He was the most famous physicist of the 20th century and a Nobel Prize winner, yet an adventurer who could bear neither authority nor mystery. He never tired of pulling back the veils. With every answer, he found a new set of interesting questions that absorbed him. Life simply could not become boring for him. He enjoyed it, whether he was immersing himself in physics or in women’s bodies, alcohol, music and all the other joys that life has to offer.
“A few facts about my timeline: I was born in 1918 in a small town called Far Rockaway, on the outskirts of New York City, near the sea,” Richard Feynman, who was called Dick, began his memoir, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, or Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman. Today, Far Rockaway is part of the Queens borough of New York and was a middle-class haven during his childhood.
The Feynmans were part of that, although during the Great Depression, which began in 1929, all of Richard’s father Melville’s entrepreneurial ventures collapsed, and the family only became financially stable when he became sales manager for a large uniform company.
Due to material deprivation, Melville never became the scientist he wanted, but his dream lived on. His wife Lucille had not yet given birth when he told her, “If he has a boy, he will be a scientist.” Richard was born.
“He never knew the facts very well, but he knew the truth,” Feynman said of his father, his first teacher without any formal training. Melville revealed to his son, among other things, that “if you look into things, you will always find something exciting”.
He taught his son from the Encyclopaedia Britannica. “He had to translate everything we read into understandable language, and that became a characteristic of my work. I still find it extremely difficult to understand most of the things other people do or how they do them. I’m always trying to translate them back and back and back and back to the point where I can somehow understand them,” Feynman explained his relationship to science and life.
He was also permanently marked by his mother, the daughter of a successful designer of women’s hats, who had fallen quite far behind in the marital ladder, but always accepted all changes with humour. She knew nothing about science, but she had a “wonderful sense of humour. I learned from her that the highest form of understanding we can achieve is laughter and human compassion.”
Later, when her son became famous and everyone was talking about him as “the smartest man in the world”, she uttered a witty sentence that made her remembered: “If this is the smartest man in the world, then God help us.”
Physics, maths and girls
She was also the reason why Richard never became a bookworm, even though he was not yet 10 years old when he already had his own laboratory at home and a few years later employed his younger sister Joan as an assistant there for four cents a week. By the age of 15, he knew trigonometry, advanced algebra and analytical geometry and calculus, but neither maths nor science absorbed him to the point where he couldn’t see the girls around him.
Yet in his final year of high school, he literally shocked the judges at a maths competition at New York University. What shocked them was not only his result, but the gap he left behind his pursuers. He was lucky enough to be taught by Abram Bader, who once studied static and quantum mechanics at Columbia University but was unable to complete his PhD because of financial difficulties.
“Feynman was sui generis. He rose above the very top of his class in a single day,” Bader later reported what happened when, in his final year of high school, Richard turned up for an extra physics lesson. There, of course, he was bored to death, but Bader gave him more challenging material. Richard worked through the book in a month, answering all the questions his teacher had written down on the side.
Maths and physics simply amused him. When he became aware of action or effort, he was “fascinated. It was the best.” At least in physics, in life it was girls. He met Arline Greenbaum, an artistic soul and the most popular girl at school, when they were both 13. She had a legion of admirers, but of course it was he who won her over in high school, as well as all the accolades he could get.
Despite this, he was unable to go to Columbia University. It is not quite clear why he was rejected, but it was probably because he was Jewish, although they were not religious at home. American universities differentiated between students and had a quota of places available for Jews, but this was already filled at Columbia, so he went to MIT or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He arrived in Cambridge in the autumn of 1935 and immediately found his place in the fraternity, but not in academia.
He couldn’t decide what he wanted to study. He was thinking of choosing mathematics as his main subject. He asked the department what he could do with it. “Well, you can become an insurance statistician and calculate insurance rates for insurance companies,” replied the head of the department, who went on to say that for students who ask this question before they start their studies, mathematics might not be the most suitable choice.
Feynman agreed and started thinking about electronics. He didn’t like that either. Now he was left with physics, and he chose it, not being fascinated by the fact that the chair of the department was the eminent physicist John Slater and that the lecturers included Julius Stratton, later Dean of MIT, and Philip Morse, an expert in nuclear and molecular computation.
