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Four Feynman Books
Review by Michael Swaine
Copyright (C) Dr. Dobb's Journal, November, 1995
Toward the end of August 1954, Richard Feynman was peeking over the top
of a copy of the journal Advances in Physics at an attractive librarian
in the CalTech library.
He had come to the library expressly to look at the librarian, which seemed
to him a pleasant way to pass a boring afternoon; the issue of Advances
in Physics was just a cover for his girl-watching. But an article by
Herbert Froehlich that posed a problem involving slow electrons moving in
a polarizable crystal caught his interest. In the article, Froehlich claimed
that solving the problem would go a long way toward an understanding of
superconductivity.
Feynman didn't see how this problem had anything to do with superconductivity,
a subject that attracted him as much as the librarian, but it was a pretty
little problem, anyway. He started playing with it as he walked back to
his office. Deciding the problem would make a good research assignment,
Feynman began explaining the problem to his graduate assistant. "I
think there must be a variational principle of some kind for estimating
path integrals," he told the student, "I think you should try
to find it."
The student asked Feynman how he should approach the problem, and Feynman
worked through some equations. Staring at the result, the student asked,
"Doesn't that just solve the problem?"
It did. Feynman had solved the problem while explaining it. It was a difficulty
he often had with graduate students; he enjoyed solving problems too much
to give them away.
Feynman's solution proved to be quite powerful and useful. He wrote to Froehlich
in early September, telling him of the librarian incident and describing
his solution to the problem. Now, he went on, "what do we have to do
to understand superconductivity?" That story, recounted in Jagdish
Mehra's The Beat of a Different Drum: The Life and Science of Richard
Feynman, is a revealing view of the kind of person Richard Feynman was.
Who Richard Feynman, the scientist, was should require no explanation, although
some readers may know of him only for one or two of his achievements. How
he worked on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos during World War II. His 1965
Nobel prize for his fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics. Feynman
diagrams, which changed the way physicists look at physics. The Feynman
Lectures, which changed the way the subject is taught.
But Feynman the person was arguably at least as interesting as Feynman the
scientist. He was, in his own witty self- characterization, a curious fellow.
A Curious Fellow
A problem confronts anyone wanting to tell Feynman's story: There are a
number of Feynman stories, and Feynman himself has already told all the
best ones.
To say that there are a number of Feynman stories is an understatement.
Anyone who tried to write at any length about Feynman without telling some
of those stories would not be doing justice to the man. He really was a
curious fellow, both in the sense of being perceived as eccentric and in
the sense of approaching life with an insatiable scientific curiosity.
But the perceived eccentricity was apparently just a consequence of the
way the man Feynman chose to live his life: He pursued, with a wide-eyed
innocence, whatever subjects appealed to him, whether or not they were in
his area of specialization, whether or not they seemed to others to be proper
matters of scientific interest. Example: picking locks on safes containing
top-secret files at Los Alamos during the war, merely to amuse himself.
He apparently actually lived his life by the motto that became the title
of his second popular book: "What do you care what other people think?"
Still, Feynman probably did care what other people thought of him in at
least one sense: He enjoyed being perceived as eccentric. He collected the
best stories about his eccentricities in two autobiographical books: Surely
You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! Adventures of a Curious Character, and What
Do You Care What Other People Think? Further Adventures of a Curious Character.
In these books, you can read about Feynman picking locks at Los Alamos,
sniffing footprints to see how bloodhounds did it, playing the drums, dancing
the samba, and doing cube roots in his head. You can see his drawings. And
you can read about how he solved the mystery of the Challenger disaster.
But you won't come to know the man and his work.
A Biography of a Scientist
Both James Gleick and Jagdish Mehra have set out to tell the story of this
extraordinary man, but they take different paths. Gleicks book, Genius:
The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, is a fairly conventional biography,
beginning with Feynman's Russian and Polish immigrant parents in Far Rockaway,
New York early in this century. Gleick follows Feynman from a boyhood of
science experiments and radio repairing, through college and marriage and
a strange isolation in the New Mexico desert during World War II, and on
to fame and achievement at Cornell and Caltech.
Gleick makes a good story of it.
Early in his adult life, Feynman faced a great tragedy in a setting of great
drama. A young man meets a woman and falls in love. She discovers she is
dying of tuberculosis. War breaks out. They marry and move away from everything
and everyone they know to live in the desert under severe secrecy. While
she lies dying slowly in a hospital in the desert, he labors miles away
with the best physicists in the world in a feverish rush to build the Armageddon
weapon that they have been told America needs to end the war. Gleick tells
that story right and gives it its proper place in Feynmans life story.
He also deals well with Feynman's reaction to these events. It's possible
to see Feynman as a cold and unfeeling man who shrugged off his wife's death
with remarkable ease. Its also possible to see him as something quite different.
Gleick lets us see both sides, drawing no conclusions.
Although he doesn't shrink from the science in Feynmans life, Gleick is
primarily telling a life story.
A Scientific Biography
Mehra's book is something else.
The Beat of a Different Drum is an account of a scientist's life,
written by a scientist, and treating the subjects work as fully as important
as the other aspects of his life. Given that Richard Feynman was one of
the most important and prolific scientists of recent time, this results
in a book with a lot of pretty heavy science.
