Richard Feynman, 1918-1988

CHJ and SHJ Humanist of the Year

• The Man

• His career

• His ideas

By Dave Shafer CHJ

Richard Feynman was born in 1918 and grew up in Far Rockaway, Queens.

He had a sister, Joan, who – like him – grew up to be a professional physicist

Both were heavily influenced by their father Melville, a salesman with a strong interest in science. They got their great sense of humor from their mother Lucille. The parents came from Poland and Russia.

“Car tires grip the road because of friction” tells you nothing about tires, the road, or friction. There is no information in that sentence. You may as well say that tires grip the road because they grip the road. This is not a true explanation of anything.

“You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing – that’s what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.”

- A lesson learned from his father, on their many walks together.

This lesson from his father in careful observation would influence Feynman in several ways. It made him self-reliant and he did not like to accept the math and physics theories of others without first deriving them himself, using his own methods. This led to some new and unusual derivations by Feynman of well-known physical laws.

Like Einstein and some other great physicists, Feynman was a late talker and did not utter a single word until he was almost 3 years old. His family, Ashkenazi Jews, was not observant and he declared himself an atheist early in his youth. In high school Richard was tested for IQ and came out at “only” 125. That was probably because of poor verbal skills or very little interest in non-science topics.

In the year 1933, in which he turned 15, Feynman taught himself trigonometry, advanced algebra, infinite series, analytic geometry and differential and integral calculus.

Feynman was an atheist in a religious sense but had the equivalent of another religion, in his very passionate devotion to math and science, especially math.

Feynman was a skeptic like this lady, about any claims without hard evidence to back it up.

Feynman could see that science and religion have always historically been at odds.

He could also see people’s chutzpah in thinking that any particular religion was unique, and not just the result of some accidents of history, real or imagined.

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool.”

Richard Feynman, Caltech commencement address, 1974  

In his last year in high school, Feynman won the N.Y.U. Math Championship; the large difference between his score and those of his closest competitors shocked the judges.He applied to Columbia, but was not accepted. Instead he attended M.I.T. where he received aBachelor’s degree in 1939, and in the same year was named a Putnam Fellow. While there, Feynman took every physics course offered, including a graduate course on theoretical physics while only in his second undergraduate year. He obtained a perfect score on the graduate school entrance exams to Princeton in mathematics and physics—an unprecedented feat—but did rather poorly on the history and English portions. Feynman was just starting to show signs of becoming what some have called the Elvis Presley of science.

Most of the surrounding medical schools (Cornell, Columbia, Pennsylvania and Yale) had rigid quotas in place. In 1935 Yale accepted 76 applicants from a pool of 501. About 200 of those applicants were Jewish and only five got in. "The dean's instructions were remarkably precise: "Never admit more than five Jews, take only two Italian Catholics, and take no blacks at all.“” As a result Jonas Salk and hundreds like him enrolled in N.Y.U. instead.

Feynman’s parents sent him to Sunday school to learn Hebrew, but the emphasis was on prayer, which turned him off. The correspondence that preceded his acceptance to Princeton University as a graduate student in 1939 is interesting. Princeton at that time still operated according to the policy which limited the number of Jews, and Feynman's professors at MIT, where he did his bachelors' degree, had to work hard to convince the Princeton administration that this particular Jew ought to be admitted. "He is not like other Jews," they wrote. Proceedings of the appointment committee at the University of Zurich show that the same argument was resorted to when Albert Einstein's professorship was being reviewed.

Jonas Salk’s experience

This was Richard Feynman nearing the crest of his powers. At twenty-three … there was no physicist on earth who could match his exuberant command over the native materials of theoretical science. It was not just a facility at mathematics…Feynman seemed to possess a frightening ease with the substance behind the equations, like Albert Einstein at the same age, like the Soviet physicist Lev Landau -but few others.

— James Gleick, “Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman”

After leaving Princeton Feynman really hit his stride

Like many physicists, Feynman was dismissive of the level of intelligence required for other disciplines. But he was not dismissive of the arts if you were a creative artist.