Feynman and his friend Ted Welton decided to take the advanced physics programme in their first year, even though students usually only started it before graduation. Welton later recalled what it was like to attend Julius Stratton’s lectures:
“Stratton was undoubtedly an outstanding lecturer, but occasionally he skipped preparations, and then there was usually the embarrassment of his skin turning slightly red. He hesitated only for a moment, then asked: ‘Mr Feynman, how would you solve the problem?’ Dick stepped unsteadily in front of the blackboard and gave the solution, always correctly and occasionally wittily.”
In those years, quantum mechanics was still in its infancy and not overly discussed in regular lectures, but it was fun in private lessons with Philip Morse. “He made us calculate really interesting things.” By the time he graduated, he’d met a whole bunch of them and wanted to stay at MIT.
“This is the best school in the country for science and engineering,” he told his boss why he didn’t want to go elsewhere. “Do you really think so?” asked Slater. “Yes,” Richard replied. “And that’s why you need to go to another school,” his supervisor replied. Richard ended up at Princeton, but only after Slater and Professor Morse secured him a place.
His grades were the most outstanding the admissions board had ever seen, the best in maths and physics and the worst in history and English. His Jewish origins were again controversial, but lobbying was successful and by the autumn of 1939 Feynman was at Princeton.
You must be joking, Mr Feynman
On the very first day, he was invited to the Dean’s for the obligatory Sunday tea. “I didn’t even know what ‘tea’ was or why!” he later recalled the complication that followed. “I had no social skills. I had no experience of anything like that at all.” And so he entered the Dean’s living room.
“It was all very formal. I was thinking about where to sit, whether to go to the girl or not, and how to behave, when I heard a voice behind me.’What would you like your tea with, Mr Feynman, cream or lemon?’ It was the Dean’s wife pouring the tea. ‘I’ll have both, thank you,’ I said, still looking where to sit, when suddenly I heard, ‘You must be joking, Mr Feynman.’ ‘Joking? I am. What the devil did I say? It was only then that I realised what I had done. That was my first experience of tea matters,” says one of the many anecdotes in his book, which he named after this very plot.
At Princeton, he became a research assistant under John Archibald Wheeler, six years his senior. The latter was “a delightful mixture of conservatism and boldness”, dressed like a businessman and rather shaved when, at the beginning of class, he pulled out his pocket watch to signal to the students that his time was limited. Feynman immediately noticed his gesture, but the next time he brought his own one-dollar watch with him and placed it pompously next to Wheeler’s. The two men rushed into the circle and immediately made a connection.
This was all the easier because Wheler, an expert in nuclear fission, was also a specialist. “Somewhere beneath that suave façade was a loose tiger, a light-hearted entertainer … with the courage to delve into crazy problems,” one colleague described him. Now they were diving into them with Feynman, for whom no authority was so strong that he would not challenge it.
He proved quantum theory so vividly that Wheeler sent it to Einstein, its strongest critic. “I still can’t believe that God rolls the dice. But maybe. I have earned the right to be wrong,” the reply said.
Feynman worked with Wheeler to explore the foundations of physics in a focused way, even as his private life was falling apart. He was still at MIT when Arline fell ill. A mass had begun to grow on the side of her neck and she was running a fever. Doctors misdiagnosed her twice, and finally a biopsy confirmed that she had tuberculosis, but it hadn’t attacked her lungs, but her lymph nodes.
It was clear to both that she might not recover. The official prognosis gave her a maximum of six years to live. But Arline was “a love like no other I have ever known”, as Feynman later put it. He wanted to marry her, but everyone else objected. “To marry at this moment to please one person is selfish. I was surprised to learn that such a marriage is not illegal. It should be,” his outraged mother wrote to him.
Instead of breaking off the engagement, in June 1942 he got in his car and picked up Arline at her home on Long Island. They were married at the age of 24 in an office on Staten Island. Their witnesses were a bookkeeper and an accountant, and their “romantic boat ride” was a boat ride from Brooklyn to Staten Island.
