Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

  Words about words: Feynman despised this kind of knowledge more intently than ever, and when he returned to the United States he found out again how much it was a part of American education, a mind-set showing itself not just in the habits of students but in quiz shows, popular what-should-you-know books, and textbook design. He wanted everyone to share his strenuous approach to knowledge. He would sit idly at a café table and cock his ear to listen to the sound sugar made as it struck the surface of his iced tea, something between a hiss and a rustle, and his temper would flare if anyone asked what the phenomenon was called—even if someone merely asked for an explanation. He respected only the not-knowing, first-principles approach: try sugar in water, try sugar in warm tea, try tea already saturated with sugar, try salt … see when the whoosh becomes a fizz. Trial and error, discovery, free inquiry.

  He resented more than just the hollowness of standardized knowledge. Rote learning drained away all that he valued in science: the inventive soul, the habit of seeking better ways to do anything. His kind of knowledge—knowledge by doing—“gives a feeling of stability and reality about the world,” he said, “and drives out many fears and superstitions.” He was thinking now about what science meant and what knowledge meant. He told the Brazilians:

  Science is a way to teach how something gets to be known, what is not known, to what extent things are known (for nothing is known absolutely), how to handle doubt and uncertainty, what the rules of evidence are, how to think about things so that judgments can be made, how to distinguish truth from fraud, and from show.

  Telescopes, Newtonian or Cassegrainian, had flaws and limitations to go with their wondrous history. An effective scientist—even a theorist—needed to know about both.

  Faker from Copacabana

  Feynman told people that he had been born tone-deaf and that he disliked most music, despite the conventional observation that mathematical and musical aptitude run side by side. Classical music—music in the European tradition—he found not just dull but positively unpleasant. Above all it was the experience of listening that he could not stand.

  Those who worked near him over the years knew nevertheless about the toneless music that seemed constantly to well up through his nerve endings, that clattered and pounded through their shared office walls. He drummed unconsciously as he calculated, and he drummed to attract a crowd at parties. Philip Morrison, who shared an office with him at Cornell, would say half seriously that Feynman was drawn to drumming because it was a noisy, staccato activity, because he had long fingers, and because it went with being a magician. But Morrison also noticed how freakish Western classical music had become by the twentieth century in one respect: of all the world’s musical traditions, the West’s had most decisively cast out improvisation. In Bach’s era mastery of the keyboard still meant combining composer, performer, and improviser in one person. Even a century later, performers felt free to experiment with improvising cadenzas mid-concerto, and Franz Liszt toward the end of the nineteenth century gave concertgoers a taste of the athletic thrill of hearing music made up on the spot as fast as a pianist could play, hearing impromptu variations and embellishments along with the false steps and blind alleys from which the performer-composer would have to extricate himself like Houdini. Improvisation meant audible risk and wrong notes. In modern practice an orchestra or string quartet that plays a half-dozen wrong notes in an hour is judged incompetent.

  Having resisted the MIT version of Western culture for engineers, having rejected the liberal arts version of culture at Cornell, Feynman finally began his own process of acculturation in Brazil. Travel for most Americans, physicists included, still began with the capitals of Europe, where Feynman never ventured until he was thirty-two and a conference brought him to Paris. In the streets of Rio he discovered a taste for the Third World and especially for the music, the slang, and the art that was not codified in books or taught in school—at least not American schools. For the rest of his life he preferred traveling to Latin American and Asia. He soon became one of the first American physicists to tour Japan and there, too, headed quickly for the countryside.

  In Rio Feynman found a living musical tradition—rhythm-centered, improvisational, and hotly dynamic. The word samba was nowhere to be found in his Encyclopaedia Britannica, but the sound rattled through his windows high above the beach, all brass, bells, and percussion. Brazilian samba was an African-Latin slum-and-ballroom hybrid, played in the streets and nightclubs by members of clubs facetiously called “schools.” Feynman became a sambista. He joined a local school, Os Farçantes de Copacabana, or, roughly, the Copacabana Burlesquers—though Feynman preferred to translate farçantes as “fakers.” There were trumpets and ukuleles, rasps and shakers, snare drums and bass drums. He tried the pandeiro, a tambourine that was played with the precision and variety of a drum, and he settled on the frigideira, a metal plate that sent a light, fast tinkle in and around the main samba rhythms, the mood shifting from explosive abstract jazz to shameless pop schmaltz. At first he had trouble mastering the fluid wrist torques of the local players, but eventually he showed enough competence to win assignments on paid private jobs. He thought he played with a foreign accent that the other musicians found esoteric and charming. He played in beach contests and impromptu traffic-stopping street parades. The climactic event in the yearly samba calendar was Rio’s carneval in February, the raucous flesh-celebrating festival that fills the nighttime streets with Cariocas half naked or in costume. In the 1952 carneval, amid the crepe paper and outsized jewelry, with revelers hanging from streetcars whose bells regurgitated the samba beat, a photographer for a local version of Paris Match snapped a carousing American physicist dressed as Mephistopheles.

