2018-02-23 18:58:03 +00:00
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---
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created_at: '2016-07-11T16:16:20.000Z'
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title: My Time with Richard Feynman (2005)
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url: https://backchannel.com/my-time-with-richard-feynman-8e15ef968e75#.4xv7d04of
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author: jonbaer
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points: 95
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story_text:
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comment_text:
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num_comments: 19
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story_id:
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story_title:
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story_url:
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parent_id:
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created_at_i: 1468253780
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_tags:
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- story
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- author_jonbaer
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- story_12072089
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objectID: '12072089'
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2018-06-08 12:05:27 +00:00
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year: 2005
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2018-02-23 18:58:03 +00:00
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---
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2018-03-03 09:35:28 +00:00
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#### “You and I are very lucky,” he said to me once. “Because whatever else is going on, we’ve always got our physics.”
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2018-02-23 18:19:40 +00:00
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2018-03-03 09:35:28 +00:00
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![](https://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/13Ct8DXLHQRJxNXQWbk6yFQ-1.jpeg)
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Richard Feynman and Stephen WolframTranscribed from a talk given at the
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Boston Public Library, April 2005. This essay is in Stephen Wolfram’s
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[Idea Makers: Personal Perspectives on the Lives & Ideas of Some Notable
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People](https://www.amazon.com/Idea-Makers-Personal-Perspectives-Notable/dp/1579550037/wolframresearch-20?tag=w050b-20)
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2018-02-23 18:19:40 +00:00
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2018-03-03 09:35:28 +00:00
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![](https://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/1t6Jsgbu_bU84ZZkgxw8G8A-2.png)I
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[**first met Richard
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Feynman**](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=richard+feynman) when I
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was 18, and he was 60. And over the course of ten years, I think I got
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to know him fairly well. First when I was in the physics group at
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Caltech. And then later when we both consulted for a once-thriving
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Boston company called Thinking Machines Corporation. I actually don’t
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think I’ve ever talked about Feynman in public before. And there’s
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really so much to say, I’m not sure where to start.
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2018-02-23 18:19:40 +00:00
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2018-03-03 09:35:28 +00:00
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But if there’s one moment that summarizes Richard Feynman and my
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relationship with him, perhaps it’s this. It was probably 1982. I’d been
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at Feynman’s house, and our conversation had turned to some kind of
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unpleasant situation that was going on. I was about to leave. And
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Feynman stopped me and said, “You know, you and I are very lucky.
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Because whatever else is going on, we’ve always got our physics.”
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Feynman loved doing physics. I think what he loved most was the process
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of it. Of calculating. Of figuring things out. It didn’t seem to matter
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to him so much if what came out was big and important. Or esoteric and
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weird. What mattered to him was the process of finding it. And he was
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often quite competitive about it.
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Some scientists (myself probably included) are driven by the ambition to
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build grand intellectual edifices. I think Feynman — at least in the
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years I knew him — was much more driven by the pure pleasure of actually
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doing the science. He seemed to like best to spend his time figuring
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things out, and calculating. And he was a great calculator. All around
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perhaps the best human calculator there’s ever been.
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Here’s a page from my files: quintessential Feynman. Calculating a
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Feynman
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diagram:
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![](https://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/1hiQFvQlRoLLcGqDU5-lD8g-1.gif)It’s
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kind of interesting to look at. His style was always very much the same.
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He always just used regular calculus and things. Essentially
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nineteenth-century mathematics. He never trusted much else. But wherever
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one could go with that, Feynman could go. Like no one else.
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I always found it incredible. He would start with some problem, and fill
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up pages with calculations. And at the end of it, he would actually get
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the right answer\! But he usually wasn’t satisfied with that. Once he’d
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gotten the answer, he’d go back and try to figure out why it was
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obvious. And often he’d come up with one of those classic Feynman
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straightforward-sounding explanations. And he’d never tell people about
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all the calculations behind it. Sometimes it was kind of a game for him:
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having people be flabbergasted by his seemingly instant physical
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intuition, not knowing that really it was based on some long, hard
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calculation he’d done.
