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Genius

The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

James Gleick

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20 quotes

biographies

Prologue

  • Feynman was patently not struck in the prewar mold of most young academics. He had the flowing, expressive postures of a dancer, the quick speech we thought of as Broadway, the pat phrases of the hustler and the conversational energy of a finger snapper.”Apr 12 2022 6:46PM
  • There are two kinds of geniuses, the “ordinary” and the “magicians.” An ordinary genius is a fellow that you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what they have done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians. They are, to use mathematical jargon, in the orthogonal complement of where we are and the working of their minds is for all intents and purposes incomprehensible. Even after we understand what they have done, the process by which they have done it is completely dark. They seldom, if ever, have students because they cannot be emulated and it must be terribly frustrating for a brilliant young mind to cope with the mysterious ways in which the magician’s mind works. Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest caliber.Apr 12 2022 6:48PM
  • After his death in 1988 his sometime friend, collaborator, office neighbor, foil, competitor, and antagonist, the acerbic Murray Gell-Mann, angered his family at a memorial service by asserting, “He surrounded himself with a cloud of myth, and he spent a great deal of time and energy generating anecdotes about himself.” These were stories, Gell-Mann added, “in which he had to come out, if possible, looking smarter than anyone else.”Apr 13 2022 1:14PM
  • Feynman was widely quoted by scientists and science writers (although he seldom submitted to interviews). He despised philosophy as soft and unverifiable. Philosophers “are always on the outside making stupid remarks,Apr 12 2022 6:49PM
  • Feynman’s reinvention of quantum mechanics did not so much explain how the world was, or why it was that way, as tell how to confront the world. It was not knowledge of or knowledge about. It was knowledge how to. How to compute the emission of light from an excited atom. How to judge experimental data, how to make predictions, how to construct new tool kits for the new families of particles that were about to proliferate through physics with embarrassing fecundity.Apr 13 2022 12:55PM
  • 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. During a sabbatical he learned enough biology to make a small but genuine contribution to geneticists’ understanding of mutations in DNAApr 13 2022 12:55PM
  • 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. With the gleeful prodding of his Los Alamos mentor Hans Bethe (“Don’t you know how to take squares of numbers near ?”) he taught himself the tricks of mental arithmetic, having long since mastered the more arcane arts of mental differentiation and integration. He taught himself how to make electroplated metal stick to plastic objects like radio knobs, how to keep track of time in his head, and how to make columns of ants march to his biddingApr 13 2022 12:56PM
  • With no less diligence, much later, having settled into a domestic existence complete with garden and porch, he taught himself how to train dogs to do counterintuitive tricks—for example, to pick up a nearby sock not by the direct route but by the long way round, circling through the garden, in the porch door and back out again. (He did the training in stages, breaking the problem down until after a while it was perfectly obvious to the dog that one did not go directly to the sock.)Apr 13 2022 12:58PM
  • 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 dismallyApr 13 2022 12:58PM
  • At the same time, when he was engrossed in the physicists’ ultimate how-to endeavor, the making of an atomic bomb, he digressed to learn 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).Apr 13 2022 12:57PM

Neither Country nor City

  • If I do this, what will happen? is both the motto of the child at play and the defining refrain of the physical scientistApr 14 2022 9:27PM

item 7

  • “That,” he says, “nobody knows. The general principle is that things that are moving try to keep on moving, and things that are standing still tend to stand still, unless you push on them hard.” And he says, “This tendency is called inertia, but nobody knows why it’s true.”Jun 10 2023 5:02AM

Weak Interactions

  • Pursuing the open mind approach, Feynman brought up a question of Block’s: Could it be that the [theta] and [tau] are different parity states of the same particle which has no definite parity, i.e., that parity is not conserved. That is, does nature have a way of defining right- or left-handedness uniquely?Apr 12 2022 6:42PM
  • Feynman made an odd presence at the high-energy physicists’ meetings. He was older than the bright young scientists of Gell-Mann’s generation, younger than the Nobel-wielding senators of Oppenheimer’s. He neither withdrew from the discussions nor dominated them. He showed a piercing interest in the topical issues—as with his initial prodding on the question of parity—but struck younger physicists as detached from the newest ideas, particularly in contrast to Gell-MannApr 12 2022 6:43PM

item 13

  • “When you have learned what an explanation really is,” Feynman had said, “you can then go on to more subtle questions.”Jul 1 2023 11:42PM
  • “Science repudiates philosophy,” Alfred North Whitehead had said. “In other words, it has never cared to justify its truth or explain its meaning.”Aug 5 2023 11:23PM
  • You see, when you ask why something happens, how does a person answer why something happens? For example, Aunt Minnie is in the hospital. Why? Because she went out on the ice and slipped and broke her hip. That satisfies people. But it wouldn’t satisfy someone who came from another planet and knew nothing about things.... When you explain a why, you have to be in some framework that you’ve allowed something to be true. Otherwise you’re perpetually asking why.... You go deeper and deeper in various directions.Aug 5 2023 11:25PM
  • No more certainties, no more absolutes. The Harvard philosopher W. V. Quine mused, “I think that for scientific or philosophical purposes the best we can do is give up the notion of knowledge as a bad job....” Not knowing had its ironies as well as its pleasures. For philosophers this was “the post-scholastic era,” as a later physicist, John Ziman, put it, “when it seemed essential to (dis)prove the peculiar (un)reality of scientific knowledge (theories/facts/data/hypotheses) by analysing (deconstructing) the arguments on which it was (supposedly) based.”Aug 5 2023 11:26PM
  • He believed in the primacy of doubt, not as a blemish upon our ability to know but as the essence of knowing. The alternative to uncertainty is authority, against which science had fought for centuries. “Great value of a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance,” he jotted on a sheet of notepaper one day. “... teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed.”Aug 5 2023 11:27PM
  • He believed that it was not certainty but freedom from certainty that empowered people to make judgments about right and wrong: knowing that they could never be more than provisionally right, but able to act nonetheless.Aug 5 2023 11:28PM

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