Feynman's Rainbow Read online

  “Yeah, well I don’t know what’s good for anybody except myself.”

  More silence. My mind raced. I knew that before long, others would join us, and my chance to get his advice would be gone. I wanted to ask, “How do I know if I’m smart enough to be here?”

  Instead I said, “Read any good books lately?”

  He just shrugged.

  “I’ve been reading about the process of discovery,” I told him, trying to keep the conversation alive. I was in the midst of Arthur Koestler’s The Act of Creation.

  “Learn anything?” he asked. He was interested. That was Feynman, always interested.

  “I’m having some trouble getting my research on track, and so I thought it might help.”

  “Yes, but did you learn anything?”

  He was mildly annoyed now, because I hadn’t answered his question. I felt rebuffed. I wasn’t yet sure what I had learned, so I told him about the passage I had just finished. I tried to make it sound dramatic.

  “It took place in Berlin, 1914. Imagine a cold spring morning. Outside church bells chime. In his office at Berlin University, Einstein ponders the still-unfinished theory of relativity. In a lab not far away, in a tall steel cage, a young chimpanzee named Nueva pushes banana skins together in a heap with a stick. In a few years, this episode will be retold in a famous book, The Mentality of Apes. But, as she glances around the room, Nueva doesn’t care about fame. Her world is simple. Eat, drink, sleep . . .”

  “Don’t forget sex,” he added with enthusiasm. I found that Feynman often found ways to interject the subject of sex. I was glad my story was holding his interest.

  “Yes, and have sex, find companionship. But right now she is hungry, and banana skins won’t do. As Nueva studies her plight, a professor named Koehler studies her. He, like Nueva—and Einstein—has a hunger to satisfy, and his notes are destined to feed many books and papers. Koehler offers bananas to Nueva, only he doesn’t do her the favor of placing the food inside her cage. Instead, he places it on the floor outside, beyond her reach.”

  “A cruel fellow,” said Feynman.

  “He’s challenging her,” I said. “To eat, Nueva will have to discover how to get the bananas. First, she does the obvious. She steps to the bars and reaches out. She strains her arms and grasps at the fruit, but the bananas are just out of reach. She throws herself to the ground and rolls on her back in despair. Not far away, Einstein is nine years into his work on the theory of relativity, and still two years from his great breakthrough.”

  “And probably feeling a lot like Nueva,” said Feynman.

  I nodded and smiled. Here we were, Feynman and I, conversing about the frustrations of research. Me and Feynman, peer-to-peer! We were connecting. I was happy.

  I continued, “Seven minutes pass. Nueva suddenly stares at the stick. She stops moaning and grabs it. Nueva thrusts it out of the cage, just beyond the fruit, and pulls it to within arm’s reach. She has made a discovery.”

  “And what did this incident teach you?” Feynman asked, not letting me off the hook. I was consciously pleased when I realized that intelligent thoughts were now actually forming in my head in response to his question.

  “Nueva had two skills. One was pushing things around with a stick. The other was reaching out through the bars for things. Her discovery was that she could put the two disparate skills together. It turned her old tool, the stick, into an altogether different kind of tool. Just like Galileo did when he used the telescope, which had been invented as a toy, to look at the sky. A lot of discoveries are like that, new ways of looking at old things, or old concepts. But the raw materials for the discovery had always been there, which is why the discoveries may seem startling at the time, but are simple and obvious to later generations. So I guess I learned something about the psychology of discovery. Something I might hope to apply.”

  He looked at me for a moment.

  “You’re wasting your time,” he said. “You don’t learn how to discover things by reading books on it. And psychology is a bunch of bullshit.”

  I felt as if he had slapped me. But then, after a pause, he looked me in the eye, and said gently and with a sly grin, “What I would learn from your story is that if an ape can make a discovery, so can you.”

