Quantum Man: Richard Feynman's Life in Science Read Free

skill. How does one know which avenue of approach will be most fruitful to solve a physics problem? No doubt some aspects of intuition are acquired. This is why physics majors are required to solve so many problems. In this way, they begin to learn which approaches work and which don’t, and increase their toolkit of techniques along the way. But surely some aspect of physical intuition cannot be taught, one that resonates at a certain place and time. Einstein had such intuition, and it served him well for over twenty years, from his epochal work on special relativity to his crowning achievement, general relativity. But his intuition began to fail him as he slowly drifted away from the mainstream of interest in quantum mechanics in the twentieth century.
    Feynman’s intuition was unique in a different way. Whereas Einstein developed completely new theories about nature, Feynman explored existing ideas from a completely new and usually more fruitful perspective. The only way he could really understand physical ideas was to derive them using his own language. But because his language was usually also self-taught, the end results sometimes differed radically from what “conventional” wisdom produced. As we shall see, Feynman created his own wisdom.
    But Feynman’s intuition was also earned the hard way, based on relentless labor. His systematic approach and the thoroughness with which he examined problems were already evident in high school. He recorded his progress in notebooks, with tables of sines and cosines he had calculated himself, and later on in his comprehensive calculus notebook, titled “The Calculus for the Practical Man,” with extensive tables of integrals, which again he had worked out himself. In later life he would amaze people by proposing a new way to solve a problem, or by grasping immediately the heart of a complex issue. More often than not this was because at some time, in the thousands of pages of notes he kept as he worked to understand nature, Feynman had thought about that very problem and explored not just one, but a host of different ways of solving it. It was this willingness to investigate a problem from every vantage point, and to carefully organize his thinking until he had exhausted all possibilities—a product of his deep intellect and his indefatigable ability to concentrate—that set him apart.
    Perhaps willingness is the wrong word here. Necessity would be a better choice. Feynman needed to fully understand every problem he encountered by starting from scratch, solving it in his own way and often in several different ways. Later on, he would try to imbue this same ethic to his students, one of whom later said, “Feynman stressed creativity—which to him meant working things out from the beginning. He urged each of us to create his or her own universe of ideas, so that our products, even if only answers to assigned classwork problems, would have their own original character—just as his own work carried the unique stamp of his personality.”
    Not only was Feynman’s ability to concentrate for long periods evident when he was young, but so was his ability to control and organize his thoughts. I remember having a chemistry set when I was a kid and I also remember often randomly throwing things together to see what would happen. But Feynman, as he later emphasized, “never played chaotically with scientific things.” Rather he always carried out his scientific “play” in a controlled manner, always attentive to what was going on. Again, much later, after his death, it became clear from the extensive notes he took that he carefully recorded each of his explorations. He even considered at one point organizing his domestic life with his future wife along scientific lines, before a friend convinced him that he was being hopelessly unrealistic. Ultimately, his naivete in this regard disappeared, and much later he advised a student, “You cannot develop a personality with physics