Richard Feynman Read online

  But if Richard learned so much about how to think about science and the world – not just an accumulation of scientific facts – from his father, where did Melville learn to think about the world in this way? Melville’s own father, Richard’s grandfather, was, apparently, also interested in mathematical and scientific ideas, so to that extent, at least, there was a tradition of science in the family. This offers hope for all of us; even if we cannot aspire to being a Richard Feynman, at least we can aspire to being a Melville Feynman – to have an understanding and enthusiasm for nature, and to pass that enthusiasm on to a child, even without the detailed mathematical knowledge that a professional scientist needs. But neither Richard’s father nor his grandfather had an opportunity to develop their interest into a career.

  Melville had been born in 1890. He was the son of Jakob and Anne Feynman, Lithuanian Jews who lived for a time in Minsk, in Byelorussia, and emigrated to the United States in 1895. The family settled in Patchogue, on Long Island, and Melville was initially taught at home, by his father (a precursor of his own relationship with Richard), but later attended the local high school. He wanted to become a doctor, but there was no way the family could afford to support the education required to fulfil his ambition, so instead he enrolled in a college to study homoeopathic medicine. Even these studies proved impossible to sustain financially, and Melville dropped out of college and into a variety of occupations, at none of which he was particularly successful, although he always managed to keep the family afloat, even through the Depression. He finally settled in the uniform business, providing ample opportunity for Richard to learn at first hand the difference between formal authority represented by a uniform and the frail human being inside the uniform. On one occasion, Feynman recalled, his father showed him a picture in the newspaper of the Pope, with people bowing down in front of him. ‘What’s the difference’, Melville asked Richard, ‘between this man and all the others?’ He immediately answered his own question. ‘The difference is the hat he’s wearing. But this man has the same problems as everybody else: he eats dinner; he goes to the bathroom. He’s a human being.’6

  The parents of Lucille Phillips, Richard Feynman’s mother, both came to the United States as young children. Her maternal grandfather (Richard’s great-grandfather) was a Polish Jew who was involved in anti-Russian activities in the 1860s and 1870s, was imprisoned and sentenced to death, but escaped and eventually made his way to America, where his children later joined him. The eldest daughter among those children, Johanna Helinsky, worked with her father in the watchmaking store he opened on the Lower East Side in New York, and it was there that she met her future husband, Richard Feynman’s maternal grandfather.

  Henry Phillips was born in Poland, but lost his parents as a child and spent some time in an English orphanage, where he was given his name, before being sent on to America to seek his fortune. Unlike many immigrants in a similar position, Henry Phillips really did succeed in making a modest fortune. He started out selling needles and thread door-to-door from a pack on his back, and went on, with Johanna, to develop a successful millinery business, which thrived until changing fashions at the end of the First World War saw the hat business go into decline. Henry met Johanna when he had a watch that needed repairing, and took it into a watchmaking store where he was surprised to find the job being done by a beautiful young woman. They soon married, went into business together, and during the height of their success in the hat trade they moved to the Upper East Side, on 92nd Street, where Lucille Phillips (the youngest of five children) was born in 1895.7 The family later moved to a large house with a big garden in Far Rockaway, which was then a semi-rural community in Queens County, at the southern tip of Long Island.

  As the daughter of a successful businessman, Lucille was educated at the Ethical Culture Institute (where she was followed, nine years later, by Robert Oppenheimer), and intended to become a kindergarten teacher. But just after she graduated from high school, when she was eighteen years old, she met Melville Feynman; they hit it off at once, and almost immediately he asked her to marry him. Her father wouldn’t give his permission for her to marry so young, so they had to wait until 1917, after she had turned 21. At first, the newly married couple lived in upper Manhattan; Richard Phillips Feynman was born there, in a Manhattan hospital, a year after their marriage.

  If Melville Feynman contributed, at least in part, to his son’s becoming a scientist, Lucille had an equally great influence on him through her sense of humour, warmth and compassion. Joan Feynman feels that the role of their mother has been downplayed in most versions of the Feynman legend, leaving her in the shadows of the father who turned young Ritty on to science. Perhaps that is understandable, at least from the point of view of those recounting the legend. After all, many of us have mothers who have a wonderful sense of humour and are full of compassion, but very few people have fathers like Melville Feynman, so his part in the story seems at first sight more interesting and more profound. Without Lucille’s influence, though, Richard Feynman might well have become a more or less conventional, dry as dust academic, rather than the safecracking, bongo-playing figure of legend. It is, after all, the combination of serious science, a sense of fun and the very sane view that ‘the highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter and human compassion’8 that made Feynman so special, and that combination is found in neither of his parents alone, but in both of them put together. And if any further proof of Lucille’s influence on her son were needed, she was a great storyteller. Joan recalls:

  wonderful memories of evenings at the supper table when Richard was home from college and he and Mother would get going. My father and I would laugh so hard that our stomachs hurt and we would beg for mercy, but they wouldn’t stop until I had fallen off my chair and was literally rolling on the floor.9

