiner. The result’s an intensive and masterful portrait of one of many nice minds of the century. In describing not solely Feynman however the physicists round him, Gleick additionally succeeds in giving us a uncommon perception into the scientific group, its values, and its mentality.
Feynman was born in New York on Could 11, 1918. His father, Melville, a Jewish immigrant from Minsk, Byelorussia, had a sensible, vivid appreciation of science; he as soon as defined to his son Richard {that a} dinosaur twenty-five toes excessive with a head six toes throughout, if standing within the entrance yard, would nearly be capable to get his head by the second-floor window. Melville Feynman offered police uniforms and vehicle polish, amongst different ventures, with out notable success. Gleick tells us that Feynman’s mom, Lucille, had a present for humor and a love of storytelling.
As a baby in Far Rockaway, Feynman tinkered with radio units, gathering spare components from across the neighborhood. Many theoretical physicists like Feynman have spent their childhoods constructing issues, however Feynman retained all through his life a direct, tactile sense of bodily phenomena. Even his mathematical calculations have a sure unfussy and muscular model. Feynman rigged a motor to rock his sister’s crib, releasing himself to learn the Encyclopaedia Britannica. However he was intimidated by athletics, by stronger boys, and by women, and was afraid that he could be thought to be an mental sissy. Like so many different socially fragile, budding scientists he sought refuge in an intense focus on math and science, however he was significantly excited by their sensible facet. His manliness, he noticed, lay in his means to do issues together with his palms.
Correspondingly, he prevented all pursuits that appeared to him “delicate,” similar to poetry, drawing, literature, and music. In actual fact, Feynman had little respect for the humanities, which he thought to be slippery and inferior to science, and even much less respect for humanists. When he was in his early thirties, he wrote that “the theoretical broadening which comes from having many humanities topics on the campus is offset by the overall dopiness of the individuals who research this stuff.” But Feynman had an appreciation of the workings of human psychology in science. In his sensible little ebook The Character of Bodily Regulation he locations nice worth on searching for completely different formulations of the identical bodily legislation, even when they’re precisely equal mathematically, as a result of completely different variations call to mind completely different psychological footage and thus help make discoveries. “Psychologically they’re completely different as a result of they’re fully unequivalent when you find yourself making an attempt to guess new legal guidelines.”
Within the fall of 1935, Feynman entered MIT, the place he discovered that just about everybody else was socially and athletically inept, and obsessed by science. He simply skipped first-year calculus and taught himself quantum mechanics earlier than his sophomore yr. He joined a fraternity, one of many two that took in Jews. He met one other precocious physics scholar, T. A. Welton, and collectively they rederived for their very own satisfaction the essential outcomes of quantum physics, which they wrote down in a pocket book that they handed backwards and forwards to one another. Feynman briefly learn Descartes and determined that philosophy was smooth and that philosophers have been incompetent logicians. It was in his junior yr at MIT that he grew to become engaged to Arline Greenbaum, whom he had met a number of years earlier in Far Rockaway, and who grew to become, apart from physics, the love of his life.
The place MIT was working-class in tone and unbuttoned in method, Princeton was patrician and genteel. The afternoon Feynman arrived there as a graduate scholar, within the fall of 1939, he was invited to a tea with Dean Eisenhart. As he stood uneasily within the go well with he infrequently wore, the dean’s spouse, a lioness of Princeton society, mentioned to him, “Would you want cream or lemon in your tea, sir?” “Each please,” Feynman blurted out. “Certainly you’re joking, Mr. Feynman,” mentioned Mrs. Eisenhart, thus supplying the title for the memoir Feynman printed fifty years later. Feynman hated individuals who, he felt used manners and tradition to make him really feel small. He grew to become aggressively unrefined.
