“Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman” by James Gleick
Published in 1993 by Publisher Vintage
Pages: 531
ISBN-10: 0679747044
Date Finished: Nov 26, 20
How strongly I recommend it: 4/10
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My Notes:
I was born not knowing and have only had a little time to change that here and there. —Richard Feynman
Oppenheimer himself had privately noted that Feynman was the most brilliant young physicist at the atomic bomb project.
“Dick could get away with a lot because he was so goddamn smart,” a theorist said. “He really could climb Mont Blanc barefoot.”
Colleges that adopted the red books dropped them a few years later: the texts proved too difficult for their intended readers. Instead, professors and working physicists found Feynman’s three volumes reshaping their own conception of their subject.
There were other kinds of scientific knowledge, but pragmatic knowledge was Feynman’s specialty. For him knowledge did not describe; it acted and accomplished. Unlike many of his colleagues, educated scientists in a cultivated European tradition, Feynman did not look at paintings, did not listen to music, did not read books, even scientific books. He refused to let other scientists explain anything to him in detail, often to their immense frustration. He learned anyway. He pursued knowledge without prejudice.
In his youth he experimented for months on end with trying to observe his unraveling stream of consciousness at the point of falling asleep. In his middle age he experimented with inducing out-of-body hallucinations in a sensory-deprivation tank, with and without marijuana.
Democratically, as if he favored no skill above any other, he taught himself how to play drums, to give massages, to tell stories, to pick up women in bars, considering all these to be crafts with learnable rules.
how to defeat the iron clamp of an old-fashioned soda machine, how to pick Yale locks, and then how to open safes—a mental, not physical, skill, though his colleagues mistakenly supposed he could feel the vibrations of falling tumblers in his fingertips (as well they might, after watching him practice his twirling motion day after day on their office strongboxes).
he worked out a nuclear reactor thrust motor, not quite practical but still plausible enough to be seized by the government, patented, and immediately buried under an official secrecy order.
He made islands of practical knowledge in the oceans of personal ignorance that remained: knowing nothing about drawing, he taught himself to make perfect freehand circles on the blackboard; knowing nothing about music, he bet his girlfriend that he could teach himself to play one piece, “The Flight of the Bumblebee,” and for once failed dismally; much later he learned to draw after all, after a fashion, specializing in sweetly romanticized female nudes and letting his friends know that a concomitant learned skill thrilled him even more—how to persuade a young woman to disrobe.
In his entire life he could never quite teach himself to feel a difference between right and left, but his mother finally pointed out a mole on the back of his left hand, and even as an adult he checked the mole when he wanted to be sure.
“An honest man, the outstanding intuitionist of our age, and a prime example of what may lie in store for anyone who dares to follow the beat of a different drum.”
he had left behind—perhaps his chief legacy—a lesson in what it meant to know something in this most uncertain of centuries.
Later it was said that physicists could be divided into two groups, those who had played with chemistry sets and those who had played with radios.
The crystal, motionless, captured waves of electromagnetic radiation from the ether.
they nonetheless had to face the fact that these waves were not in anything.
Children and scientists share an outlook on life. If I do this, what will happen? is both the motto of the child at play and the defining refrain of the physical scientist.
atheists like Richard’s father, Melville.
Many families, as Jews, were embedded in a culture that prized learning and discourse; immigrants and the children of immigrants worked to fulfill themselves through their own children, who had to be sharply conscious of their parents’ hopes and sacrifices.
as Melville once put it. The child will have to find a niche in which he can live a useful and fruitful life.
Melville Feynman placed a high value on curiosity and a low value on outward appearances.
The pope himself was just a man in a uniform.
Amid some borrowed apocalyptic imagery he expressed a feeling that science meant skepticism about God—at least about the standardized God to whom he had been exposed at school.
He endured the canonical humiliations:
Einstein’s supposed claim that only twelve people worldwide could understand his work.
“Peculiar” meant harmless. It meant that brilliant men paid for their gifts with compensating, humanizing flaws.
Richard spent fifteen dollars on a special entrance examination for Columbia University, and after he was turned down he long resented the loss of the fifteen dollars. MIT accepted him.
Werner Heisenberg, seventeen years older than Feynman, experienced his moment of crisis at the University of Munich, in the office of the local statesman of mathematics, Ferdinand von Lindemann.
mathematics: What is it good for? He got the classic answer: If you have to ask, you are in the wrong field. Mathematics seemed suited only for teaching mathematics.
Yet when Einstein doubted that God played dice with the world, or when he uttered phrases like the one later inscribed in the stone of Fine Hall at Princeton, “The Lord God is subtle, but malicious he is not,” the great man was playing a delicate game with language.
professional colleagues, who were happy to read God as a poetic shorthand for whatever laws or principles rule this flux of matter and energy we happen to inhabit.
