Feynman's Rainbow Page 13

  I knew I would have to take some risks because I would not stick to one narrow, “coherent” field of research, or even to a single career. I knew that since I was not driven by ambition I might not be accepted by my peers who are. I knew that I might be looked upon with the same misplaced scorn with which I had looked upon Professor Gardening, or with which Professor Breadcrumb had looked upon me. And I knew that, in the end, I would probably not find the success in conventional or material terms that Feynman achieved, or that my mother desired for me—or that Murray seemed to want to thrust upon his daughter Lisa. But at least with an internal focus my happiness would be under my own control.

  Once I shed the burden of the real or imagined values and expectations of others, it was easy to tell where my passions lay. I dropped string theory. I started to work more on the quantum optics I had started with Mark. As it turned out, Feynman had been correct—our theory was right and the accepted approach was flawed. I also came out of the closet about my writing. If Feynman could see beauty as the inspiration for the theory of the rainbow, and if an electron could behave like a wave, and light like a particle, then the little contradiction of Leonard flitting among different subfields of physics, or even among varied careers, would not shake the universe.

  Other than Feynman, none of my colleagues at Caltech took an interest in my optics work. And most of them rolled their eyes whenever I brought up writing. Before long, I was asked to move out of my office, to another one on the other side of the building. “Murray wants the office next to him for one of his own people,” Helen said. I wondered about a connection with my new choice of activities, but, mainly I thought, Who cares? I didn’t know where my physics or my writing would take me. But I looked forward to the ride. And whether I continued to write as a hobby, or ever supported myself with it, I hoped that maybe someday I’d write something that Feynman would admire. And then I thought, no, even better, I hope that someday I will write something that I will admire.

  XXIV

  AFTER I LEFT CALTECH I never saw Feynman again, except on television.

  It was in early 1986. He was weak from his long battle with cancer, but he had nonetheless agreed to be the single scientist on the American presidential commission investigating the crash of the space shuttle Challenger. Impatient with the bureaucratic process, he flew around the country conducting his own mini-investigation. He soon zeroed in on a prime cause of the disaster that might have remained a mystery if not for his muckraking: the loss of resiliency of one of the shuttle’s key gaskets, the rubber O-rings, at low temperatures. At the commission’s televised public meeting on February 11, 1986, Feynman dipped an O-ring into a glass of ice water and showed that, when squeezed, it did not show resilience. With this now-famous, simple, desktop demonstration Feynman showed that responsibility for the disaster lay largely with NASA managers who ignored their engineers’ warnings to abort the launch because of the unusually cold temperature that morning, twenty-nine degrees Fahrenheit (the lowest temperature at any previous launch had been fifty-three degrees Fahrenheit). Feynman, now a celebrity, wrote a report on his findings, which the commission sought to suppress, as it was thought to be embarrassing to NASA. But Feynman fought to have it included, and in the end it appeared as an appendix.

  Feynman battled his cancer through two more operations, in October 1986 and October 1987. After the latter operation, his fourth, he had trouble bouncing back. He was now weak, in pain, and often depressed. But physics still brought him vigor. He continued to teach a course in quantum chromodynamics. And, in his last months of life, he finally decided to learn string theory. Murray taught him, in a private “seminar” they held each week.

  On Wednesday, February 3, 1988, Feynman entered the UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles. He didn’t know the seriousness of his malady when he entered the hospital, but he soon found out. He had one remaining kidney, and it was failing. His doctors offered continuing dialysis, but that wouldn’t provide much quality of life. It was not a path he wanted to follow. He refused the procedure. He accepted morphine for the pain, and oxygen, and prepared himself for the consequences. He said he saw it as his final discovery: what it is like to die. He told a friend he had realized when he was seven that it would happen someday, and he didn’t see any reason to start complaining about it now. He said he would find the experience IN-ter-ES-ting.

  Life gradually drained from him. First he couldn’t speak. Then he couldn’t move. And finally, he could no longer breathe. He had made his final discovery. It was February 15, 1988, just a few months before his seventieth birthday. He had survived his cancer for ten years, significantly beating the odds he had looked up so long ago. And he had held on long enough to overcome his greatest regret—he had lived to see his little daughter Michelle reach adulthood.

  Six weeks after Feynman’s death there was a memorial service for him at Caltech, a festive celebration of his life, with speaker after speaker coming to the stage to reminisce. Murray’s name was on the program, but he didn’t show up.

  He had a good excuse.

  As Murray was preparing to leave for the service, federal agents wearing flak jackets and carrying assault rifles raided his home. It turned out his interest in ancient cultures—and their artifacts—had led him to purchase some that had been smuggled into this country. Murray forfeited some artifacts, cooperated with the U.S. customs agents, and, in the end, flew to Peru where he was honored for setting a good example and given a key to the city of Lima.

  Murray finally had the opportunity to pay public tribute to Feynman in a special memorial issue of Physics Today honoring Feynman. In his obituary, Murray wrote what can only be categorized as a “mixed review” of Feynman’s personal style. It raised a few eyebrows in the physics community.

