Genius
James Gleick
I found this in my grandmother’s house. My grandfather was an electrical engineer who taught physics, I didn’t know him well enough to understand that side of him but going through his books as an adult I see that he was still very interested in scientific biographies and technical books well into his later years. I enjoyed this read, one of the main ideas is exploring what makes a ‘genius’. Gleick doesn’t answer this, but I’m not sure we ever can. This post is a series of my favourite bits from the book.
Early life
Feynman grows up in Far Rockaway, a commuter belt suburb of New York. His parents are Jewish immigrants (Belarussia and Poland) and the author points out how children from similar backgrounds go onto succeed through their hard work and make significant contributions to America’s progress throughout the 20th Century.
His father has a great love of learning and passes this on to Feynman. As pre-teen he is tinkering with radios. The author compares the play and experimentation of childhood with the work of the scientist, both of whom ask “If I do this, what will happen?”. This quote stands out:
Every child is observer, analyst, and taxonomist, building a mental life through a sequence of intellectual revolutions, constructing theories and promptly shedding them when they no longer fit.
Elon Musk wrote a piece a few years ago talking about how studying Physics encouraged him to think of problems from ‘first principles’. This passage captures how Feynman did the same from a young age:
The fundamental questions arose on a beach. “Is the sand other than the rocks? That is, is the sand perhaps nothing but a great number of very tiny stones? Is the moon a great rock? If we understood rocks, would we also understand the sand and the moon? Is the wind a sloshing of the air analogous to the sloshing motion of the water in the sea?”
For Feynman’s father, instilling this love of learning was not merely for fun, it was a reaction to the tough life they had escaped. He was raised to “better face the world and meet the intense competition of others for existence”. Children needed to find a niche in which they could live an interesting and fruitful life.
Another example of this first principles thinking is demonstrated in a story about a bird. Richard’s father tells him the name of the bird in five languages, to which Richard responds:
You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You’ll only know about humans in different places and what they call the bird. So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing. That’s what counts.
On IQs. Feynman’s test was 125, on the Wechsler scale that corresponds to ‘very high’, but not ‘extremely high’.
Much of the book deals with quantum and atomic theory and the author explores the general accumulation of understanding in this area, as well as Feynman’s specific contributions. He points out that the Greeks had some understanding of the quantum in the 5th century BC:
Things change, crumble, fade, wither, or grow, yet they remain the same. The notion of immutability seemed to require some fundamental immutable parts. Their motion and recombination might give the appearance of change.
A question from teenage Feynman to one of his teachers about atomic theory: “How do sharp things stay sharp all this time if the atoms are always jiggling?”. As an adult asked which piece of scientific knowledge he’d pass on to another generation, responds:
All things are made of atoms - little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.
The principle of ‘least action’ comes up a few times. It is the idea that during motion, action can rise and fall, but when an object reaches its destination, the path followed would always be the path for which the total action was least. Feynman is asked to demonstrate this by throwing a ball up to a window. It seemed to imply that the object chooses a path.
College years
Feynman goes to MIT as an undergrad and impresses. He then does his postgrad at Princeton. When he applies to Princeton his scores in history and English were in the bottom fifth. He scorns those other subjects. The author expands on Princeton a bit, describing how it styled itself after Oxford and Cambridge. Einstein says of it: ”A quaint ceremonious village of puny demigods on stilts“.
A memorable Princeton episode is a presentation of a theory developed with his supervisor Wheeler to and audience that included Pauli, Einstein and Von Neumann. The author also points out various eccentricities of Feynman’s behaviour, such as writing down everything he does in a day. The author notes: ”If there is a disease whose symptom is the belief in the ability of logic to control vagarious life, it afflicted Feynman.”
One of the physics observations I enjoyed:
“A movie showing a drop of ink diffusing in a glass of water looks wrong when run backward. Yet a movie showing the microscopic motion of any one ink molecule would look the same backward or forward. The random motions of each ink molecule can be reversed, but the overall diffusion cannot be. The system is microscopically reversible, macroscopically irreversible. It is a matter of chaos and probability. It is not impossible for the ink molecules, randomly drifting about, someday to reorganize themselves into a droplet. It is just hopelessly improbable.”
Towards the end of his time at Princeton, the war picks up and the first whisperings of an atomic bomb project are heard. Feynman goes to Los Alamos. Other physicists want him on their project for ”His persistent scepticism, his unwillingness to accept any assertion on authority… if there was baloney or self-deception in the idea, Feynman would find it.”
Los Alamos
The section opens with the test of the first atomic bomb - The Trinity Test. Feynman was 27 at the time. The reactions of various physics luminaries are noted. Fermi drops some papers to calculate the explosive pressure of the detonation by measuring how far the shockwave moves them. A real-life example of a ‘Fermi estimate’. On the drive back, the team reflects on their work. They discuss how the practicalities of the bomb made everyone move into areas they weren’t familiar with. Stanislaw Ulam, for example, laments how he had ”always worked exclusively with symbols. Now had been driven so low as to use actual numbers, and, even more humbling, they were numbers with decimal points“!
A quote on Feynman’s genius from Paul Olum, a talented mathematician from Harvard:
“Feynman was able to run mental rings around him. It wasn’t that he was a brilliant mental calculator; Olum know the tricks of that game. It was if he were a man from Mars… he had never known anyone so intuitively at ease with nature - and with nature’s seemingly last accessible manifestations. He suspected that if Feynman wanted to know what an electron would do under given circumstances he merely asked himself, ‘If I were an electron, what would I do?’“.
We are introduced to Oppenheimer quite early in this chapter. The book describes him as below his peers with regard to physics ability and an aesthete, with a taste for good food, suits and wine. General Groves’ appointment of him as manager was unexpected, given he had no experience, but time proves Groves right as Oppy turns out to be a brilliant manager.