Richard arranged for Arline to move to a charity hospital near Princeton, where he was now in his third year. Love is “good and terrible … I know we both have a future in a world of happiness – now and forever”, his wife wrote to him in a letter from the hospital, while he was at college researching how to build a nuclear bomb.
Other faculties did the same until, in 1943, the scattered research was brought together and a laboratory for the Manhattan Project, headed by Robert Oppenheimer, was set up in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Among the first to volunteer was 25-year-old Richard.
Death of loved ones and innocent people
Oppenheimer arranged for Arline to move to a nearby convalescent home in Albuquerque, where Feynman hitchhiked or borrowed a car to visit her every weekend. He called her Putsy and she was endlessly amused.
One day she sent him a box of pencils in Los Alamos. On each one it said: “Richard, darling, I love you! Putsy.” He complained that he was embarrassed to write with them in front of his colleagues, all eminent scientists. She was amused to death. “Amazing. Aren’t you proud of the fact that I love you?” she said, became a little more serious and continued, “What do you care what other people think?” From then on, he really didn’t care what other people thought of him.
But he didn’t have to worry about his reputation in Alamos either. The theoretical department was headed by nuclear physicist Hans Bethe, who came from the private Cornell University in Ithaca. He was a German who had studied in Munich, Cambridge and Rome, but had fled to America in 1933 to escape the Nazis. Huge, kind, diplomatic and pragmatic, he got on well with Feynman.
When Feynman arrived in Los Alamos, “it just so happened that all the bigwigs were absent, except Hans Bethe”. The latter needed an interlocutor, so he came up to Feynman and “started arguing. I said: ‘No, no, you’re crazy. He said, ‘Just a moment’, and then he explained how he wasn’t crazy, I was crazy. Then we continued like that. Look, when I hear about physics, I only think about physics. I don’t care who I’m talking to, but then I suggest things like ‘no, no, you’re wrong’, or ‘you’re crazy’.”
Bethe was so impressed by him that, at 25, he became the youngest bandleader in Los Alamos. He worked with great enthusiasm, but he suffered. The tight security measures never got on anyone’s nerves like they did his. He and Arline fought against the censors who wanted to read their letters. Once he had had enough, he got drunk, marched down the road, sang loudly and knocked over everything he could kick. It was then that he decided for the first time to give up alcohol because he was “becoming a moralist”, as he wrote to his wife. Of course, he did not stick to his decision.
Just for fun, he was looking for holes in the fence surrounding the research camp to prove the holes in the security measures, and wondering whether it was moral to abuse the Coca-Cola machine. To relax, he began to slam. Soon no safe was safe from him any more, let alone the lock. He used to get on his victims’ nerves with memos criticising their lapses in security, and they all turned to him when they needed notes from an absent colleague to break into his safe.
“I try to learn everything that is mysterious,” he later explained that he became a skilled burglar because breaking in was just another puzzle he had to solve. But it was more than that, it was his stress release valve. He worked all days and, like others, lived under extreme pressure. He once wrote to his wife that he finished work at 11 pm and went to bed early. At the same time, he watched Arlene’s life fade away. It ended in the spring of 1945.
He was told that the end was nigh. He borrowed a car from Klaus Fuchs. On the way to Albuquerque, his tyre burst three times. At the hospital there was “no dramatic collapse …, her breathing became less and less until there were no more breaths, but just before that there was another small one”. At that moment, his watch mysteriously stopped.
On the way back to Los Alamos, he suffered a fourth tyre puncture and was greeted with sympathetic looks from his colleagues at the finish line. “She’s dead. How is the programme going?” Those were his only words. He felt no pain. He didn’t realise his loss until a month later: “I was passing a shop in Oak Ridge [in Tennessee, where he was sent on a special assignment] and saw a lovely dress in the window. And then it hit me.”
He went home to Far Rockaway, but returned before 16 July 1945, when the plutonium bomb was finally tested. Everyone put on dark glasses, but he didn’t want them because “bright light can never harm your eyes”. He watched the explosion through the truck’s windscreen to shield him from the ultraviolet light, but he still “saw the devil’s thing … I’m probably the only one who saw it with human eyes”.