“The theoretical broadening which comes from having many humanities subjects on the campus is offset by the general dopiness of the people who study these things...”(Feynman quote)

Feynman drawing at easel

He studied drawing and painting for very many years.

He started taking art lessons at the age of 44 and then continued with art the rest of his life.Here are some of his pictures.

Feynman was a real ham and loved to perform – on the bongo drums, juggling, even on a unicycle. He went out of his way to cultivate a certain public image of himself. A rather adolescent one. He also loved practical jokes. There is a host of Feynman anecdotes from those who knew him.

“Feynman was half genius, half buffoon”

- theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson.

“…rather as though Groucho Marx was suddenly standing in for a great scientist.”

- C.P. Snow

“He spent a great deal of time and energy generating anecdotes about himself”

– Nobel prize physicist Murray Gell-Mann

Feynman kept an adolescent nature the rest of his life

Some people have personalities that are hard to discern. With Feynman little was hidden and what you saw is what you got.

Feynman seemed to have a compulsion to share every detail of his life with others, through his books, lectures, and endless retelling of anecdotes about himself.

Arline Greenbaum,the love of his life. She was diagnosed with TB just before they got married. His family tried to dissuade him but they did marry and she died after about 5 years together. He was quite devastated for some years.

When she died he wrote her a letter that remained sealed the rest of his life.

As his wife lay dying of TB Feynman read extensively in the medical literature. He was appalled at how unscientific much of medicine is. He would have been very skeptical of something like acupuncture, which has not been rigorously tested and seems to work better for Asians than Westerners.

After Princeton Feynman joined the Manhattan Project to work on developing the atom bomb and moved to Los Alamos, New Mexico.

Bohr, Oppenheimer, Feynman, Von Neumann

Because of the top secret nature of the atomic bomb project, Los Alamos was chosen because of its extreme remoteness – ideal for a secure facility. As Dorothy Parker said, of another place, “There’s no there there.” Even today it is hard to get to, surrounded by national wilderness areas. The community of scientists and engineers there lived in a hot house of intense activity, trying to beat Hitler to an atomic bomb. Feynman’s amazing ability, before computers, to calculate and estimate key numbers and his deep understanding of science made him a central figure despite his very young age.

An enormous amount of incredibly complex calculations had to be done at Los Alamos as part of designing the first atomic bomb. Before computers there were only two alternatives to pencil and paper calculations. The slide rule was very fast but only gave 3 digit accuracy. More complicated ones could handle more advanced math than arithmetic, like trig functions and exponents.

Much more accurate was the Marchand mechanical calculator, with very many motor driven gears. It could add, subtract and multiply to 10 digit accuracy. Division was not so simple and required several steps. Very many of these were used at Los Alamos. Still to come was the first true electronic calculator, called Eniac, with no transistors but 18,000 vacuum tubes. Every time it was turned on 2 tubes would blow out. It could not be used for long before enough tubes would fail and shut it down. Los Alamos did not want to divert their resources to this new and complicated heavy maintenance gadget.

Here is a typical Feynman approach to a problem. Two row boats ½ mile apart are approaching each other. The one on the left is moving at 1 miles/hour, while the one on the right is moving at 2 miles/hour. A fly leaves the boat on the left, flies to the one on the right at 12 miles/hour, instantly turns around and flies back to the one on left, turns and goes back to the one on the right, back and forth as the boats move closer and closer and eventually meet. What is the total distance the fly travels? The hard way to solve this involves very many calculations, although they are simple ones. Feynman would have said, instead, that the boats are ½ mile apart and are approach each other at 1 + 2 = 3 miles/hour. So they will meet in 1/6 hour or 10 minutes. The fly is going at 12 miles an hour for 10 minutes so it will travel exactly 2 miles. There is no need to calculate all the separate parts of the fly’s path to get the right answer. Feynman had short cuts like this for very complicated physics calculations and could do some in his head.