  As hard as he threw himself into life in Rio, he was lonely there. His ham-radio link was not enough to keep in touch with the fast-changing edge of postwar physics. He heard from hardly anyone, not even Bethe. That winter he drank heavily—enough to frighten himself one day into swearing off alcohol one more time, for good—and picked up women on the beach or in nightclubs. He haunted the Miramar Hotel’s outdoor patio bar, where he socialized with an ever-changing group of expatriate Americans and Englishmen. He took out Pan American stewardesses, who stayed on the Miramar’s fourth floor between flights. And in an act of rash abandon he proposed marriage, by mail, to a woman he had dated at Cornell.

  Alas, the Love of Women!

  The popular anthropologist Margaret Mead had recently reported what so many popular magazines were already noticing: that the courtship rituals of American culture were in ferment. Mead examined billboard advertisements and motion-picture plots and declared, “The old certainties of the past are gone, and everywhere there are signs of an attempt to build a new tradition …”

  In every pair of lovers the two are likely to find themselves wondering what the next steps are in a ballet between the sexes that no longer follows traditional lines, a ballet in which each couple must make up their steps as they go along. When he is insistent, should she yield, and how much? When she is demanding, should he resist, and how firmly?

  Sometimes Feynman looked at his own mating habits with a similar detachment. Since Arline’s death he had pursued women with a single-mindedness that violated most of the public, if not the private, scruples associated with the sexual ballet. He dated undergraduates, paid prostitutes in whorehouses, taught himself (as he saw it) how to beat bar girls at their own game, and slept with the young wives of several of his friends among the physics graduate students. He told colleagues that he had worked out a kind of all’s-fair approach to sexual morality and argued that he was using women as they sought to use him. Love seemed mostly a myth—a species of self-delusion, or rationalization, or a gambit employed by women in search of husbands. What he had felt with Arline he seemed to have placed on a shelf out of the way.

  Women told him that they loved him for his mind, for his looks, for the way he danced, for the way he did try to listen to them and understand the
m. They loved the company of his intellectual friends. They understood that work came first with him, and they loved that about him, although Rose McSherry, the New Mexican woman he courted intensely by mail at the height of his work on quantum electrodynamics, resented it when he returned from the Pocono conference and wrote her that work would always be his “first love.” She would never marry a man to slave for him, she said. Sometimes she worried that he thought of women as mere recreation. She wished she could feel that he did his work because of her and for her. So many women wanted to be his muse.

  The changing rules caught Feynman’s lovers in a bind. The language of illicit sex relied on awkward euphemisms and old-fashioned labels, spooning and jilting, heels and tramps, defining their roles and leaving them at a disadvantage. In his first summer at Cornell, a woman he had met in Schenectady let him know as indirectly as possible that she was pregnant and then that the pregnancy was over. “I have been quite indisposed—something unusual for me—but I think you have undoubtedly guessed the reason.” As she wrote, she knew that he was renewing a fling with his “Rose of Sharon.” She knew she was supposed to hate him, but she preferred not to think of men as “heels.” She assured him that she was not “in love.”

  I almost envy you the wonderful and supreme happiness that you must have enjoyed before your wife passed away. Such happiness comes to so few people—I wonder—can it happen twice in one’s lifetime?

  She did offer him a warning, saying sarcastically that she was sure he would recognize a bit of Byron:

  Alas, the love of women! it is known

  To be a lovely and a fearful thing; …

  And their revenge is as the tiger’s spring,

  Deadly, and quick, and crushing; yet, as real

  Torture is theirs—what they inflict they feel.

  They are right; for man, to man so oft unjust,

  Is always so to women …

  In a postscript, she corrected his spelling of her name.

  Women were expected to contend in the work force—another trend accelerated by the war—but they also stood in the centerpiece of a cozy domestic vision of family life. The professions, and particularly the sciences, remained in the rear guard. The new Physics Today summed up the difficulties from the sober perspective of someone who had spent more than a decade teaching physics to undergraduates at Bryn Mawr, where a local ditty asked,

  Tell me what it is like to be teaching these girls?

  Do you find that they have any brains?

  Do they take themselves seriously (may I ask) or do you?

  The editors were determined to keep the tone lighthearted. The author argued, not without sympathy, that the single most grievous obstacle to the success of women as physicists was their own “tendency to defer to the superior male.” Meanwhile employers continued to assume that women’s eventual priority would be marriage and children. In the Physical Review women almost never appeared as authors.