The Manhattan Project was slowly winding down and Richard Feynman had become a much sought-after figure. Robert Oppenheimer wanted him at Berkeley. He wrote to the chairman of the physics department: “He is certainly the most brilliant young physicist here, and everybody knows it.” He described him as extremely clear, normal in every way, and an outstanding teacher with “a warm attitude to physics in every respect. He is on the best of terms with the theoreticians to whom he belongs and with the experimentalists with whom he works in close harmony.”
Of course, Hans Bethe also wrote to his faculty at Cornell. He, too, sang Richard’s praises, mentioning his added value of being extremely open-minded. In the autumn of 1944, Bethe and Cornell won the race for him: they offered him an assistant professorship and sabbatical leave until he had finished his work at Los Alamos.
For Feynman, the choice was not difficult at all – he wanted to work with Bethe. “I liked him very much. I have never regretted my decision.” And so, at the end of October 1945, he arrived on the Cornell campus.
Finding solace in women and alcohol
He wasn’t in the best of skin. He was still in the throes of losing his wife, though he refused to admit it. He was moved by the realisation that “his” atomic bomb had killed 80,000 people. For the first time, he began to question the value of science. He began to believe that the world would end in nuclear annihilation. The only answer to stress was to move away from physics.
Hans Bethe later claimed that it was not so bad: “A depressed Feynman is only a little less cheerful than any man when he is lively.” But he was now too lively. He went to student parties and pretended to be an undergraduate. He would go to pubs looking for “girls” who needed help with physics, and he perfected the technique of conquest.
He used to pay for the girls’ drinks as standard, until he realised in a club in Albuquerque that talking got much better results. It turns out that girls prefer men who rudely refuse to pay for their drinks but are interested in their interests to helpful cavaliers who don’t listen to them.
Feynman’s tongue has always flowed like a greased tongue. He had a gift for storytelling, but he often made things up, even if the truth was sometimes less likely than a lie. He was pursuing a student and she asked him whether he was a student or a postgraduate. “None of that, I’m a professor,” he replied. “Oh yeah? A professor of what?” “Theoretical physics.” “Then I suppose you worked on the atomic bomb.” “Yes, I was at Los Alamos during the war.” “You bloody liar!” the girl growled at him.
He had become almost addicted to women, changing them on the fly, and to alcohol, which flowed in torrents, except that he had no interest in physics until he saw a plate fall out of someone’s hand during lunch in a pub. It was spinning and wobbling at the same time before it landed on the floor. Feynman, bored, wrote the equation of the plate’s motion on a napkin. He went to Bethe and, in his familiar style, joyfully announced, “Hey, Hans! I’ve noticed something interesting.” Sometimes Bethe didn’t quite understand him, but it was not clear to him why the formula was so important. “It’s not important at all. I was just having fun.”
But this party was a turning point because it broke his “scientific” blockade. Physics became playful again and he enjoyed it again. “Everything flowed completely effortlessly. I almost tried to resist! There was nothing important in what I was doing, but in the end it was important. The diagrams and everything that won me the Nobel Prize came from that tinkering with the oscillating saucer.”
He shared the 1965 prize with Julian Schwinger for his theory of quantum electrodynamics, which, in simplified terms, explains everything in the Universe except gravity. The latter was not only an outstanding physicist, but also a mathematician. At the Shelter Island conference, he theoretically broke down the problem by literally writing formulae on a blackboard all day, and only Robert Oppenheimer lasted to the end of the presentation.
Feynman, on the other hand, has not been able to explain how he arrived at his solution. He always imagined the problem and solved it intuitively, but the theoretical part, in which Schwinger excelled, was very lame. The proverbially analytical physicists found it difficult to understand him because he only did as much calculus as was necessary, and so he failed to impress with his presentation of quantum electrodynamics at the same conference.
Once he spent a weekend with his sister, who was a physicist like him. In the morning, he asked her to go to the room where her roommate was sleeping to get his notes. Joan looked but saw nothing resembling mathematics. There were just some papers with funny pictures on them, and she said to him, “Richard, I can’t find your papers, they’re just some crazy diagrams.” “That’s my work!” he said.