While at Los Alamos Feynman figured out how to crack safes and would do practical jokes like opening top secret safes and leaving anonymous messages like “I was here” – hilarious to Feynman but gave near heart attacks to the security people, who thought it was a Soviet spy. Ironically an actual Soviet spy at the labs sometimes gave Feynman rides to the Los Alamos hospital for him to see Arline. Later he was caught sending bomb secrets to Russia.

Feynman’s immature liking for practical jokes resulted in many anecdotes about him, which he would then delight in endlessly retelling.

A 1996 movie was made about that time at Los Alamos when Arline was dying, and Feynman was visiting her in the hospital every day, after working all day on the atom bomb project. He told a story that shows his atheism -

Next to her bed was an old clock. Arline told Feynman that the clock was a symbol of the time that they had together and that he should always remember that. Always look at the clock to remember the time we have together, she said. The day that Arline died in the hospital, Feynman was given a note from the nurse that indicated the time of death. Feynman noted that the clock had stopped at exactly that time. It was as if the clock, which had been a symbol of their time together, had stopped at the moment of her death. Did you make a connection? I asked “NO! NOT FOR A SECOND! I immediately began to think how this could have happened. And I realized that the clock was old and was always breaking. That the clock probably stopped some time before and the nurse coming in to the room to record the time of death would have looked at the clock and jotted down the time from that. I never made any supernatural connection, not even for a second. I just wanted to figure out how it happened”.

After his wife Arline died Feynman overcame his shyness around women and became extremely promiscuous. He got at least two women pregnant, who then terminated the pregnancy.

Feynman was put in charge at the age of 25 of the atom bomb computation group at Los Alamos. He did many calculations in his head and was very good at estimating answers with few if any calculations, just based on his incredible math intuition.

His Los Alamos ID badge

Feynman and Von Neumann (on right). Von Neumann was probably the smartest person in human history, IQ-wise

Despite the intense pressure to solve the problems involved in designing and building the first atom bomb and the 15 hour work days, Feynman thrived at Los Alamos.

Feynman had an intense work ethic his whole life, plus boundless nervous energy.

Like most of the people at Los Alamos Feynman did not think much about the implications of the bomb, until after the war. After the war he went to Cornell and then Caltech.

Geniuses in physics come in two basic flavors. Both are extremely smart so that is a given. Feynman was one type. His profound understanding of physics allowed him to see how to reorganize existing knowledge and theories into forms that would better

facilitate the search for new knowledge and suggest deep connections between previously separate branches of physics. He developed new and better ways of dealing with difficult computational problems and they revolutionized atomic physics. But at the end of the day his role was basically that of a type of midwife, although an extremely brilliant one. He himself created very little new knowledge but created mathematical tools and ideas that made it much easier to discover new knowledge.

Consider the sun and planets. If we assume that everything revolves around us then the motions in the sky of the sun and planets are very complicated. If we assume that we all go around the sun then the motions become very simple. But neither is right or wrong, it’s just that one gives a much simpler explanation. This is not new knowledge about the universe, but about a better point of view. Feynman was great at these simpler explanations. New knowledge about the universe was that there are more planets – Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto that were not known before.

The other type of physics genius has as an extreme example Albert Einstein. He did not reorganize existing knowledge and theories into a better structure. He created new knowledge out of whole cloth, by pure thought. A contemporary version of this is the underappreciated genius Stephen Wolfram, shown here with Feynman. He explained much of the intricate structure of life forms by a new and simple recursive model. An out of nowhere new idea and a very successful one. Both types of genius contribute greatly to the advance of science and we need a Feynman as well as a Wolfram and an Einstein.

The nature of genius is poorly understood. Where inspiration and breakthrough ideas come from is a real mystery.

Unlike some of his brilliant physicistcolleagues, Feynman was very practical and well grounded in the real world. He did not fit the “absent minded professor” stereotype.

Richard Feynman called Wolfram "astonishing.“ Wolfram had his first scientific paper published in a physics journal when he was 16 and still a schoolboy at Eton. He was the youngest of the original recipients of the MacArthur Foundation "genius" fellowships in 1981 and the only physicist in the group.