  In their wholly male world, physicists were even less likely than other American men to look for intellectual partnership in their sexual relationships. Some did, nevertheless. In the European tradition, where the professoriat implied a certain social class and cultural grounding, wives had tended to share their husbands’ class and culture: Hans Bethe married the daughter of a theoretical physicist. In the American social stew, where science had become an upward pathway for children of the immigrant poor, whatever husbands and wives might be assumed to share, it was not necessarily a background in the academy. Feynman, alone anyway in the distant reaches of much of his work, seemed to date only women of obvious beauty, often blondes, sometimes heavily made-up and provocatively dressed—or so it seemed to some of the women he did not date. He hardly seemed interested in professional companionship from the women he chased, try though they might to offer it. “I’m learning more everyday about physics and realizing that there is just reams more to learn,” one of his lovers wrote. “Somehow the field of physics has a fatal fascination for me.” She suspected, though, that he had already moved on to someone else. She and all her successors shared an unforgivable handicap, and some of them guessed it: They were not Arline Greenbaum, Feynman’s Juliet, the one perfect love, the girl who had died before the mundane, domestic, day-today, year-to-year realities of ordinary life could have time to add a tempering color and tone to the romantic ideal.

  Every so often Feynman would feel the urge to bring a measure of rationality to his relations with women. He loved to work out the rules, to find the systems. He tired of the susurrus of promises, flattery, cajoling. He hated having to apologize. He turned Arline’s favorite principle to a new purpose: “It seems to me that you go to lots of trouble to be sure the girl doesn’t think ill of you,” he wrote in a note to himself after one emotionally messy encounter.

  WHAT DO YOU CARE WHAT SHE THINKS? It is all right to care whether you hurt her or not—just do your best, (if you insist) on trying not to—then if the fact is that you are O.K., don’t bother to try to argue otherwise or try to get her to tell you you are wonderful… . Further, if you are selfish & look only to your physical pleasure—don’t try to convince yourself otherwise—or rather—don’t try to explain it to her or convince her otherwise.

  In his favorite bar story he gradually deduces the procedural machinery of a bar: women flirt with the customers, the customers buy them drinks, the women move on. “How is it possible,” he would say, “that an intelligent guy can be such a goddamn fool when he gets into a bar?” He is such a neophyte in a bar, such a naïve outside-the-experience anthropologist, that even his education in how to order a Black and White with water on the side holds interest. He watches as bar girls goad him to buy champagne cocktails. In retaliation he learns a new set of procedures. The main rule is to treat the women with disrespect. It is psychological warfare. “You are worse than a whore,” he tells someone whom he has bought sandwiches and coffee for $1.10. His reward: she sleeps with him and repays him for the sandwiches, too. All’s fair.

  Feynman told these very stories to the women he dated. Despite their too-good-to-be-true quality, they were convincing and funny. No one ever caught him in a lie. Like many people who discover that storytelling is a talent—that they can hold an audience, focus a roomful of eyes—he honed his repertoire, never caring whether the crowd included people who had heard a story before. Nor, mostly, did they care. With his stories, his laughter, his dancing, his ability when alone with another person to concentrate his attention absolutely, he was intensely attractive to women. This despite the central coldness he held so close—this noetic Casanova. They suffered, sometimes, enormous pain. A second woman told him euphemistically that she had had an abortion: “The whole thing is horrible, cruel and wretched, and happens about once in two million… . I’m sure you never dreamt that any harm would come of such a sudden urge (shall we say, the ‘shortest part’ of an urge) but as I mentioned before the innocent have to pay, etc. etc.” Later she asked him to forgive the mean things she had said.

  They almost always did forgive him. They loved to recite his virtues. A catalog that one woman set down on paper:

  1. Handsome (could be)

  2. clever (he thinks)

  3. tall (very)

  4. well dressed (trim)

  5. a dancer (From a whore in Mexico City)

  6. a drummer (whow!)

  7. personality plus (oh boy!)

  8. smart (putting it mild)

  9. conversation (good)

  10. sweet (sometimes)

  On professional trips overseas he seduced women so regularly that his hosts knew he expected them to make introductions. In London he would meet Pauline or Betty, in Paris Isabelle or Marina, in Amsterdam Marika or Genny. He would see a woman for days and then file her farewell letter with the others:

  My love for you is so great that I’m sure it would have brought us both a wealth of happiness … please always remember, when in the evening of your life … that somewhere in the world there is me and that
I love you. For I shall always remember you because you are the only person that I have felt at complete ease and sympathy with.

  There were so many attitudes a woman could assume for a short-term love affair. His lovers would warn him jovially not to break too many hearts, or they would wish him luck with all his projects “be they blonde or mathematical—or physical!” They would hint that they might appear on his doorstep—that his “sorcière” might not know the way to the moon and stars but could find the USA—or implore, “concerning your work hurry up to find an atomic broom which could fly from Europe to California in a couple of hours.” They would accuse him of preferring his own company—of a “Narcissus-of-the-mind complex.” They would wonder aloud what home really meant to him—was he not a little lonely, after all?