Today, they are used to show everything from the behaviour of subnuclear particles to the motion of planets, the evolution of galaxies and the structure of the Universe, but at the time, only Freeman Dyson, who was not even at the conference, could see from the reports that Julius Schwinger was explaining mathematically what Richard Feynman was showing in graphic detail. He combined the two and came up with the “Middle Way Theory”, for which he himself became famous in January 1949. “So, Doc, now you’re ‘in’,” Feynman, who had worked with him at Cornell, told him.
But Dyson did not win the Nobel Prize for his “discovery”, as Feynman and Schwinger did, presumably because only three individuals can share the prize, and the Japanese Sin-Itiro Tomonaga also appeared in this story. He had worked on quantum electrodymanics before, but since Japan was isolated during the Second World War, nobody knew about it. He contacted Oppenheimer in 1948, presented his views on the theory a year later and became the third Nobel Prize winner in physics in 1965.
I want to go where the pretty girls are
The theory of quantum electrodynamics is “the jewel of physics, our most precious possession”, Feynman wrote when he was in a good mood. But one winter day in 1950, he was unwell. It was snowing in Ithaca, his car drifting off the road. He struggled with the chains and thought of better weather. “I remember that was the moment I decided this was crazy. There must be a corner of the world somewhere that doesn’t have these problems,” he wrote in one of his books.
He discovered it when he visited Caltech in Pasadena, California, USA. Robert Bacher, who used to work with him at Cornell, knew how to lure him to Pasadena. “He was very cunning. He knew me like the back of his hand, and he said, ‘Feynman, I’ve got one car too many, and I’ll lend it to you. See, that’s how you get to Hollywood and the Sunset Strip. And so every night I would go to the Sunset Strip, go to the nightclubs and bars and get into the action. It was everything I loved in Las Vegas – beautiful girls, big cinemas and so on. Bacher knew how to awaken my interest in Caltech.”
In Las Vegas, he gambled and specialised in seducing bar dancers. Now he was doing the same in California, only he was drawn to Brazil. In 1949, he spent six weeks lecturing in Rio de Janeiro. He wanted to go back there, but Robert Bacher wanted him to stay in Caltech, and he was ready to give him anything he wanted. So he arranged for his work at Caltech to start with a sabbatical leave and he was able to spend the academic year 1951/52 in Brazil.
He stayed at the Miramar Palace Hotel in Copacabana and lectured at the Centre for Physical Research in Rio de Janeiro. In Portuguese, of course. He learned it for the occasion. He also spoke Spanish and researched Mayan hieroglyphics because they reminded him of riddles, and he resisted them as hard as women.
He also knew a little Chinese. Sister Joan sent him a letter in Chinese, and he immediately started learning the language so he could write back to her: “My elder brother speaks it too.” Then he added: “I really am a bastard: I would never let my younger sister be better at anything.”
Joan later confirmed that no one livened up the party like Richard did, and his afternoons in Brazil were completely dissolved. They were usually spent on the beach chasing women and in bars having a drink or two or three.
One afternoon, he felt the need for alcohol. He was alone and wanted a drink. It was then that he realised that he was slowly slipping into alcoholism. “This strong feeling, which I didn’t understand, scared me. For me, thinking is so much fun that I don’t want to destroy this most pleasant machine that makes life so glorious.” He gave up alcohol completely, but that didn’t stop him from pretending to be drunk at parties.
Towards the end of his stay in Brazil, he visited a museum with a friend, “a very cute girl with pigtails”. He was lecturing her on funerary practices in the Egyptian art department when he remembered that he had learnt all these details from Mary Louise Ball. She had been his girlfriend in Ithaca, and now lived conveniently not far from Pasadena.
He was overwhelmed by a wave of nostalgia, but he just fell in love with her in a letter. She said yes and they married as soon as he returned home. Four years later, in 1956, they were divorced. Mary’s reasons for divorce included what she understood to be his “extreme cruelty”, which meant that he had begun to work on physics in bed that morning.
The unsold soul
He did not mourn her, but she was not Arline, and Arline was not the girl in the polka-dot bikini he saw on the lakeshore when he was at the Geneva conference. Of course, he had to meet her immediately. He found out that she was Gweneth Howarth, originally from Yorkshire, fleeing the provincialism there and a nanny in Switzerland.