“Feynman loved doing physics. I think what he loved most was the process of it. Of calculating. Of figuring things out. It didn't seem to matter to him so much if what came out was big and important. Or esoteric and weird. What mattered to him was the process of finding it. And he was often quite competitive about it. Some scientists (myself probably included) are driven by the ambition to build grand intellectual edifices. I think Feynman--at least in the years I knew him--was much more driven by the pure pleasure of actually doing the science. He seemed to like best to spend his time figuring things out, and calculating.” - Wolfram talking about Feynman

Stephen Wolfram

Feynman was extremely competitive and part of his pleasure in “working things out” was to show that he was easily the smartest person in the room.

Feynman had some brilliant physicist colleagues who were also Nobel Prize material and there was intense rivalry.

“When he was young he had hoped to start a revolution in science, but nature said no. Nature told him that the existing jungle of scientific ideas, with the classical world and the quantum world described by very different laws, was basically correct. He tried to find new laws of nature, but the result of his efforts was in the end to consolidate the existing laws in a new structure. He hoped to find discrepancies that would prove the old theories wrong, but nature stubbornly persisted in proving them right. “

- theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson

Feynman was not particularly concerned with the usefulness of science. He was mostly interested in simply understanding how the physical world works and the pleasure that he got from it..

“Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out, but that is not the reason we are doing it. ”

― Richard P. Feynman  

Feynman had a brief 2nd marriage in 1952.

“He begins working calculus problems in his head as soon as he awakens. He did calculus while driving in his car, while sitting in the living room, and while lying in bed at night.”

—Mary Louise Bell divorce complaint

Feynman had a son and an adopted daughter from his third marriage, which lasted until his death.

Feynman was not interested in possessions and lived a pretty simple life

In 1959, in a much simpler time than now, technology-wise,

Feynman gave an amazing lecture in which he extrapolated existing technology and ideas far into the future and correctly foresaw developments that we take for granted today, 50 years later, like personal computers, swallowable medical pill-cameras - and anything with extreme miniaturization, like cell phone cameras. The field of nanotechnology was accurately predicted by Feynman.

Feynman talking to his hero, physicist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Dirac, one of the fathers of quantum mechanics. Dirac was a man of extremely few words, legendarily so, while Feynman was quite the opposite. They made a real odd-couple.

“I was born not knowing but have only had a little time to change that here and there”

- Richard Feynman

“In Nature’s infinite book of secrecy a little I can read”

- the soothsayer in Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra”

Let’s take a close look atsome of Feynman’s achievements in physics. Our pledge to you –This will be painless for those who are not science oriented.

So let’s dive in!

Learning about quantum mechanics and atomic theory is a lot to swallow in a short time so we will only briefly discuss some very broad generalities, in layman’s terms.

Feynman thought that much of physics should be explainable to a person in ordinary English

Feynman wanted to open the door to the mysteries of the physical universe. His quite unparalled intuition and deep understanding of physics led him to see that the opening of that door was needlessly complicated. He made major advances in quantum mechanics in the form of better organizing the existing theories, simplifying them, making new connections, and developing simpler and better ways to do calculations. Sort of like a Nobel-Prize level closet organizer of atomic physics.

When Feynman first encountered quantum mechanics he was quite unhappy with the rickety structure of the theories about atomic level physics. Some arbitrary assumptions were needed to avoid certain paradoxes and this offended his sense of what a solid base should be. He made major advances in restructuring quantum mechanics so that it had a more solid foundation.

By getting rid of some excess baggageand also reorganizing it Feynman helped quantum mechanics achieve its amazing predictive successand it is one of the most experimentally verified branches of physics today. It deals, however,

with some bizarre concepts that Einstein completely rejected. It works perfectly but he thought that it can’t possibly be the correct explanation for things. Feynman only cared that it works well and was not looking for elegance the way that Einstein was.