  VI

  MANY WEEKS PASSED, and I became friendly with Feynman, but I did not become his friend. We began to talk more easily, mainly because I became less nervous around him. I had asked if I could tape some of our conversations because I wanted to write something about him. I didn’t know what—a magazine article maybe. I wasn’t sure I could do physics anymore, but I had always loved to write. It was an escape for me, like going to the movies. And he didn’t seem to mind. He always liked an audience.

  It was a cool day. The campus was quiet; the few students walking weren’t talking. Inside, Feynman’s office was utilitarian. The blackboards were covered with mathematics—mostly with Feynman diagrams like those he had invented in his youth. There was a desk, a couch, a coffee table, a couple of bookshelves. Nothing seemed opulent. Nothing indicated that he was one of the most famous and respected scientists of the twentieth century. He was speaking to the point that had bothered me most—did I have that something special that it takes to be a scientist?

  Feynman said:

  Don’t think it is so different, being a scientist. The average person is not so far away from a scientist. He may be far away from an artist or poet or something, but I doubt that too. I think in the normal common sense of everyday life that there is a lot of the kind of thinking that scientists do. Everyone puts together in ordinary life certain things to come to conclusions about the ordinary world. They make things that weren’t there, such as drawings, such as writing, such as scientific theories. Is there something common in the process? I don’t see such a big difference between that and the scientist’s work.

  For instance, any ordinary person can lie, and lying takes a certain imagination. And you have to make up a story that is sort of reasonable with nature, and it might even have to fit with certain facts. Sometimes they do a good job. They don’t have to be scientists or writers.

  Is science anything more wonderful than the person who says, “Mary hasn’t come home yet, I betcha she went to the Loaf and Ladle for lunch, because she likes to go there? Let’s call there.” You call there and Mary is there. Is that creativity? The average person puts together ideas of their experience to see something else, or some relationship, and suddenly notices that the twitch that little Mary has always comes when she is talking about school. Then they do something with that realization. All ordinary life and behavior involves human activity which seems to me to be very similar.

  Scientists do think in a constructive way. You ask a scientist some question and it worries him. He doesn’t worry in the sense that a normal person sometimes worries, like “I wonder if this sick person is going to get better.” That’s not thinking, that is just worrying. The scientist tries to build something up. Not just to worry about something, but to think something out.

  The scientist analyzes something like a detective does. Like a detective trying to find out what happened when he wasn’t there, given clues. We are trying to figure out what nature is like from clues given by experiments. We have the clues and we try to figure it out. It is more analogous to detective work than anything else.

  Somehow I did not picture Feynman as Sherlock Holmes. That was more like Murray, a person who always seemed to walk around muttering, “Elementary . . .” to whomever he was with. Murray was from the I-can-do-it-because-I-am-smarter-than-everyone-else school of physics. Of course, Murray was smarter than everyone else. But I wasn’t. Feynman dressed and spoke like more of a blue-collar, regular-guy physicist, which was more my type. With that thought the detective metaphor suddenly made sense to me—and I found it encouraging. I knew that there were fumbling detectives like Rockford and Colombo—or regular guys like Sam Spade—who nevertheless managed to reveal the mysteries of the w
orld around them.

  Still, when I got back to the apartment that night I suggested to Edward and Ray that we go to the library to rent a Sherlock Holmes movie, figuring he was a better role model for a physicist than Rockford. It was the days before VCRs, so we would actually check out film and a projector and project the movie on a wall on the outside of the building. From that week on, my neighbors and I moved outside every Friday night and watched the same flick—The Hound of the Baskervilles. With joints and beers, we would sit under the palm trees beside the pool and revel in its shadowy, black-and-white frames. Edward would occasionally dress as Sherlock, though the substance in his pipe was not conducive to Holmes’s kind of tight, logical analysis. Together we’d call out otherworldly Basil Rathbone’s camp lines in advance, like the audience in a 1939-vintage version of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. By the end of the evening, I would be lost in a world halfway between Pasadena decadence and Old World decorum, and marvel at the power of film.