Feynman and his thesis adviser at Princeton, John Wheeler, labored on the character of time. Einstein had already proven, at the start of the century, that point just isn’t absolute, that the speed at which clocks tick relies on the movement of the observer. However what determines the course of time? Why is the long run so distinct from the previous? It was well-known that, on the microscopic degree, the legal guidelines of physics have been detached to the course of time: they gave the identical outcomes whether or not time flowed ahead or backward. Feynman and Wheeler solved a tough drawback regarding electrical energy by assuming that, in the best way electrons emit radiation, time flows each ahead and backward. It appeared a loopy concept, however it was the type of deep and vital loopy concept that brought about physicists to skip meals and keep on the blackboard. By the point the younger Feynman introduced his calculations to a departmental seminar in early 1941, his viewers had come to incorporate the nice mathematician John von Neumann, the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, who was quickly to win the Nobel Prize and was visiting from Zurich, and the sixty-two-year-old Einstein, who seldom got here to colloquia. After listening to Feynman’s speak, Einstein commented, in his smooth voice, that the idea appeared attainable.
Round this time, Arline, who had been affected by fevers and fatigue, was recognized as having tuberculosis. She was to spend a lot of the remainder of her brief life in sanatoriums. Towards his dad and mom’ robust objections, Feynman married her. The one witnesses to the marriage, in a metropolis workplace on Staten Island, have been two strangers.
In 1942, lots of the physicists at Princeton started fanning out to work on army tasks at, amongst different locations, MIT’s Radiation Laboratory (the “Rad Lab”), the College of Chicago, Berkeley, and Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Whereas nonetheless at Princeton, Feynman collaborated with Paul Olum and Robert Wilson on a tool for culling the fissionable type of uranium from the nonfissionable. This was the start of the Manhattan Venture. In March of 1943, Feynman and Arline took the prepare to Los Alamos. Arline entered Presbyterian Sanatorium in Sante Fe whereas Feynman lived within the barracks at Los Alamos, driving the twenty-five miles over rutted roads to see her each weekend.
At Los Alamos, Hans Bethe, the nice nuclear physicist from Cornell, was in control of all theoretical work. The place Bethe was calm, cautious, and professorial, Feynman was fast, fearless, intuitive, and irreverent. Feynman was simply what Bethe was searching for. He made the twenty-five-year-old Feynman a bunch chief, selling him over older and extra senior physicists. Feynman was capable of remedy a important drawback on how neutrons bounce round amongst uranium atoms and begin a series response.
Arline died in the summertime of 1945. Two years later, when he was at Cornell throughout a irritating deadlock in his theoretical work, the twenty-nine-year-old Feynman wrote a letter to his lifeless spouse, positioned it in a field, and by no means learn it once more. After Feynman’s demise, Gleick found the letter, which reads partially:
D’Arline,
I like you, sweetheart.
It’s such a really very long time since I final wrote to you—nearly two years however I do know you’ll excuse me since you perceive how I’m, cussed and sensible; & I believed there was no sense to writing.
However now I do know my darling spouse that it’s proper to do what I’ve delayed in doing….I wish to inform you I like you. I wish to love you. I at all times will love you.
I discover it laborious to grasp in my thoughts what it means to like you after you might be lifeless—however I nonetheless wish to consolation and care for you—and I would like you to like me and look after me. I wish to have issues to debate with you….
P.S. Please excuse my not mailing this—however I don’t know your new deal with.
Arline’s demise was the nice tragedy of Feynman’s life. Gleick means that he by no means let anybody get near him once more, though he had many affairs, a second temporary and unsightly marriage, and a 3rd, apparently satisfying, one to Gweneth Howarth, with whom he had two youngsters. Gleick additionally means that Feynman might have handled many ladies as intercourse objects as a result of he felt nobody measured as much as his first spouse. For the remainder of his life, Feynman pursued solely lovely ladies, a few of them the wives of his pals and colleagues, however he had little interest in their mental companionship. His angle towards ladies is usually recommended by the conclusion of his Nobel deal with in 1965:
So what occurred to the previous concept that I fell in love with as a youth? Nicely, I’d say it’s turn into an previous woman, that has little or no engaging left in her and the younger in the present day is not going to have their hearts pound once they have a look at her anymore. However, we are able to say one of the best we are able to for any previous lady, that she has been a superb mom and she or he has given beginning to some superb youngsters.