...while I am describing to you how Nature works, you won't understand why Nature works that way. But you see, nobody understands that.

The macro world, that we are familiar with, has many of the cause and effect relationships that we know. The micro world and especially the atomic level world is governed by laws of probability, not rigid cause and effect relationships.

To further complicate things, the very act of observing the atomic level world automatically changed its behavior.

One problem that Feynman and others struggled with is how to best bridge the big gap between the bizarre microworld and the macroworld that we know so well. Feynman understood both physical worldsextremely well.

“If that's the world's smartest man, God help us.”

His mother, Lucille Feynman, after Omni magazine named him the world's smartest man

Feynman’s highly publicized key role in the government investigation of the fatal Challenger disaster was actually a very tiny part of his career and it used an infinitesimal fraction of his intelligence.

Receiving Nobel Prize in physics

Though raised Jewish and born to Ashkenazi parents, Feynman himself was not only an atheist, but distanced himself from being labeled Jewish even on ethnic grounds. He routinely refused to be included in lists or books that classified people by race. He asked to not be included in Tina Levitan's The Laureates: Jewish Winners of the Nobel Prize, writing, "To select, for approbation the peculiar elements that come from some supposedly Jewish heredity is to open the door to all kinds of nonsense on racial theory," and adding "…at thirteen I stopped believing that the Jewish people are in any way “the chosen people”

Feynman, Gell-Mann and I had dinner together and the subject of Israel and the Jews came up. "Why preserve this fossil?" Feynman asked me at the table, referring to the Jewish people. "Wouldn't it be better to speed up assimilation?" As I tried to list the many contributions Jews had made to humanity, including achievements in modern science, he cut me off. "Jews in science? Compare that with the Hungarians! Look what an impact they've had!" To which Gell-Mann responded: "Don't you know that all those Hungarians were Jews?" And apparently, he didn't.

Zsa-Zsa Gabor, Jewish-Hungarian non-physicist.

The most famous of these Jewish Hungarian physicist geniuses was John Von Neumann. At 6, he could divide two 8-digit numbers in his head and was fluent in Greek and Latin; by 8 he had mastered calculus; by 12 he was at the graduate level in mathematics. He had a photographic memory of the highest order and was probably the smartest man who ever lived. He invented the electronic computer, game theory, and was key to developing the atom bomb and many other branches of math and physics.

Feynman did not think that science had anything to offer as far as guidance in ethical affairs. Science is about objective facts and ethics is about subjective judgments.

God using the “Smite” key

There is an interesting theory about why there is some goodness and beauty in the world. It is that God is 100% evil but only 80% competent. So some good things slip through, as his mistakes. Feynman had little interest in speculations like this. He was very grounded in what he considered reality to be.

“I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.”

Richard P. Feynman

Nonetheless, he does have some thoughts on non-scientific topics that are worth considering.

“It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil - which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama.”

“I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose which is the way it really is as far as I can tell possibly. It doesn't frighten me.”

During an interview in BBC's Horizon program (1981).

Change is good

Feynman is walking on a mountain trail with his friend Danny Hillis. Hillis says, “I’m sad because you’re going to die.” Feynman replies, “Yeah, that bugs me sometimes too. But not as much as you think. See, when you get as old as I am, you start to realize that you’ve told most of the good stuff you know to other people anyway.”

In the absence of anything even close to solid evidence, Feynman concluded that religion is based on hopes, fears, and unverifiable speculations. Feynman had little patience for religious statements that claimed objective truth.

Anything that claimed to be due to supernatural phenomena would have to pass a rigorous test with Feynman, and of course none did.

Feynman did not end up in his later years as a grumpy man. He was full of a love of life up until his death. Feynman developed two rare forms of cancer, Liposarcoma and Waldenström's macroglobulinemia, dying shortly after a final attempt at surgery on February 15, 1988, aged 70. His last recorded words are noted as “I’d hate to die twice. It’s so boring.”

Feynman remained fully engaged with life right up to the very end, when he died at 70.