  Even Lucille’s good humour and compassion were severely tested, however, early in 1924, when Richard was five. She had another son, Henry Phillips Feynman, who was born on 24 January that year, but lived only for a month and a day, dying on 25 February. It wasn’t until Richard was nine that his sister Joan was born; but that doesn’t mean that he led anything like the usual life of an ‘only child’ for the first nine years of his life.

  The Feynman family moved a couple of times when he was very small, but settled in Far Rockaway, where they shared Lucille’s father’s house with her sister Pearl and her family. That family included a son Robert, three years older than Richard, and a daughter Frances, three years younger than him. So he was in the middle of an extended family of children that were in fact cousins, but lived like siblings. The reason for the house-sharing was financial. Pearl’s husband, Ralph Lewine, worked in the shirt business, but never achieved as much success as Melville did in his own line of business. The Feynman family was far from poor; they weren’t as well off as Lucille’s parents had been, but Joan Feynman recalls that they were always comfortable financially, right through the Depression years. Living in such close proximity wasn’t always easy, at least for the adults in the two families (and, of course, the very fact that the house had been passed on by Henry Phillips was a constant reminder to both Melville and Ralph that they had not achieved as much as their father-in-law), and shortly after Joan was born, when Richard was ten, the Feynman family moved out to the nearby town of Cedarhurst. But within a couple of years they had returned, and although neither son-in-law ever became as successful in business as Henry Phillips, thanks in part to the house they had inherited from him both families survived the Depression in relative comfort. Joan remembers that she ‘had nice clothes from good stores in New York’, and that there was a woman who came in every day to clean and do laundry. ‘Before the war, we had a new car every year (usually an Oldsmobile).’10

  Even Melville, usually so iconoclastic and unwilling to be bound by convention, had one blind spot, though. True to his word, he encouraged Richard to take an interest in science. But he never attempted to rouse any similar enthusiasm in J
oan. In the 1930s, it was almost inconceivable, even to someone as broadminded as Melville Feynman, that a girl could become a scientist. But Joan became a scientist anyway, ending up in space research at the prestigious Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena – she became, in fact, exactly the kind of scientist that Melville must have imagined Ritty might become. It all started when she would hear Melville and Richard talking about all these interesting things, and later she would ask her brother about what she had overheard. Soon, he was explaining things to her in the same way that he had learned them from their father, becoming a scientific raconteur (albeit to an audience of one) in his early teens.11 Joan, too, helped to influence her brother’s development, and likes to describe herself as ‘Richard Feynman’s first student’.12

  It started when she was still a baby, and Richard had the duty of looking after her. Propped up in her baby carriage, she would watch Richard and a friend tinkering with the collection of wires, batteries and other electrical bits and pieces that they called their ‘laboratory’. The family had a dog at the time, which had been taught tricks, and Richard reasoned that since his sister was brighter than the dog, she ought to be able to do better tricks. He decided to teach her arithmetic, in order to impress his friends, and encouraged her to learn by allowing her to pull his hair if she got the sum right. Joan still recalls standing in her crib, at the age of about three, ‘yanking on his hair with great delight’ having just learned to add two and three.

  As Joan got bigger, so did her tasks. At five, she was a paid lab assistant, earning two cents a week for carrying out odd jobs and sometimes playing the part of the magician’s assistant, sticking her finger in a small spark gap and enduring a modest electric shock, again to amaze Richard’s friends. No anecdote sums up their relationship better; the hero-worshipping younger sister knew that her big brother would never hurt her, and trusted him to keep the shock at the level of mild discomfort, even though the sparks that leapt across the gap when no finger was in place looked terrifying to anyone not in the know. In exchange, as well as the financial rewards, Richard introduced her to the wonders of the world, showing her the stars and demonstrating centrifugal force by whirling a glass of water in an upside down arc without spilling a drop (except on one memorable occasion when the glass slipped out of his hand and flew across the room).

  One of the things Richard showed her has stayed vividly in Joan’s mind. She recalls that the household was run in a very orderly fashion, with strict rules about things like bedtime. As the youngest child in the household, she went to bed first. But one night, when she was about four years old, her brother, then about thirteen, got permission to wake her up. He told her he had something wonderful to show her, and took her out into the middle of a nearby golf course, before telling her to look up at the sky, where she saw the aurora borealis.

