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 Fröhlich that posed a problem involving slow electrons moving in a polarizable crystal caught his interest. In the article, Fröhlich 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 Fröhlich 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 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.
Both James Gleick and Jagdish Mehra have set out to tell the story of this extraordinary man, but they take different paths.
Gleick's 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 Feynman's 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. It's 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 Feynman's life, Gleick is primarily telling a life story.
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 subject's 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.
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 sheep's 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
Copyright © 1995, Dr. Dobb's JournalA Curious Fellow
A Biography of a Scientist
A Scientific Biography
A Question of Style