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