  But the real turning point in Joan’s becoming a scientist came when she was fourteen, and Richard was a graduate student at Princeton. Joan had long been fascinated by astronomy, but had actually been told by her mother that the female brain wasn’t up to doing science.13 Then, on her fourteenth birthday, Richard gave her a college level textbook on astronomy, and when she protested that it was too difficult for her, he told her to persevere. ‘You start at the beginning and you read as far as you can, until you get lost. Then you start at the beginning again, and you keep working through until you can understand the whole book.’14 Persevering in this way, she made steady progress. Eventually, she came to page 407, where there was a graph showing part of the spectrum of a star. The caption credited the astronomer who had obtained the information – Cecilia Payne-Gaposhkin – a woman! ‘The secret was out: it was possible! From that day on, I was able to take my own interest in science seriously.’15

  There was ‘this excitement in the house, this great love of physics, so naturally I thought it sounded great’, she remembers.16 ‘The feeling of excitement was in the house all the time, in my brother and my father. So I just grew up with it. Science became the thing to do.’ But she was never any more in awe of Richard than other kid sisters were in awe of their big brothers. ‘Your brother, he’s your brother. You don’t make any assumptions he’s particularly brilliant.’ It is only hindsight that made her realize that the family was actually unusual in its interest in science. ‘Well, we were interested in relativity when I was a kid, so that then we had to be different than many other families.’

  Two decades after Ritty had shown her the aurora, after she had finished her own PhD in solid state physics, Joan became interested in the aurora again. She was enjoying the work, and wanted to tell Richard about it. But the last thing she wanted was for her smart elder brother to solve the problem before she could have the pleasure of working it all out. So she went up to him and offered a deal, dividing up the Universe. If he would promise not to work on the aurora, she would leave everything else to him. Richard agreed.

  In the 1980s, however, he visited Alaska, where he was shown around an observatory dedicated to the study of the aurora. Having learned about the work being done there, and expressing interest in the intriguing problems still to be solved, he was asked, well, why don’t you work on some of these puzzles yourself? ‘I would like to’, Feynman replied, ‘but I can’t. I’d have to get my sister’s permission.’

  A little later, at a meeting of aurora experts, one of the Alaskan researchers came up to Joan, asking whether her brother had been joking. No, she said, the story was correct. On his return to California, Richard had asked her permission to work on the aurora, and she had turned him down. True to his word, given three decades earlier, he left the aurora to her.17

  About the time Richard showed his little sister the aurora for the first time, he started in high school, in the autumn of 1931. By then, he was already established as an unusually clever child, both within school and outside. It was during the years in Cedarhurst that he really began to develop a conscious interest in science, and he was allowed to have a laboratory in the basement of the house, where he could experiment with chemicals. School in Cedarhurst, as far as science was concerned, was a complete waste of time. It was taught only in the eighth grade (the last grade in elementary school), and the only thing Feynman ever learned from it was that there are 39.37 inches in 1 metre. But in arithmetic, it was different. He was already ‘known as some kind of a whiz-kid at arithmetic in elementary school’, and at the age of ten or eleven he was called out of his class and into another to explain his method of doing subtraction, which the teacher thought was particularly neat, to the younger children.18

  In his last year at elementary school, though, Richard did make some of his first scientific contacts. He had a dentist who took the trouble to answer his questions about how teeth worked, and who he built up in his mind as ‘a scientist’. He also tried to struggle through the few popular books in the public library about new developments in science (more of these developments in Chapter 2), and although the dentist was not really much of a scientist he realized that Richard had more than a passing interest in scientific matters. The dentist had another patient, William LeSur, who was an English teacher in Far Rockaway High School, but who helped out with the science teaching there; he told him about the boy’s interest. The outcome was that LeSur invited Richard to visit the high school once a week, after classes had finished, and hang out in the lab while they cleaned up. Through this contact, Richard met the real chemistry teacher at the high school, and the head of science, Dr Edwin Barnes, who talked to him about science while he helped clean up the apparatus.

  But if Richard learned little science from the teachers at Cedarhurst, it was during his time there that he learned about atoms from a new friend, Leonard Mautner, who explained what would happen if you kept on breaking up a substance into smaller and smaller pieces. To someone who has had any kind of scientific education, that may sound fairly trivial. But it was a landmark event in Feynman’s life. Just over 30 years later, in his famous Lectures, he would say:

 
; If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that 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. In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied.19