Richard Feynman was a legendary physicist. Of course, he was a damn fine physicist. But another reason that his name is so well-known is that he was fond of telling stories of interesting events in his life and these anecdotes have become very popular. There are many books filled with these stories, many of which I have read. The last one I read was a comic: Feynman by Ottaviani and Myrick. At first, I did not like the weird shapes of people in the pages. But after reading through, I feel that the funny shapes better carry the spirit of the Feynman stories. The one thing that stayed with me after reading the book, even though I sort of knew a bit about it from the other books, was the fact that there were multiple instances in his career when Feynman was in the doldrums with respect to his work. You hear often the stories of his exceptional calculating ability or his practical pranks... the stories of the incomparably smart and inimitably funny Feynman! But it is also useful, especially for a practicing physicist, to know about the times when the legend appeared human, even below average. It is also especially fortunate that we can see these times through his eyes and emotions. There were three that stuck in my mind after the book, and these three I recount below. Some bits I borrow from another book, Genius by James Gleick.
1. Post-war ennui and the spinning plate
I have heard a faculty mention this story in a lecture; so this one is probably the most famous. Feynman came back from the hectic schedule of Los Alamos, having spent an exhilarating time loving the bomb and saving the world among many of the best physicists of his time, to the comparative drudgery of having to take classes and the monumental task of starting the legendary research career that he had dreamed of. Bored and pressured, he was doing almost no research. He was teaching classes and reading Arabian Nights, but he felt he was shirking. Then he got this big offer from Princeton that added to his burden. Finally, he said enough is enough. He was not responsible for other people's expectations; and he rejected the Princeton offer. Bob Wilson assured him that his classes were all that the department needed of him, and that lightened his load further. He also remembered how physics had seemed lighter earlier, like a fun game. Then while sitting in canteen one day, he saw someone toss up a spinning plate. Something about the spin and the wobble caught his attention. "How does that work like that?", he wondered... and off he went trying to figure it out! He worked on it, the effort was easy as a pie and he worked it out to find the reason, and in the process the excitement he had been missing all along. He went to show Bethe, and Bethe asked him what its was. But Feynman had realized that that is the point! He used to do things for the fun of it, and then he had become too serious about his career and forgotten the fun part of it. Off he went on his research career, and it seems even the spinning plate was soon useful in some theory of the electron orbiting the nucleus or something!
2. The professor forgets how to be a student
A decade later, Feynman was now half-senior. Younger physicists like Murray Gell-Mann were forging ahead. The Chinese pair of Lee and Yang had just made their Nobel-winning breakthrough of proposing the violation of mirror symmetry (parity) by the weak force (verified experimentally by their compatriot Madame Wu, who was unfortunately left out of the Nobel prize). Feynman was at the fringes of this research, contributing at conferences but not dipping deep enough to get anything published. While visiting his sister Joan, also a physicist, he complained that he did not understand the new parity work form Lee and Yang. Joan saw that the professor had forgotten how to be a student.She ordered him to go, pretend to be a student and work through Lee and Yang's paper. This he did... worked it out in his own way... saw an alternate path and embarked on a research journey that ended up with the theory of V-A interaction published along with Gell-Mann! (So there is this other story that Richard had gifted Joan an astronomy book when she was still in school. When she complained that it was too hard, he asked her to read till the point when she is lost and then to just go back and start reading from the beginning. She did that, kept doing that, and finished the book.)
3. Perils of high regard
Feynman won his Nobel prize in 1965. Soon after, he felt as if he had run out of creative juice. Moping around in self- inadequacy, Feynman traveled to University of Chicago to address the undergraduates there. James Watson, of the Watson and Crick fame, gave Feynman a book he had written. The book contained a personal account of the discovery of the structure of DNA. (Titled "Honest Jim" then, the book later found fame with the name "The Double Helix".) Watson wanted a testimonial from Feynman. Feynman started reading, and found it so interesting that he missed a party being held in his honor! He also caught colleague David Goodstein who had traveled with him, and made him read the book all through the night. You see, Watson and Crick did not have good knowledge of what others in their field were doing. Still, they got to the correct answer first. It was the kind of ignorance that Feynman also had creatively utilized earlier and had sort of forgotten. After David had finished, Feynman held up a piece of paper on which he had written, among other scribblings, "DISREGARD"!
Thus it was for Feynman, the human beneath, and in between, the legend.
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