Starting in his late twenties, Feynman began to be adopted round by Feynman tales. He heard the tales, polished and embellished them, and retold them. He relished his picture as a rough-hewn, philistine hero. Gleick writes that after Arline’s demise, “The Feynman who might be wracked by robust emotion, the person stung by shyness, insecurity, anger, fear or grief—nobody bought shut sufficient any extra to see him.”
Feynman finally emerged from his despair at Cornell and, within the late Forties, did the work that gained him the Nobel Prize, displaying how electrons work together with electromagnetic radiation—e.g., radio waves—and different charged particles. His concept, referred to as quantum electrodynamics, has been confirmed by experiments to larger accuracy than every other concept of nature. (Quantum electrodynamics predicts that the magnetic power of the electron is 1.00115965246; the measured worth is 1.00115965221.) Quantum electrodynamics explains all electrical and magnetic phenomena, which embody every part we expertise in every day life besides gravity.
Feynman shared his prize with Shin’ichiro Tomonaga of Japan and with Julian Schwinger of the US, who had each independently derived their very own formulations of quantum electrodynamics. These various formulations have been, nevertheless, a lot more durable to work with than Feynman’s. Schwinger was in some ways the antiparticle of Feynman. He dressed expensively and meticulously, drove a black Cadillac, spoke elegantly in lengthy sentences with subordinate clauses, lectured with out notes, and prided himself on arriving on the finish of complicated mathematical calculations with no mud on his footwear from taking an occasional blind alley.
Feynman made two different main contributions to physics, each worthy of a Nobel Prize. He developed a theoretical rationalization for superfluids—fluids which are completely frictionless and that can spontaneously glide over the partitions of a beaker and can move by holes so tiny that even gasoline couldn’t get by. He additionally labored out a concept for the weak nuclear pressure, one of many two sorts of nuclear forces. Each theories have been developed on the California Institute of Expertise, the place he spent the second half of his life. Murray Gell-Mann, Feynman’s rival at Caltech, had independently arrived on the weak-force concept, and the division chairman judiciously organized for each Feynman and Gell-Mann to publish their vital work in a joint paper. Like Schwinger, Gell-Mann was very completely different from Feynman. His pursuits in science have been slim, however he had broad pursuits exterior science, whereas Feynman was engrossed with just about all of science, however with nearly nothing exterior it.
At Caltech, Feynman grew to become extra involved with schooling, though he didn’t have the persistence to oversee college students making ready theses. In 1961, Caltech determined to revise its physics curriculum and requested Feynman to assist. Lecturing on the blackboard to freshmen and later to sophomores, he started with atoms, transferring as much as bigger phenomena like clouds and colours on ponds and all the way down to the smaller, like electrons and the quantum world. With out consulting books, he slowly constructed up the complete edifice of physics as he understood it, the bodily world as he noticed it. Quickly graduate college students and different professors got here to hear. Feynman’s Caltech lectures finally grew to become the three-volume Feynman Lectures on Physics, which might be discovered on the bookshelves of virtually each skilled physicist on the planet. The lectures in the end failed to perform their supposed objective. Apparently easy on the floor, they have been actually deeply subtle. However they’re a triumph of human thought, and deserve a spot within the historical past of Western tradition, together with Aristotle’s collected works, Descartes’s Rules of Philosophy, and Newton’s Principia.