He quickly offered her a new job: would she be his housekeeper in California? No. He returned to his native Altadena and persuaded her from a distance. Not long afterwards, neighbours were watching her drive him to work in the morning, and in the autumn of 1960 they learned that she had changed from a busy housewife to a married woman.
He had better luck with her than with Mary, because Gweneth was extremely forgiving and completely indifferent to everything. She didn’t mind, for example, that he regularly went to a strip bar, ordered a 7-Up, watched a few naked dancers on stage and then started to work on physics or preparing for lectures.
Gweneth didn’t mind when he started learning to paint. Of course, he was only interested in nudes, but there were naked women walking around his studio, or he would walk up to them.
Two children, Carl and Michele, were born to Mr and Mrs Feynman. In 1977, Gweneth explained the secret of their successful marriage. I don’t feel I have to compete, and I don’t feel I’m a shadow. I am completely happy. I am not his maid, we get on well. I know he is happy because he says so. When he comes home at night, he says: ‘Oh, it’s so nice to come home.’ For example, on rainy winter evenings, when the fire is going, the curtains are drawn and there is a nice smell coming from the kitchen. I don’t just do it for him, I do it for my family and I love it. I like comfort. That is where my satisfaction comes from and I do not need to be important. I do things he doesn’t do and I do them well.”
She ignored the other women, she got used to his unusualness. Freeman Dyson later laughingly recalled how they once drove to Albuquerque.Feynman had to go there urgently because there was a girl he wanted for himself, but they had to spend the night on the way. Since all the hotels were full, they went to a brothel.
Feynman did not change his lifestyle habits even after he became famous. He once participated in a conference as a Nobel Laureate. All the decent hotels in the city were booked. Without hesitation, he booked a room for a week in a secluded hotel, mostly occupied by prostitutes and their clients.
He hated fame, he loved money, but he never allowed himself to be seduced by it. One day, the University of Chicago offered him “an extraordinary sum of money, three or four times what I was earning”. He wrote the dean off:
“When I read the salary, I decided I had to turn down the offer. The reason I have to turn down the salary is so I can do what I’ve always wanted to do – find a beautiful mistress, put her up in a new apartment, buy her nice things… With the salary you have offered, I could actually do that, and I know what would happen. I would be worried about what she was doing. When I would come home, I would argue with her and so on. All these distractions would make me uncomfortable and I would be miserable. I would not be able to do physics to any quality and there would be a big mess. What I have always wanted to do would be bad for me, so I have decided to refuse your offer.”
He never forgot that “you must not deceive yourself, and you deceive yourself most easily”, which is why he always “turned himself upside down”, just as he broke down to the core everything he undertook.
His colleagues at Caltech were a little afraid of him, as one of them admitted: “If you said something in a meeting that he didn’t agree with, he immediately put you in your place with his sharp tongue. He couldn’t stand queers.” He could be rude, intimidating and downright argumentative. He hardly ever read his colleagues’ scientific papers, but he could nevertheless embarrass them to no end by relentlessly drilling them with questions during their lectures at conferences and finally proving that they did not know what they were talking about.
On the contrary, the students adored him. He advised them, “Fall in love with something and do it! No one has figured out why in life and it doesn’t even matter. Explore the world. Almost everything is really interesting if you look deep enough. Work as hard and as much as you want on what you love. Don’t think about what you want to be, think about what you want to do.”
His lectures were like a play, with everything from drama and surprises to comedy and dense confessionality. “He loved the stage. As much as he was a scientist, he was also an actor. He could explain things in a different way from the way the experts thought about them”, was how someone sitting in his lecture room described him.
The vitality boil
It was for this reason that in the early 1960s one of his colleagues, Matthew Sands, tried to persuade him to start teaching introductory physics: “Look, Richard, you have invested years in understanding physics. Now you have the chance to peel it down to its essence and get it down to beginner level.” Feynman thought for a few days, then asked, “But has any great physicist ever given a lecture on basic physics?” Without knowing it, Sands replied. “I will!” decided Feynman immediately.