  “What I always liked about Richard’s style,” Murray wrote, “was the lack of pomposity in his presentation. I was tired of theorists who dressed up their work in fancy mathematical language or invented pretentious frameworks for their sometimes rather modest contributions. Richard’s ideas, often powerful, ingenious and original, were presented in a straightforward manner that I found refreshing. I was less impressed with another well-known aspect of Richard’s style. He surrounded himself with a cloud of myth, and he spent a great deal of time and energy generating anecdotes about himself. . . . Many of the anecdotes arose, of course, through the stories Richard told, of which he was generally the hero, and in which he had to come out, if possible, looking smarter than anyone else. I must confess that as the years went by I became uncomfortable with the feeling of being a rival whom he wanted to surpass; and I found working with him less congenial because he seemed to be thinking more in terms of “you” and “me” than “us.” Probably it was difficult for him to get used to collaborating with someone who was not just a foil for his own ideas. . . .”

  Murray and Feynman were rivals. Nevertheless I was surprised that Murray chose to be so harsh. That’s Murray, still competitive, still tormented. But I prefer to think the real reason for Murray’s negativity was, simply, that when Murray wrote the obituary he was having a bad day. In any case, I don’t think Feynman would have been offended—he always appreciated it when you spoke your mind. Ironically, around the time Murray was writing the critical article, he was doing new landmark research based on Feynman’s early work on the formulation of quantum theory in terms of paths or histories. Shortly after completing that work, Murray left Caltech. He now lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

  By the time Murray left Caltech, John Schwarz no longer needed him as a mentor, for in 1984, Schwarz and Michael Green had a historic breakthrough. After working on the problem for five years, they found the mathematical miracle they were looking for and resolved the last major inconsistency in string theory. It didn’t make the theory any easier to solve, but it convinced many leading physicists—especially Edward Witten—that the theory had too many miraculous properties to ignore. As Holmes, or more probably Rockford, might have said, Coin
cidence? I think not. Within months string theory, the laughingstock of physics, became string theory, the hottest thing in physics.

  Over the next two years hundreds of particle theorists jumped on the bandwagon, writing over a thousand research papers. Today string theory research dominates the field of elementary particle theory. As rare as it had been to find anyone working on string theory, it has become just as rare to find a particle theorist not working on it. By the end of 1984, Murray was finally able to get Schwarz “a real job,” as a professor at Caltech. But it still wasn’t easy. As one administrator remarked, “We don’t know if this man has invented sliced bread, but even if he has, people will say that he did it at Caltech, so we don’t have to keep him here.”

  In 1987 Schwarz received a prestigious MacArthur fellowship, and in 1997 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. In 2001, he was awarded the American Physical Society and American Institute of Physics’ 2002 Dannie Heineman Prize for “valuable contributions made in the field of mathematical physics.” Despite the glory, string theory is still a work in progress, far from proven or even well understood. Schwarz says he never had any regrets, even when it looked as if his work might never be accepted. He also says he never had any doubt it was correct. Today Schwarz has Feynman’s old office, and still works on string theory. What is not yet known is how he will fare without the help of Helen Tuck, who, well into her seventies, has just retired as department secretary.

  Feynman was not a fan of string theory, but he respected Schwarz. And why not? If anyone wasn’t following the crowd, it was John. Whenever I hear people’s ideas easily dismissed, or hear someone’s goals in life criticized as unattainable, I always think of John Schwarz. And I think of Feynman, for if there is one thing he taught me, it is the importance of being truly committed to whatever it is we are striving for.

  One day a year or so ago I was going through musty boxes that I had stored in a warehouse far out of town. In one of them, amid decades-old college texts, I found the cheap old Radio Shack cassette tapes which were to form the basis for the transcriptions in this book. When I recorded our conversations I didn’t know I wanted to write a book, or even that I was capable of doing it, but I did know I wanted to write about Feynman. I imagine anyone who ever knew him, and had the inclination to write, would have felt the same way. Yet I did not write about him, and the tapes lay dormant for some twenty years. I think the reason was that, back then, I didn’t really have any purpose in mind.

  Listening to the tapes again after all those years, I missed Feynman, the gruff, reluctant teacher whose spirit even terminal cancer couldn’t dampen. And I missed the person I was, the eager, innocent student with his whole life before him. It was then that the purpose of this book became clear.

  In his epilogue, Feynman stated his own goal in writing The Feynman Lectures on Physics, which I had read on the kibbutz in Israel so many years ago. Feynman wrote, “I wanted most to give you some appreciation of the wonderful world and the physicist’s way of looking at it.” His statement was overly modest, for the worldview he imparted in those books was not just any physicist’s way of looking at the world; it was distinctly his own. It is this goal that I hope I have furthered in writing this book. For Richard Feynman always knew how to get the most out of what the world had to offer, and how to get the most out of the talent with which God—or mere genetics—had blessed him. That’s all we can hope for in life, and in the years since he’s passed on, I’ve found it to be a valuable lesson.

  FURTHER READING

  BY FEYNMAN:

  Richard Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics

  Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law

  ABOUT FEYNMAN:

  James Gleick, Genius

  With more emphasis on technical content:

  Jagdish Mehra, The Beat of a Different Drum

  BY MURRAY:

  Murray Gell-Mann, The Quark and the Jaguar

  ABOUT MURRAY:

  George Johnson, Strange Beauty

  ON STRING THEORY:

  For the general audience:

  Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe

  F. David Peat, Superstrings and the Search for the Theory of Everything

  If you have an advanced degree in mathematics or physics:

  Joseph Polchinski, String Theory

  Michio Kaku, Introduction to Superstrings and M-theory

  LEONARD MLODINOW received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. He was on the faculty of Caltech, and an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow, before becoming a writer in Hollywood for Star Trek: The Next Generation and other hit television series. His first book, Euclid’s Window, a critically acclaimed history of geometry, has been translated into eight languages. He lives in South Pasadena, California.