  Feynman continued:

  Really all we do is a hell of a lot more of one particular kind of thing that is normal and ordinary! People do have imagination, they just don’t work on it as long. Creativity is done by everybody, it’s just that scientists do more of it. What isn’t ordinary is to do it so intensively that all this experience is piled up for all these years on the same limited subject.

  A scientist’s work is normal activities of humans carried out to a fault, in a very exaggerated form. Ordinary people don’t do it as often, or, as I do, think about the same problem every day. Only idiots like me do that! Or Darwin, or somebody who worries about the same question. “Where do the animals come from?” Or, “What is the relation of species?” A scientist works on it, and thinks about it for years! What I do, is something that common people often do, but so much more that it looks crazy! But it’s trying to find the potentiality as a human being.

  For example, neither you nor I have muscles that stand way out on our arms like these fabulous guys. For us that would be impossible. Well they work and they work and they work on it. In that case, it might be a fault. How big can you make those muscles? How can you make the chest look great? They try to find out how far you can go. And therefore, they do something with an intensity that is out of the ordinary. It doesn’t mean that we never lift weights. All they do is lift weights more. But, like us, they’re trying to find the greatest potentiality of human beings’ activity in a certain direction.

  The scientist as a brain jock? Did I believe him? Is creative genius a form of synaptic sweat?

  I had gone into physics and through my studies thinking physicists were something like mystics. After all, the physicist’s pen can shake theology with a new view of creation, or change the world with an invention, like the radio, the transistor, the laser . . . or the Bomb. The physics lore you get in school encourages this view: We read about Einstein, his IQ off the charts, employing pure logic to derive the connection between space and time; we heard Niels Bohr described, because of his physical intuition, as having a direct line to God; we toasted Werner Heisenberg, who formulated the uncertainty principle that shook the foundations of mechanistic philosophy. Amongst my friends, these physicists were all mythic heroes.

  People picture scientists in white coats. Physicists, at least, don’t wear them, but in a way, I subscribed to the same basic misconception: that scientists were somehow different from other people. I read about their theories in the tight logical development that comes only long after the fact. I knew nothing of their insecurities, their false starts, their confusion, their days in bed with a bellyache. Even as a graduate student I never got to know any faculty members as people. They were there to ask questions of, but always separated by the same partition that separates the rich and the poor. Now I was on the faculty myself, a real scientist, and that is what seemed so strange. I didn’t see myself as different, so, if scientists were different, how could I be a scientist? Feynman was saying don’t worry, they aren’t. It was a simple realization, and a comfort.

  There is a flip side to the comforting knowledge that everyone is just stumbling through the fog, and that is that it is a pretty good bet that many of them are not stumbling in the right direction. Who is going down the blind alley and who is on the road to success? Whose work will be remembered and whose forgotten? What is worth doing, and how do you know? I didn’t have the answers, but I thought back on the pep talk the division chair had given me. Explore, he said. Check out what other people are doing. I decided to open myself to others.

  VII

  THE FIRST GUY I tried to connect with was a fellow named Stephen Wolfram with a position similar to mine. We met for lunch at a place that called itself an Italian deli. Wolfram ordered a plate of rare roast beef. They gave him maybe a pound of it. No bread. No potato chips. No pickle. Just a pound of red meat. I had a regular sandwich, potato chips and all. Despite our divergent tastes in food, we got into a pretty friendly conversation. He seemed like a nice enough fellow at first, but when we got to talking I discovered some things that alarmed me. Namely, he had studied at Oxford, published his first scientific paper at the age of fifteen, and received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Caltech by the age of twenty. No, I decided. We could never be friends. Years later, I would read about him often, founding a wildly successful software company, and then publishing a famous book, an outgrowth of his pet theory, cellular automata. Ordinary people? I wondered if Feynman had met this guy.