Mehra had already written biographies of physicists Heisenberg, Dirac, and
Pauli when Feynman asked him to do for him what he had done for them. The
Beat of a Different Drum is based on many extensive interviews with
Feynman regarding all aspects of his life and work. Mehra had other sources,
too, of course: He talked with relatives about Feynman's life, and to scientists
like Murray Gell-Mann about his science. The book is certainly well researched.
The completeness with which he covers the science is especially impressive.
He seems to have devoted a chapter to every significant research program
of Feynman's. Take, for example, his chapter on what Feynman called "the
only law of nature I could lay a claim to" -- the theory of weak interactions.
Mehra begins with seven pages of historical background on the problem, going
back to Marie and Pierre Curie, before Feynman enters the picture at the
Sixth Rochester Conference on High Energy Nuclear Physics at Rochester,
New York, in April 1956. His entrance is typical Feynman. By chance, he
finds himself rooming with experimenter Martin Block, who tosses an offhand
question at Feynman as they are about to turn in.
The question concerns the theta-tau puzzle, a hot topic in physics that
year. Two particles, referred to as theta and tau, are identical with respect
to key properties, leading to the conclusion that theta and tau are actually
just different names for the same particle. But studying how the particles
decay leads to the conclusion that they differ in intrinsic parity, meaning
that they can't be the same particle.
The best theoreticians of the field, including Murray Gell-Mann, had been
wrestling with this apparent paradox without success. In their room that
night, Block says to Feynman, "What is this big deal about the parity
thing? Maybe they are the same particle and [parity is not conserved]."
Feynman seems about to tell him how dumb he was, Block recalled later, but
then he begins to think about it. The two sit up half the night hashing
it out, and the next morning Feynman stands up in front of the great theoreticians
and proposes the idea. Gell-Mann and the other theoreticians don't completely
ignore the brash young man, but they don't jump up and down in excitement,
either. Nevertheless, Feynman tackles the puzzle in earnest when he returns
to Caltech. Mehra tells of one shining moment when Feynman jumps up in the
middle of a meeting and shouts "I understand everything!" The
following year, Feynman and Gell-Mann coauthor the crucial Physical Review
paper on the matter.
A Question of Style
The two biographies differ in style and structure.
Gleick has a distinctive and engaging writing style.
Mehra writes with admirable clarity when he is explaining Feynman's physics,
although when he discusses Feynman's life his style often fails to bring
out the drama of the events. Worse, he occasionally sounds too much like
Richard Feynman. Mehra conducted numerous interviews with Feynman for the
book, so at most points, he had Feynman's own utterances to draw upon. It
appears that he fell to the temptation too often. Feynman's style, when
it appears in quotations, really is refreshingly direct and unaffected.
When it creeps into the narrative of the book, it is annoyingly colloquial,
repetitive, and semiliterate. Here's Gleick:
Long afterward, when they were old men, after they had shared
a Nobel Prize for work done as rivals, they amazed a dinner party by competing
to see who could most quickly recite from memory the alphabetical headings
on the spines of their half-century-old edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Here's Feynman:
In ancient Egypt and Greece the priests and oracles used to
look at the veins in sheeps livers to forecast the future, and that's the
kind of pictures I was drawing to describe physical phenomena. I thought
that if they really turn out to be useful it would be fun to see them in
the pages of the Physical Review. I was conscious of the thought that it
would be amusing to see these funny-looking pictures in the Physical Review.
And here's Mehra, sounding like Feynman:
California had a law that all schoolbooks used by all the kids
in all public schools of the state had to be chosen by the State Board of
Education. So they had a committee, the Curriculum Commission, to examine
the books and give them advice on which books to approve.
The books differ, too, in structure. By hanging the whole story on the human
chronology of Feynman's life, Gleick is able to construct a more cohesive
narrative than Mehra. You can see it in as simple a thing as their chapter
heads. Gleick has six, with titles like Far Rockaway and Caltech. Mehra's
book, in contrast, has 26 chapters, most of them with titles like "Action-at-a-distance
in electrodynamics: the Wheeler-Feynman theory" and "The space-time
approach to quantum electrodynamics."
Despite its shortcomings as a human story, Mehra's book is a remarkable
record of Feynman's work. If you want to know about Feynman and his physics,
read Mehra. If you want to know the story of Feynman's life, read Gleick.
But if what you really want is to know the best Feynman stories, then you'd
better read Richard Feynman.
The Beat of a Different Drum
Jagdish Mehra
Oxford University Press, 1994, 630 pp., $35.00
ISBN 0-19-853948-7
What Do You Care What Other People Think?
Richard P. Feynman, as told to Ralph Leighton
Bantam, 1988, 255 pp., $9.95
ISBN 0-553-34784-5
Genius
James Gleick
Pantheon, 1992, 533 pp., $14.00
ISBN 0-679-40836-3
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
Richard P. Feynman, as told to Ralph Leighton
Bantam, 1985, 322 pp., $4.50
ISBN 0-553-25649-1
Electronic Review of Computer Books
Created 5/1/96 / Last modified 6/7/96 / webmaster@ercb.com