He did not remove the object with his left hand. He prepared his lectures so thoroughly that his colleagues Matthew Sands and Robert Leighton summarised and published them in three books. They are so good that they are still used by students today. In one of them, for example, he explained the electric force and the basic electric charge carried by electrons and protons:
“Substances are a mixture of positive protons and negative electrons. They attract and repel each other with great force, but the balance is so perfect that when you stand next to someone, you don’t feel any force at all. If there was just a tiny balance, you would detect it. If you were an arm’s length away from someone and you each had one per cent more electrons than protons, the repulsive force would be incredible. How big? Enough to lift the Empire State Building? No! To lift Mount Everest? No! The rebound would be so strong that it would lift a ‘weight’ equivalent to the whole Earth!”
Even his opponents had to admit that he was one of indestructible vitality. He overlooked nothing and was interested in everything. He enjoyed being “something I am not”. In Brazil he became an excellent bongo drummer and was a member of the local band. He was fascinated by persuading women to undress so that he could draw them naked. At certain times in his life, he had so many of them at one time that his secretary had to urge him to “get rid of some of them”.
Out of curiosity, he immersed himself in biology, took a sabbatical after winning the Nobel Prize, and researched viruses at Caltech so successfully that the average researcher would have declared his achievements a remarkable career. For him, they were just a pastime, in the same way that he worked for a computer company for several summers as an ordinary employee out of curiosity, because he was interested in computer development. He was also one of the first to see the potential of tiny devices such as those used today in nanotechnology.
In 1983, aged 65, he bought a computer. He went to get it and parked it outside a shop. In his perpetual childish excitement, he tripped on the pavement, fell and hit his head on the wall. Blood ran down his face. The shop assistant persuaded him to get help and go back for his computer first, but on Saturday he couldn’t find his doctor, so he drove around Pasadena for a while and finally decided to call an ambulance.
The paramedic bandaged his head and sent him to the emergency room. There, his wound was cleaned and stitched. Everything seemed to be as it should be, but his neck was a little stiff and he was suffering from headaches. A little later, he started to experience driving problems: once he almost crashed into an oncoming car and another time he almost hit a pedestrian.
He told himself that he was getting old, but now he was also having problems during lectures. During one, he was shocked – a visiting colleague pointed out a mistake. He was not making mistakes. For the first time, the students did not understand what he was talking about. They all wondered what was wrong with him, and they all kept quiet because he was always weird.
Then he made a scene of the woman he was painting. Because she had a small child, he went to her home, only this time he stripped naked so that she screamed and locked herself in the bathroom. Then he got dressed and went to the toilet, but went through the wrong door and came out into the yard. He spent forty minutes looking for the car he had parked in front of the block, but in the end he remembered none of it.
When it all got too weird even for him, his wife convinced him to see a doctor. It turned out that during the fall, a blood vessel in his brain had burst and he was slowly bleeding. The pressure in his head was building up. Without help, he would have fallen into a coma and died.
“The cure is simple: you twist the hole, let the disgust out and the brain goes back to its place.” He recovered quickly, but had some problems with reading. “As far as I know, everything is fixed, but how can I be sure? I was deluded before and I can certainly delude myself now,” he said, again distantly analysing what he had done.
So he realised that sometimes you wish you could “detach” a little, but when something is really wrong with your mind, you don’t even notice. “A mind that is going numb loses the analytical ability to observe itself. I simply rationalised every problem. I couldn’t see what was quite obvious: a man doesn’t get old in a week!”
The Last Adventure
He certainly didn’t. He still refused to attend faculty meetings, never applied for a research grant, never accepted invitations to lectures, and did not participate in committees. But he did serve on one, and the denouement was, of course, dramatic.
On 8 January 1986, just 73 seconds after it was launched from Florida, the Challenger spacecraft exploded. Why? NASA had asked him to join a 12-member exploratory committee. He did not want to because, on principle, he wanted nothing to do with the government. That was true, but it was also true that he had been diagnosed with a rare form of abdominal cancer in 1978 and had now been diagnosed with a new one.
“He came home and said, ‘It’s as big as a football’,” his son Carl recalled how his father told him the news of his first cancer. “I said, ‘Wow, what does that mean?’ He said, ‘Well, I went to the medical library and found out there’s about a 30 per cent chance it’s going to kill me’.”
