I've been reading Six Easy Pieces, excerpts from Richard Feynman's Lectures on Physics, and am reminded, by some of the personal reminiscences in the Introduction by Paul Davies, and in the Preface by David L. Goodstein and Gerry Neugebauer, of James Gleick's biography of Feynman, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, which I read when it was first published in 1992. I took the trouble to write a review, which of course was never published, but now I have a blog. So here it is.
Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman
by James Gleick
Pantheon, 531 pp.
The curtain rises, in this biography, on an instantly recognizable schoolhouse character--the shy, awkward boy with unusual mathematical aptitude who, conscious of being "different," casts about for a way to be one of the fellows. In the case of Richard Feynman, growing up in Far Rockaway, New York, in the years following the First World War, the uneasiness was translated into keen admiration for working men who built and fixed things. These, the boy thought, were real men. He began hiring himself out for radio repair and, aided by library books with titles like Algebra for the Practical Man, embarked on an ambitious course of self-education.
About forty years later, in 1965, Feynman shared the Nobel Prize in physics with Julian Schwinger and Shin'ichiro Tomonaga for their work in quantum electrodynamics. Though Feynman's work lagged behind that of the other two men, it was finally his formulation, which included the famous "Feynman diagrams," that made the theory comprehensible to other physicists and thus fecund. Feynman watched with satisfaction as he eclipsed Schwinger in the footnotes to articles in The Physical Review. The practical boy had triumphed.
For the biographer, however, the young Feynman does not cast so long a shadow as does the grown man responsible for two collections of memoirs, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think? These books, both best sellers, chronicle the adventures of a picaresque hero from his early days in radio repair to his legendary performance as a member of the presidential commission investigating the Challenger shuttle disaster. Gleick aptly compares the hero of these stories to the child in the fairy tale who announces that the emperor is naked. Feynman consistently appears more honest and plain spoken than everyone else.
What Feynman does not necessarily appear to be in his own stories is a supremely gifted theoretical physicist. Scientific colleagues worried that he was playing the part of a buffoon. Feynman, who began playing samba on the drums during a sojourn in Brazil, allowed that his biographer was sure to depict either a bloodless intellectual or a bongo-playing clown. Gleick quotes the prediction and, while he tries to steer a middle course, the title alone indicates that he is determined to emphasize Feynman's intellectual achievement.
The problem, of course, is that relatively few people are in a position to comprehend that achievement. In giving a full account of, say, Feynman's contribution to a theory pertaining to elementary particles, the biographer risks glazing the eyes of even the pluckiest "general reader." Gleick's thorough treatment is meant to broaden a mere anecdotal appreciation of Feynman's genius, but what lodged in my mind was new anecdotes. Some examples:
1. During Feynman's senior year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he took the Putnam Exam, which is administered annually to the best math students at universities across the country. The persons attaining the top five scores are designated Putnam Fellows, and one receives a scholarship for graduate study at Harvard. The test is so difficult that often more than half the examinees fail to solve a single problem in the allotted time.
On the day Feynman took the test, a friend was amazed to see him ambling across the campus while the exam was still in progress. Later, the graders were amazed by the gap between Feynman's score and those of the four other Fellows. Unfortunately for Harvard, the practical young man was more interested in physics than math, and he enrolled in the graduate school at Princeton.
2. About the time Feynman was finishing graduate school, he was recruited to work on the atomic bomb. Upon accepting, he was quickly promoted to the position of a group leader. Robert Oppenheimer called him the most brillian young physicst at Los Alamos.
Part of Feynman's value to the Manhattan Project was his prodigious calculating ability. In those days, calculating machines were cumbersome, and grinding through a complicated equation could be a very laborious process. Colleagues soon learned that it was often easier just to ask Feynman. His mind seems to have contained, among other things, pictures of logarithmic tables that he could read from. Any problem he was given involved values he already knew, or values that were between two values he already knew, and he could interpolate with preternatural rapidity.
3. Feynman was for 37 years a member of the physics faculty at the California Institute of Technology. In 1961, the department concluded that its undergraduate physics curriculum was antiquated. Feynman accepted the task of teaching a new two-year course in basic physics to Caltech freshmen and sophomores.
He threw himself into the work. Many undergraduates dropped the course--it was hard and idiosyncratic--but Feynman seems to have barely noticed, perhaps because their seats were taken by graduate students and faculty who realized that something remarkable was happening. Moving quickly, and taking up topics in unorthodox sequence, Feynman built up, over the two years, the entire edifice of physical reality as it was understood by him.
