"The Median Isn't the Message," Stephen Jay Gould's essay that describes the way in which bad medical news overpowered, but only for a few moments, his rational habits of mind, recalled for me a similar episode in the life of physicist Richard Feynman. While working on the Manhattan Project, his wife Arline, who had tuberculosis, died in a sanatorium in Albuquerke. Having received a phone call at Los Alamos informing him that the end was near, Feynman made the trip in a borrowed car, and, according to biographer James Gleick, sat in Arline's room, listening to her labored breathing, noting her attempts to swallow, and "tried to think of the science of it, the individual cells starved for air, the heart unable to pump." After Arline had died, he noticed that the small clock in the room had stopped at 9:21 p.m.--the exact time of her death. This is the kind of "mystical" event that people love, and those overcome with grief are especially susceptible to the tendency to elevate such occurences into the canon of nonsense. Not Feynman, who, notwithstanding his grief, worked out a theory: the clock was weak--he had had to repair it more than once--and a nurse, making notes for the death certificate in the dimly lit room, had picked it up in order to record the time of death. The small upset must have been enough to stop the clock again.
The philosopher who complained that people "have a thirst for things that are against reason, and they do not want to make it too hard for themselves to satisfy it" would have found, in Richard Feynman, a welcome antidote. For those who may conclude, from the case of the grieving clock, that Feynman was a "bloodless intellectual," I'd recommend the selection of his letters, Pefectly Reasonable Deviations From the Beaten Track, collected and edited by his daughter, Michelle.
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