He told his son the truth, but he could often be forcefully insensitive with it. A series of operations and treatments successfully prolonged his life, but just before he was due to become a member of the Commission of Inquiry, he learned that he now had a rare form of bone marrow cancer.
He did not want to participate. His wife intervened. She told him that if he took part, 11 of them would walk around together, and the 12th would run around sticking his nose into everything, no matter how strange. “You probably won’t find anything, but if there is anything, you will find it. There is no human being who can do it like you,” she assured him. “Being very immodest, I believed her,” he wrote later. He reportedly said to his wife: “I’m going to commit suicide in six months.” And he accepted the offer.
It turned into his last avatnura. His wife was right: all the members of the commission – the government representative, NASA and even former astronauts like Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, and Sally Ride, the first woman in space – wanted to sweep the matter under the carpet, he wanted to get to the bottom of it.
He had only the tacit support of Major General Donald Kutyn, the spokesman for the space programme in the Ministry of Defence, behind him. For Armstrong, the investigation, which claimed the lives of seven crew members, was unnecessary, but for William Rogers, Secretary of State in the Nixon administration, all that mattered was that nothing should be done to tarnish NASA, because it had done so much so far and the faith of the American people in it must remain intact.
Feynman, of course, was only interested in what really happened. When all those involved in the construction of the spacecraft were questioned and most of them answered detailed questions by saying they did not know and would provide the information later, which of course they did not, everyone was satisfied, but not Feynman.
It soon became clear to him that the accident was probably caused by a rubber ring seal in the solid rocket fuel compartment. The annular seal normally fills a fixed gap, Feynman explained, but this is not the case with spacecraft. Inside the seal, the gap grows as the pressure increases. For the seal to seal properly all the time, the rubber would have to expand fast enough to fill this expanding gap. This increases in a fraction of a second during a rocket launch.
It turns out that the seal was already a concern for its manufacturer. The night before the launch, Thiokol Company engineers warned NASA officials that the craft could not fly if the temperature was below 11.7 degrees Celsius. By morning, under pressure from the same Nasa, the temperature limit had been lowered to minus 1.7 degrees Celsius. And the morning was really cold.
Feynman wanted to investigate the low-temperature expansion of the seal in detail, but encountered strong resistance. In the end, he did what he had done in the lecture theatre, but demonstrated the problem in a practical way at a press conference. Early in the morning, he bought a pair of pliers and a C-clamp from a shop, and then performed the experiment in front of the cameras. It was simple, but that is what made it dramatic.
In his hand was a ring seal from a spacecraft. He pushed it into the ice water and squeezed it with a C-clamp. When he released the pressure, the seal remained unchanged. “For at least a few seconds, and more likely more than that, a given material at 0 degrees Celsius has no stretch,” he concluded his presentation.
He and the investigation team immediately parted ways: they completed their official investigation, he continued with his. He travelled for months from Florida and Alabama to Texas to visit all the space centres and their contractors. Everywhere he came to the same conclusion: “Exaggeration at the top is inconsistent with reality at the bottom.” Communication “slowed down and finally stopped”.
He wrote his report and the Commission of Inquiry attached it to the official one as an “addendum”. He concluded by saying, “For technology to be effective, reality must come before public relations, because nature cannot be fooled.”
But now he was exhausted. The mass in his abdominal cavity had grown and he would have to have a new operation. He didn’t want to. He knew it was over, but he stayed true to himself until the end. “I would never want to die twice. It’s so boring,” he told his wife before he died in 1988, aged 69.
“What am I proud of? That I was able to love my first wife as deeply as I could,” he wrote before. Although he himself told anecdotes from his past throughout his life, he never mentioned that he wrote a letter to Arline two years after her death. It was a pilgrimage to a box of memoirs. It was opened only after his death.
“I love you, darling. In my head I find it hard to understand what it means to love you after you are dead, but I still wish I could comfort you and take care of you, and I wish you would love me and take care of me,” he wrote to her at a time when he was formally considered the greatest womaniser and merrier among scientists.