The lectures were edited and published as a three-volume text. They have proven too difficult for use in college courses, but professional physicists regard The Feynman Lectures on Physics as a gift from the mountaintop. A previous reviewer of Gleick's book, reaching back to the philosophic system contructed by Aristotle for analogy, calls the Lectures "a triumph of human thought." Gleick, who is nothing if not sober and evenhanded, calls the lectures "a magisterial achievement": not since Newton, he avers, had a scientist given such a comprehensive account of his understanding of the world.
4. Feynman could easily have won three Nobel prizes. In additon to the work in quantum electrodynamics, he supplied a theoretical explanation for the strange, frictionless properties of superfluids and, with Murray Gell-Mann, his Caltech colleague, developed a universal theory for the weak nuclear force.
One might think that such achievements are the mark of a mind not only powerful but also focussed. Yet Feynman suffered through periods when he seemed unable even to find an appropriate problem to work on. During one sabbatical year he dropped physics altogether in order to teach himself molecular biology. Before the year was out, he had made an original contribution to the understanding of how mutations work in genes.
Perhaps, then, one can see why some prankish physicists once convened a seminar on the topic: Is Feynman human? The apparently transcendent intellectual ability, together with the free-wheeling iconoclasm delineated in the memoirs, comprise the sturdy twin legs of the Feynman legend. Gleick, however, may be most successful when showing that the stylized self-portrait of the memoirs doesn't begin to convey the complexity of his subject's character.
Feynman's first wife, Arline Greenbaum, died of tuberculosis in a Santa Fe sanatorium while he was working on the Manhattan Project. Gleick thinks that for Feynman the loss of Arline, which came with young love still in full bloom, before either could suffer any of the disenchantments associated with long familiarity, transfigured her into something like a Platonic form. She stood out among women just as he stood out among scientists. After Arline, he never let anyone get close to him. He was 27 when she died.
Gleick's psychological interpretation is marred by Feynman's third marriage, to Gweneth Howarth, with whom he raised two children, and also by a thousand other stories of lonely geniuses. He nevertheless has provided a coherent exposition of the questions concerning Feynman's personal relationships, especially with women.
In the almost exclusively male world of theoretical physics, Feynman's often active love life was a part of his mystique. But many women, including some former girlfriends, were not impressed. The breezy diction of Surely You're Joking suggests that, to Feynman, women were all either "put together" or "cornfed." In the years immediately following Arline's death, he was quite promiscuous, at least by the standards normally applied to physics professors, and his sex partners seem to have been culled from the ranks of graduate students, the wives of colleagues, women he picked up in bars, and prostitutes.
Gleick's explanation is that Feynman tended to regard women as mere sex objects because none of them could be Arline Greenbaum. There is no attempt to excuse, only to explain, and the explanation probably would not be very convincing if it weren't for Gleick's very moving and wholly convincing account of the Richard Feynman-Arline Greenbaum love story.
Arline's tuberculosis, which was diagnosed in 1941, provides the obstacle required by love stories. The wedding, in a New York city office, with two strangers for witnesses, took place later that year over the strenuous objections of the groom's mother, who feared for her son's health. On the advice of doctors, the newlyweds abstained from sexual relations. Arline spent the rest of her life in sanatoriums.
Predictably, Feynman immersed himself in the science related to tuberculosis. He soon was sufficiently familiar with the medical literature to exasperate Arline's doctors with pointed, Socratic interrogations. He remained proudly rationalistic. On the day Arline died, the clock in her room stopped running at the time of death. The physicist set about understanding the phenomenon. The clock was weak--he had repaired it more than once--and he remembered that a nurse, making notes for the death certificate, had tilted the face toward a dim light in order to record the time of death. He concluded that the slight upset had stopped the clock again.
Yet the Feynman who loved Arline appears inevitably vulnerable. His love letters, necessitated by her confinement and his work, are alternately humorous, playful, hortatory, tender, and agonized. He was not immune to self-deception. When their conjugal celibacy finally ended, Arline immediately missed a period, and the ecstatic couple began preparing for parenthood. To outsiders, however, it was obvious that the cessation of menses was not due to pregnancy. Arline was dying.
It is understandable that a young husband's rational faculties should be vitiated by the emotional turmoil connected with his wife's illness. But, then, this is the same husband who, maybe an hour after his wife's death, was determinedly solving the problem of the grieving clock. What begins to emerge is neither the bloodless intellectual nor the bongo-playing clown but, I suspect, the best portrait we will have of one of the most notable men of the twentieth century.
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