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He always had a fantastic formal intuition about the innards of his
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calculations. Knowing what kind of result some integral should have,
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whether some special case should matter, and so on. And he was always
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trying to sharpen his intuition.
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You know, I remember a time — it must have been the summer of 1985 —
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when I’d just discovered a thing called rule 30. That’s probably my own
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all-time favorite scientific discovery. And that’s what launched a lot
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of the whole new kind of science that I’ve spent 20 years building (and
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wrote about in [my
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book](http://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/page-27) A New Kind of
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Science).
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![](https://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/1y3Svp15U9vEJkG0ofbf2qg-1.gif)Well,
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Feynman and I were both visiting Boston, and we’d spent much of an
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afternoon talking about rule 30. About how it manages to go from that
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little black square at the top to make all this complicated stuff. And
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about what that means for physics and so on. \[See A New Kind of
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Science,
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[page 30](http://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/page-30).\]
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![](https://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/16zzy5bIva5rtm0lVIUVbyQ-1.gif)Well,
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we’d just been crawling around the floor — with help from some other
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people — trying to use meter rules to measure some feature of a giant
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printout of it. And Feynman took me aside, rather conspiratorially, and
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said, “Look, I just want to ask you one thing: how did you know rule 30
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would do all this crazy stuff?” “You know me,” I said. “I didn’t. I just
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had a computer try all the possible rules. And I found it.” “Ah,” he
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said, “now I feel much better. I was worried you had some way to figure
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it out.”
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Feynman and I talked a bunch more about rule 30. He really wanted to get
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an intuition for how it worked. He tried bashing it with all his usual
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tools. Like he tried to work out what the slope of the line between
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order and chaos is. And he calculated. Using all his usual calculus and
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so on. He and his son Carl even spent a bunch of time trying to crack
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rule 30 using a
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computer.
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![](https://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/1-cqmdmHwYU9PtWNRQ-Yf1Q-1.jpeg)![](https://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/1lPDhsgXyfSoTAO7QLd42bA-1.jpeg)And
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one day he calls me and says, “OK, Wolfram, I can’t crack it. I think
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you’re on to something.” Which was very encouraging.
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Feynman and I tried to work together on a bunch of things over the
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years. On quantum computers before anyone had ever heard of those. On
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trying to make a chip that would generate perfect physical randomness —
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or eventually showing that that wasn’t possible. On whether all the
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computation needed to evaluate Feynman diagrams really was necessary. On
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whether it was a coincidence or not that there’s an e^–H t in
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statistical mechanics and an e^iH t in quantum mechanics. On what the
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simplest essential phenomenon of quantum mechanics really is.
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I remember often when we were both consulting for Thinking Machines in
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Boston, Feynman would say, “Let’s hide away and do some physics.” This
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was a typical scenario. Yes, I think we thought nobody was noticing that
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we were off at the back of a press conference about a new computer
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system talking about the nonlinear sigma model. Typically, Feynman would
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do some calculation. With me continually protesting that we should just
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go and use a computer. Eventually I’d do that. Then I’d get some
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results. And he’d get some results. And then we’d have an argument about
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whose intuition about the results was better.
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I should say, by the way, that it wasn’t that Feynman didn’t like
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computers. He even had gone to some trouble to get an early Commodore
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PET personal computer, and enjoyed doing things with it. And in 1979,
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when I started working on the forerunner of what would become
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Mathematica, he was very interested. We talked a lot about how it should
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work. He was keen to explain his methodologies for solving problems: for
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doing integrals, for notation, for organizing his work. I even managed
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to get him a little interested in the problem of language design. Though
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I don’t think there’s anything directly from Feynman that has survived
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in Mathematica. But his favorite integrals we can certainly
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do.