  A few days later I got to my office with a headache. I had been up till four with Ray, who was depressed because he couldn’t find a girlfriend. Lately he seemed extraordinarily devoted to this task. He’d mutter to himself, sometimes in Spanish, the only reminder that his given name was Ramon and not Ray. If a love song came on the radio he would yell curses, or change the station, or, once, smash the radio. He thought about his woman problem day and night. It consumed him. I thought about him, employing Feynman’s analysis, as a scientist. His field was love, and, like Darwin or Feynman, he worried about the same question all the time, in his case the question of finding a mate. Ray had been talking suicide, and, since he owned a gun, I thought it my duty to make sure he didn’t use it. So I kept him off drugs, and we drank martinis instead. We found that we could commiserate in that we had similar problems plaguing us. Neither of us could find the mistress we desired, the mistress in my case being a good problem to work on.

  At my office, it didn’t help my headache that I could hear Murray through the wall screaming at someone over the phone. It appeared to be someone at the bank, a clerk of some kind, and he or she was being dense about something. It could really bother Murray when people didn’t know things, or grasp ideas as fast as he did. Unless of course it was Feynman, in which case Murray reveled in it. And since Murray had encyclopedic worldly knowledge, and Feynman’s factual knowledge was focused on math and the sciences, there was plenty Murray could talk about where Feynman would be at a disadvantage.

  I chewed a few aspirin and wondered what I was going to do. I had had periods between papers before, times I would spend just reading and thinking, trying to come up with a good idea, or a good problem to try to solve. That is normal for a theoretical physicist. The inability to concentrate isn’t. I decided to pay a visit to a young professor down the hall. Maybe, I thought, we could collaborate on something. He seemed accessible, and had produced a famous Ph.D. dissertation having to do with the strong force.

  One of the attractions of physics is the magnitude of the ideas you ponder. It may seem like a yawner to spend your day fiddling with mathematical expressions, but it becomes exciting when you realize that in studying the strong force you are exploring a power as great as any you’ll find in even the most speculative science fiction. Without the strong force, the electric repulsion between the positively charged protons in the nucleus would blow apart every atom in the universe, except those of hydrogen gas, whose nuclei consist of lone protons. When you think of it that way, the power and potential of wh
at you may discover seems almost unlimited.

  It is the strong force binding quarks to each other that physicists believed was the reason that Murray’s quarks were never seen in isolation. But there was a problem with this explanation: According to the experimental observations, when particles like protons were smashed into each other, they behaved as if the particles inside them—what Feynman had called partons, but which everyone else believed were quarks—could jiggle around freely. How could they move freely if they were bound together so tightly? Because it was so difficult to calculate the consequences of quantum chromodynamics—the theory of the strong force—the answer to this question was not at all apparent. This young professor down the hall had done groundbreaking work on this problem. The answer, it turned out, was that according to quantum chromodynamics, the strong force, unlike the other fundamental forces, grows stronger with distance. If you could pull two quarks an inch apart (which you can’t), they would experience an unimaginably strong attraction; two quarks within a proton hardly affect each other, and behave as if they were free.

  To escape the effects of the strong force, you don’t run away, you move closer. Though a novelty in physics, this behavior was much like the human forces that acted upon me at Caltech. I was there, supposedly free to do whatever I wanted. And as long as I acted like a serious scientist working on important research I did feel free. Yet I did not feel free to say something stupid. I did not feel free to fail. I did not feel free to be anything except obsessed with research—and not just any research.

  In the culture of physics I had grown up with, there was a hierarchy of respectability. My office was on the floor that housed the elementary particle theorists—those who, like Feynman and Murray, work on the theory of the fundamental forces and particles in nature. They tend to look down on others, like biologists, or chemists, or most other physicists, who are applying, rather than discovering, fundamental laws. In this view, even solid-state physics, which has led to discoveries such as the transistor, and thus our modern digital age, is dismissed as a less worthy calling. “Squalid state physics,” Murray called it.