Wolfgang Pauli once complained, “Our friend Dirac, too, has a religion, and its guiding principle is ‘There is no God and Dirac is His prophet.’”
and I wish no one to believe anything I have written, unless he is personally persuaded by the evidence of reason.”
The more competently science performed, the less it needed God.
It is almost impossible for a physicist to talk about the principle of least action without inadvertently imputing some kind of volition to the projectile. The ball seems to choose its path. It seems to know all the possibilities in advance.
The universe wills simplicity.
The fraternities at MIT, as elsewhere, strictly segregated students by religion. Jews had a choice of just two, and Feynman joined the one called Phi Beta Delta, on Bay State Road in Boston, in a neighborhood of town houses just across the Charles River from campus.
Having chosen a fraternity, one instantly underwent a status reversal, from an object of desire to an object of contempt. New pledges endured systematic humiliation.
The hazing left many boys with emotional bonds both to their tormentors and to their fellow victims.
The fraternity made a cooperative project of enlivening the potential dull boys.
By then Dick had decided that alcohol made him stupid. He avoided it with unusual earnestness. His friends knew that he had drunk no wine or liquor at the party, but all the way home he put on a loud, staggering drunk act, reeling off the subway car doors, swinging from the overhead straps, leaning over the seated passengers, and comically slurring nonsense at them.
He resented art. Music of all kinds made him edgy and uncomfortable.
He rejected the bird’s nest of traditions, stories, and knowledge that cushioned most people, the cultural resting place woven from bits of religion, American history, English literature, Greek myth, Dutch painting, German music.
Europe prepared its scholars to register knowledge more broadly.
In one course he resorted to cheating. He refused to do the daily reading and got through a routine quiz, day after day, by looking at his neighbor’s answers.
It seemed like supremely useless knowledge, a parody of what knowledge ought to be. Why didn’t the English professors just get together and straighten out the language?
He read John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (“Whatever crushes individuality is despotism”) and wrote about the despotism of social niceties, the white lies and fake politesse that he so wanted to escape.
The Cartesian master plan was to reject the obvious, reject the certain, and start fresh from a state of total doubt.
Richard stopped reading, though, long before giving himself the pleasure of rejecting Descartes’s final, equally unsyllogistic argument for the existence of God: that a perfect being would certainly have, among other excellent features, the attribute of existence.
Philosophy at MIT only irritated Feynman more. It struck him as an industry built by incompetent logicians.
Philosophy set knowledge adrift; physics anchored knowledge to reality.
William Harvey three centuries earlier had declared a division between science and philosophy.
HEISENBERG started quantum mechanics with “a brilliant idea”: “one should try to construct a theory in terms of quantities which are provided by experiment, rather than building it up, as people had done previously, from an atomic model which involved many quantities which could not be observed.”
Negative probabilities, Dirac said, “are of course quite absurd.”
(Feynman made a mental note that a surprising number of articles seemed to be coming from Princeton.)
Not only could the calculators add, multiply, and subtract; they could divide, though it took time. They would enter numbers by turning metal dials. They would turn on the motor and watch the dials spin toward zero.
The school’s laboratories, technical classes, and machine shops gave undergraduates a playground like none other in the world.
In Rome, as the 1930s began, Enrico Fermi made his own tiny radiation counters from lipstick-size aluminum tubes at his institute above the Via Panisperna.
The sky is blue because the molecules of the atmosphere scatter the blue wavelengths more than the others; the blue seems to come from everywhere in the sky.
It came just one step past the question of why we see clouds at all: water molecules scatter light perfectly well when they are floating as vapor, yet the light grows much whiter and more intense when the vapor condenses, because the molecules come so close together that their tiny electric fields can resonate in phase with one another to multiply the effect.
The committee had seen its share of one-sided applicants but had never before admitted a student with such low scores in history and English on the Graduate Record Examination.
His physics and mathematics scores were the best the committee had seen. In fact the physics score was perfect.
Is Feynman Jewish? We have no definite rule against Jews but have to keep their proportion in our department reasonably small because of the difficulty of placing them.
On the eve of the Second World War institutional anti-Semitism remained a barrier in American science, and a higher barrier for graduate schools than colleges.
“We know perfectly well that names ending in ‘berg’ or ‘stein’ have to be skipped,” the chairman of Harvard’s chemistry department, whose name was Albert Sprague Coolidge, said in 1946.
Feynman, as a New York Jew distinctly uninterested in either the faith or the sociology of Judaism, did not give voice to any awareness of anti-Semitism. Princeton did accept him, and from then on he never had occasion to worry about the contingencies of academic hiring.
Any substance expands because heat agitates its molecules—heat is the agitation of its molecules—
Quantum mechanics was triumphing not because a few leading theorists found it mathematically convincing, but because hundreds of materials scientists found that it worked.
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