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![](https://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/172MJCYWzvpS0AogmfRg_og-1.gif)![](https://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/1WfJHqFINZMzwSZcEd-lEyA-1.jpeg)You
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know, it was sometimes a bit of a liability having Feynman involved.
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Like when I was working on SMP — the forerunner of Mathematica — I
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organized some seminars by people who’d worked on other systems. And
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Feynman used to come. And one day a chap from a well-known computer
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science department came to speak. I think he was a little tired, and he
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ended up giving what was admittedly not a good talk. And it degenerated
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at some point into essentially telling puns about the name of the system
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they’d built. Well, Feynman got more and more annoyed. And eventually
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stood up and gave a whole speech about how “If this is what computer
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science is about, it’s all nonsense….” I think the chap who gave the
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talk thought I’d put Feynman up to this. And has hated me for 25 years…
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You know, in many ways, Feynman was a loner. Other than for social
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reasons, he really didn’t like to work with other people. And he was
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mostly interested in his own work. He didn’t read or listen too much; he
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wanted the pleasure of doing things himself. He did used to come to
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physics seminars, though. Although he had rather a habit of using them
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as problem-solving exercises. And he wasn’t always incredibly sensitive
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to the speakers. In fact, there was a period of time when I organized
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the theoretical physics seminars at Caltech. And he often egged me on to
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compete to find fatal flaws in what the speakers were saying. Which led
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to some very unfortunate incidents. But also led to some interesting
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science.
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One thing about Feynman is that he went to some trouble to arrange his
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life so that he wasn’t particularly busy — and so he could just work on
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what he felt like. Usually he had a good supply of problems. Though
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sometimes his long-time assistant would say: “You should go and talk to
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him. Or he’s going to start working on trying to decode Mayan
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hieroglyphs again.” He always cultivated an air of irresponsibility.
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Though I would say more towards institutions than people.
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And I was certainly very grateful that he spent considerable time trying
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to give me advice — even if I was not always great at taking it. One of
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the things he often said was that “peace of mind is the most important
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prerequisite for creative work.” And he thought one should do everything
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one could to achieve that. And he thought that meant, among other
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things, that one should always stay away from anything worldly, like
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management.
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Feynman himself, of course, spent his life in academia — though I think
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he found most academics rather dull. And I don’t think he liked their
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standard view of the outside world very much. And he himself often
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preferred more unusual folk.
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Quite often he’d introduce me to the odd characters who’d visit him. I
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remember once we ended up having dinner with the rather charismatic
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founder of a semi-cult called EST. It was a curious dinner. And
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afterwards, Feynman and I talked for hours about leadership. About
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leaders like Robert Oppenheimer. And Brigham Young. He was fascinated —
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and mystified — by what it is that lets great leaders lead people to do
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incredible things. He wanted to get an intuition for that.
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You know, it’s funny. For all Feynman’s independence, he was
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surprisingly diligent. I remember once he was preparing some fairly
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minor conference talk. He was quite concerned about it. I said, “You’re
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a great speaker; what are you worrying about?” He said, “Yes, everyone
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thinks I’m a great speaker. So that means they expect more from me.” And
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in fact, sometimes it was those throwaway conference talks that have
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ended up being some of Feynman’s most popular pieces. On nanotechnology.
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Or foundations of quantum theory. Or other things.
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You know, Feynman spent most of his life working on prominent current
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problems in physics. But he was a confident problem solver. And
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occasionally he would venture outside, bringing his “one can solve any
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problem just by thinking about it” attitude with him. It did have some
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limits, though. I think he never really believed it applied to human
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affairs, for example. Like when we were both consulting for Thinking
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Machines in Boston, I would always be jumping up and down about how if
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the management of the company didn’t do this or that, they would fail.
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He would just say, “Why don’t you let these people run their company; we
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can’t figure out this kind of stuff.” Sadly, the company did in the end
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fail. But that’s another
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story.
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![](https://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/1uW_l9n54f47SZbPxRBEq2A-3.png)
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