Physicist Murray Gell-Mann was once asked to describe the scientific method of his colleague and competititor Richard Feynman. Author James Gleick describes the incident in his new biography, ”Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman”:
”Gell-Mann leans coyly against the blackboard and says, Dick`s method is this. You write down the problem. You think very hard. (He shuts his eyes and presses his knuckles periodically to his forehead.) Then you write down the answer.”
How else to explain Feynman, who could count among his accomplishments helping to create modern theoretical physics and also figuring out how to train a dog to do counterintuitive tricks such as fetching a sock by an indirect route?
Feynman`s curiosity knew no bounds. He led the group of scientists at Los Alamos, N.M., who computed the destructive power of the atomic bomb. In his spare time, he figured out how to break into the soda machine, how to pick locks and how to crack safes.
Feynman reformulated quantum mechanics, the all-embracing law of physics capable of describing the interaction of particles and radiation on a scale so small that Newton`s laws do not apply.
His new theory included the idea that the path a particle takes is based on the sum of every possible path it could take-a fundamental insight into modern physics.
He was one of three scientists who independently of each other developed quantum electrodynamics, the modern description of light interacting with matter that is widely considered the most precise scientific theory humans have ever developed.
The three shared the Nobel Prize. But while the others used complex mathematical formulas that many physicists could not understand, Feynman invented a way of diagramming interactions between particles. Feynman diagrams have become a standard language of physics.
From bongos to O-rings
He also taught himself how to play the bongos in complex rhythms and with considerable skill, to speak Portuguese, and to track people like a bloodhound, following their warmth and smell.
He intrigued a national TV audience when, as a member of the commission investigating the crash of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986, he took a piece of an O-ring seal, dipped it into ice water and showed that it had lost its elasticity.
He was driven not by a desire for glory-although he clearly took pleasure in his iconoclast`s reputation-but by a hunger for knowledge.
In writing about him, Gleick, a former science writer for The New York Times and author of ”Chaos: Making a New Science,” also investigated the makings of genius. It is a question that has regularly occurred to Feynman`s colleagues and students, a group of whom at the California Institute of Technology once held a half-serious debate on whether Feynman was human.
”He was a fantastic lecturer,” said Michael Turner, an astronomer and cosmologist at the University of Chicago who studied with Feynman at Caltech, where Feynman taught for 38 years. Turner is one of a number of members of Chicago`s physics community who retain indelible memories of Feynman, who died in 1988 at 69.
”It was like the Vulcan mind meld. When you`re in a lecture with him, it`s like he`s inside your head and he`s taking you on a special tour. And then he leaves and you`re left with your own feeble mind.”
World-class magician
Feynman was a raconteur, a storyteller, a flirt. He frequented a topless bar, where he wrote chains of equations on paper placemats.
”He was a party animal,” Turner said. ”We always invited him to our parties. He would often try to steal our dates.”
Feynman`s stories were so engaging that a collection of them-”Surely You`re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”-dealing with such things as physics, Las Vegas show girls and his investigations of the tracking ability of ants in his bathtub, became a best seller.
Mathematician Mark Kac, who knew Feynman at Cornell University, where Feynman taught before moving to Caltech, has written:
”There are two kinds of geniuses, the `ordinary` and the `magicians.` An ordinary genius is a fellow that you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what they have done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it.
”It is different with the magicians . . . the working of their minds is for all intents and purposes incomprehensible. Even after we understand what they have done, the process by which they have done it is completely dark. . . . Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest caliber.”
As Gleick wrote: ”This was the conundrum of genius. Was genius truly special? Or was it a matter of degree-a miler breaking 3:50 rather than 4:10?”
To Drasko Jovanovic, a senior scientist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia who attended a number of lectures by Feynman, there is something in a mind like Feynman`s that is unknowable.
”We are not able to discern people`s intelligence, particularly people who are smarter than we are,” Jovanovic said.
”It is like climbing a mountain. You can see below you, but above, you can`t. Something can be thousands of meters above you, or hundreds; you don`t know. To me, he was a genius, in the clouds; I cannot penetrate it.”
But while the source of Feynman`s way of thinking may be impenetrable, Jovanovic said, his ideas themselves are extraordinarily accessible-further evidence to Jovanovic of his genius.
”Everything he has written is absolutely understandable,” he said. ”It is so simple I give lectures to high school students, and they understand it. It almost resonates with your own mind.”
He recalls the experience of reading Feynman`s work the first time as a transcendent moment.
”I just couldn`t believe my eyes,” he said. ”It was a spectacular experience.”
For scientists, their field is not the dry domain outsiders may imagine, but a thrilling world in which the greatest theories are things of elegance, simplicity, even beauty.
U. of C. astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar suggests that scientists are motivated in large part by aesthetics.
”A number of beautiful ideas appear in the solving of the problem,” he said. ”It gives me pleasure. That`s why I do it.”
Chandrasekhar, who is intrigued with the process of scientific discovery, once asked Enrico Fermi how he discovered the effect of slow neutrons on induced radioactivity.