Feynman gained the Nobel Prize for his work in quantum electrodynamics, the quantum concept of how electrons work together with radiation and different electrically charged particles. Electrons are the best electrical particles. Usually discovered within the outer components of atoms, they produce gentle and different types of electromagnetic radiation in addition to a lot of the interactions between atoms and molecules. Quantum physics, one of many two pillars of twentieth-century physics together with Einstein’s relativity, is the physics of the subatomic world. The theoretical foundations of quantum physics have been laid within the Nineteen Twenties, principally by Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg, and Paul Dirac. A fundamental concept of quantum physics is that particles of matter typically behave as in the event that they have been in a number of locations without delay. This uncertainty concerning the location of issues is negligible for macroscopic objects like individuals, however this can be very vital for subatomic particles like electrons, the place the phenomenon has been repeatedly noticed and has immense penalties. One other vital concept, additionally derived from experiment, is that bodily portions like vitality should not indefinitely divisible into smaller quantities, however as a substitute have a smallest, indivisible unit, referred to as the quantum (as US forex has a smallest unit, the penny). Each concepts run counter not solely to instinct however to the Newtonian theoretical conception of the world earlier than 1900. To be able to mathematically describe these two fundamental concepts of quantum physics the theories of Schrödinger, Heisenberg, and Dirac needed to characterize matter and vitality not by certainties however by chances (or, technically talking, amplitudes, that are intently associated to chances). Thus, whereas within the Newtonian scheme a bodily legislation would present how a particle strikes from A to B underneath the motion of a pressure, within the quantum scheme a bodily legislation would present how the chances for a particle to be at numerous locations evolve underneath the motion of a pressure.
The quantum concept of the Nineteen Twenties gave a superb description of remoted particles, however it didn’t precisely describe the interactions of particles. Experiments started to show up small discrepancies in particle conduct. For instance, within the unusual quantum world subatomic particles are always showing out of nothing after which disappearing once more. Every particle, such because the electron, surrounds itself with a cloud of different, ghost-like particles, referred to as “digital particles,” which fleetingly come into existence after which slip away into oblivion. Electrons work together with the ghost-like particles round them, and people interactions alter the properties of the electron, similar to its mass and electrical cost. In actuality, the physicists discovered, there aren’t any remoted electrons. The quantum ghosts are in every single place. Their shadows have been seen in experiments. When physicists within the late Thirties and early Forties tried to change the quantum concept of Schrödinger, Heisenberg, and Dirac in order to precisely describe particle interactions, they bumped into technical difficulties with the ghosts. As soon as the ghosts started popping up within the arithmetic, the equations couldn’t be solved.
One of many triumphs of Feynman’s quantum electrodynamics was that it supplied a way for coping with the ghosts. Roughly talking, the strategy entails treating the ghosts as a part of the electron. Experiments on electrons don’t penetrate contained in the cloud of ghost-particles round them; we by no means observe the “naked” electron on the middle of the cloud. What we observe is the electron and its cloud. When the factor we name an electron is redefined to incorporate the digital particles round it, the technical difficulties go away.
Different scientists along with Feynman contributed to this redefinition of the electron (and its subatomic cousins). Nevertheless, Feynman’s personal model of quantum electrodynamics had two additional, and distinctive, options. First, it made use of mathematical strategies that have been a lot simpler to work with than the strategies of different variations, significantly the model of Schwinger. This was Feynman at his sensible greatest. Second, Feynman’s quantum electrodynamics supplied a brand new image of the world. In different descriptions of quantum physics, even after certainties are changed by chances, a particle advances from A to B in tiny increments, with forces appearing to maneuver the particle (or the chance of the particle) from one increment to the following. However Feynman’s mathematical description of quantum electrodynamics is world, not incremental. It considers each attainable route from A to B, assigns a single quantity to the whole route, then provides up the numbers from all of the completely different routes to reach on the chance of getting from A to B.
The descriptions of different physicists might be in comparison with observing how a automotive hastens and slows each few toes alongside a freeway from New York to Los Angeles, whereas Feynman’s description seemed solely on the complete gasoline consumption for the journey. Moreover, in Feynman’s description, the automotive travels concurrently on all routes from New York to Los Angeles, even on such loopy however attainable routes as New York to Chicago to Miami to Los Angeles. Such an outline results in an odd image of the world, the place all of the alternative ways wherein one thing can occur are occurring, on the similar time. What we human beings, grossly insensitive, macroscopic objects that we’re, conceive of as a single actuality is definitely a tapestry of many simultaneous realities. It’s ironic that Feynman, who thought-about philosophy a waste of time, ought to have give you concepts philosophically so wealthy. However all deep theories of nature since Lucretius’ atomism have had broad philosophical implications.
As together with his earlier ebook, Chaos, which described the brand new science of nonlinear bodily phenomena and the individuals concerned in it, James Gleick brings to Genius excessive intelligence, a powerful sense of narrative, a dedication to thoroughness in ascertaining details, and glorious prose. A lot of his analogies and metaphors are memorable. For instance, in describing Feynman’s idea of least-time trajectories, he makes an analogy to a lifeguard making an attempt to succeed in a drowning swimmer. The lifeguard, who begins his rescue mission on the seashore, travels sooner on land than in water. Due to this fact, the quickest path to the swimmer just isn’t essentially alongside a straight line, which could embody a brief stretch on land however a protracted stretch in water. Guided by one in every of Feynman’s articles within the Bodily Overview, Gleick offers a ravishing and vivid description of how Feynman visualized superfluids whereas mendacity in mattress one night time. What Gleick does most brilliantly is to inform us with honesty and perception who Feynman was.
The place Genius falls brief, for my part, is in its presentation of Feynman’s science. There are too many untranslated technical phrases, like “matrices,” “spin,” “momentum variables,” and “imaginary numbers.” (“One prescription was to take all of the momentum variables and substitute them with sure extra difficult expressions.”) Maybe extra importantly, a number of the scientific ideas should not clearly defined—for instance, quantum physics, handedness, the distinction between numerical and analytical options, space-time diagrams. To make sure, quite a lot of science is introduced skilfully, however lots of the scientific explanations are facile and imprecise. Studying the science parts, one has the feeling of making an attempt to see by a veil.
Many nonscientists are fascinated and puzzled by the scientific mentality. How does it differ from the considering of musicians or writers? How do scientists make discoveries? What do scientists imply once they say {that a} concept or an equation is aesthetically engaging? For my part, few books clarify this mentality higher than Feynman’s personal ebook The Character of Bodily Regulation and the mathematician G.H. Hardy’s A Mathematician’s Apology. However, after all, the scientific mentality is simply part of the scientist. It doesn’t embody his persona, the life he leads, his world. Among the scientific biographies of current years attempt to convey collectively the mentality and the life; in doing so the scientific biographer, maybe greater than others, faces a formidable problem, requiring not solely the abilities of a scholar and author but in addition a technical grasp of the science.
How a lot of the particular scientific work of an amazing scientist do we now have to grasp in a scientific biography? The reply is simply partly a matter of style. We can’t perceive a genius like Feynman, who spent sixteen hours a day considering physics, if we don’t additionally admire a few of his work. But that is by no means sufficient. Two different current scientific biographies, Abraham Pais’s “Delicate is the Lord,” about Einstein, and Walter Moore’s Schrödinger, each splendid books in their very own methods, give correct technical descriptions, however they don’t seem to be accessible to the overall reader, and the accounts of the lives of their topics lack the richness and energy of Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman. Gleick has written a monumental work, an enduring scientific biography. Even the ebook’s shortcomings make one admire each the difficulties of the style and the extent of Gleick’s accomplishment.
In February 1988, after a grotesque collection of sicknesses and problems from most cancers, Feynman entered the UCLA Medical Heart for the final time. He was sixty-nine. Throughout town, on a nook of his blackboard, he had written in chalk, “What I can’t create I don’t perceive.” As he lay in his hospital mattress, together with his power ebbing, Feynman whispered his final phrases: “I’d hate to die twice. It’s so boring.”