He made his discovery by bombarding a piece of metal with neutrons, and placing a piece of paraffin in front of the metal. The paraffin slowed down the neutrons.
Fermi told Chandrasekhar that he had planned to put a piece of lead in front of the metal. Lead would not have slowed down the neutrons, but Fermi did not know that in advance.
For some reason, he told Chandrasekhar, he found himself avoiding putting the lead in place and conducting the experiment. Suddenly, for some reason he could not explain, he picked up a piece of paraffin and used it instead.
”It was just like that,” he told Chandrasekhar, ”with no advance warning, no conscious prior reasoning.”
No flash of inspiration
Yet it would be a mistake to think of the most brilliant scientists as simply blessed by sudden, unbidden inspiration, said Robert Sachs, professor emeritus of physics at U. of C. and a former director of Argonne National Laboratory.
Scientists make discoveries when they are trying to understand paradoxes in experiments, he said. The process is more painstaking than magical, even for the great physicists involved in the creation of quantum mechanics, which Sachs considers one of the greatest intellectual achievements in human history.
”They were very systematic,” Sachs said. ”They had questions that had to be answered, and they went about it by trying different things. There were many, many false starts in physics.”
”Obviously, Feynman was a very smart guy, but it`s not like he was a superbrain or from another planet,” said Turner of the U. of C. ”I don`t think that applies to anyone. He had a different way of looking at things, and he was very smart.”
And yet, Sachs said, scientific creativity does have a certain inexplicable quality.
When studying a problem, he said, ”You suffer miserably. What I feel I`m doing is bouncing around in my brain like I had a whole collection of computers talking back and forth to each other, trying to match things somehow so some coherence between these things will show up.
”Then, suddenly, things fall into place. That is the inspirational moment of creativity. It`s all been there somewhere, but I don`t think anybody can tell you just what happened at that moment it came together.”
`These are driven people`
Ken Hope, who for 10 years directed the MacArthur Fellowships program, known popularly as ”genius grants,” also tried to define the magic. He concluded that it involved far more than intelligence.
”I think it has to do with a certain courageousness,” he said. ”When someone like Feynman is trying to understand in a fundamental and deep way what the nature of science is, that`s kind of a bold program.”
Feynman took a perverse pleasure in his unremarkable intelligence test scores.
”Feynman once said, `I may have an IQ of 120, but it`s all aimed at physics,` ” recalled Christopher Hill, a senior scientist at Fermilab who, while a graduate student at Caltech, had an office down the hall from Feynman`s.
Gleick found that Feynman was able to concentrate completely on whatever he was studying-a skill that served him well in his dating years when women found his ability to concentrate on them, albeit briefly, extremely alluring. He did not read books, even scientific ones. He did not go to movies. He did not listen to music. He did not enjoy art.
”These are driven people, absolutely obsessed,” said Dean Keith Simonton, a psychologist at the University of California at Davis whose book
”Scientific Genius: A Psychology of Science” examines the nature of scientific creativity.
Beyond logic
The greatest scientists, he said, tend to think and speak in contradictions, as in Niels Bohr`s contention that light cannot be considered either a wave or a particle, but is simultaneously both and neither.
”It`s not that they reject logic entirely, but they realize that there is something beyond logic,” Simonton said.
”Einstein insisted that you need intuition-that once your intuition got the answer, you used logic in order to convince other people you were right.
”A number of physicists talk about how they actually imagine themselves to be an electron, and what an electron would do if it were heading toward a neutron,” he said. ”Einstein imagined what would happen if he were inside an elevator in free fall.”
Feynman seemed to have a particularly strong physical intuition about the way things worked, Gleick found, an ability to use all his senses to imagine the way tiny particles of matter interact.
He seemed permeated by mathematics. ”There was something about Feynman`s mind that was related to rhythm and his constant tendency to drum his fingers,” Gleick said.
”One guy who knew him at Cornell talked about walking in on him, and he was rolling around on the floor, working on a problem,” Gleick said.
”Feynman was constantly waving his hands and making geometric shapes,”
said Robert W. Wilson, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, during a recent visit to Fermilab. ”I think his mind must have worked geometrically.”
It all adds up to genius
For Gleick, the essence of genius seems to be part intelligence, part myth, part lucky timing and maybe part magic.
”I don`t believe it`s just the sum of the qualities you have,” he said. ”I think it`s also a part of the reputation you have, the community you`re in. And you aren`t a genius in science without certain problems to work on.” After Einstein died, researchers removed his brain from his body to try to find some biological explanation for the way he thought. The attempt was in vain.
Chandrasekhar, a Nobel prize-winner whose work is so original that much of it was dismissed for decades before scientists understood it, said he cannot penetrate the workings of the mind of Isaac Newton, whose ”Principia” he is now rewriting in modern mathematical equations.
”I don`t call Newton a genius,” he said. ”The only thing I can say is that I don`t understand him, but I can see a parallel between what he did and Michelangelo`s painting of the Sistine Chapel.”
