UNEXPECTED CONVERSATION: Richard Feynman

0:03Tetragramatine I've always been rather very one side of the earth, the science, and when I was younger, I concentrated almost all my effort on it. I didn't have time to learn, and I had not much patience with what's called in humanities, even though in the university there were humanities that you had to take, I tried my best to avoid somehow to learn anything and to work at it. It's only afterwards when I've gotten older and I've more relaxed, that I've spread out a little bit. I've learned to draw, and I read a little bit, but I'm really still a very one -sided person and don't know a great deal.

1:00I have a limited intelligence, and I've used it in a particular direction. You're really missing out. Art has so much potential to stimulate the mind. Tell me about your family. Tell me about your father. Yes. Well, we had the encyclopedia Britannic at home. Even when I was a small boy, he used to sit on his lap and read to me from the encyclopedia Britannica. We would re -say about dinosaurs, and maybe it would be talking about the Brontosaurus or something. I would say something like, this thing is 25 feet high, and the head is 6 feet across, you see, you saw. It's so we'd stop always and say, let's see what that means.

1:47That would mean that if he stood in our front yard, he would be high enough to put his head through the window. But not quite because the head is all a little bit too wide and would break the window as it came by. Everything we'd read would be translated into some reality, so that I learned to do that. And everything I read, I tried to figure out what it really means, what it's really saying. It was very exciting and interesting to think that there was animals of such magnitude. I wasn't frightened that there would be one coming in my window as a consequence of this, I don't think. But I thought it was very, very interesting, and that they all died out, and at that time nobody knew why.

2:27I'm not sure if we know why now, or even if they ever existed, but it is interesting to think about. Tell me more about your childhood. We used to go to the Catskill Mountains. We lived in New York, and the Catskill Mountains was a place where people went in the summer. And there was a big group of people there, but the fathers would all go back to New York to work during the week and only come back over in the weekend. And on the weekends when my father came, he would take me for walks in the woods and would tell me various things about interesting things that were going on in the woods, which I'll explain in a minute.

3:03But the other mothers, seeing this, of course, thought that was wonderful and that their other fathers should take their sons for walks, so they tried to work on them, but they didn't get anywhere at first. And they wanted my father to take all the kids, but he didn't want to because he had a special relation to me. It's great that you and your father were so close. Yeah, so it ended up that the other fathers had to take their children for walks the next weekend. And the next Monday, when they were all back to work, all the kids were playing in a field. And one kid said to me, see that bird, what kind of a bird is that?

3:43And I said, I haven't the slightest idea what kind of a bird it is. He says, it's a brown floated thrush or something. He says, your father doesn't tell you anything, but it was the opposite. My father had taught me, looking at a bird, he says, you know what that bird is? It's a brown floated thrush, but in Portuguese, it's a honte da peito, an Italian chute da pequita. He says in Chinese, it's a chongong, in Japanese, a patana da co dacha, etc. He says, now they've known all the languages you want to know what the name of that bird is. And when you're finished with all that, he says, you'll know absolutely nothing, whatever about the bird.

4:19You only know about humans in different places and what they call a bird. Now he says, let's look at the bird and what it's doing. So he didn't just put names on things, but inspired you to think about what was going on. He had taught me to notice things. And one day when I was playing with what we call an express wagon, which is a little wagon, which has a railing around it for children to play with, that they can pull around. It had a ball in it. I remember this, it had a ball in it. And I pulled the wagon and I noticed something about the way the ball moved. So I went to my father and I said, say, pal, I know there's something.

5:00When I pulled the wagon, the ball rolls to the back of the wagon. It rushes to the back of the wagon. And when I'm pulling along and I suddenly stop the ball rolls to the front of the wagon, I said, why is that? And he said, that he said, nobody knows. He said, the general principle is that things in a moving try to keep on moving. And things that are standing still tend to stand still unless you push on them hard. And he says, this tendency is called inertia, but nobody knows why it's true. That's a deep understanding. He doesn't give me a name. He knew the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.

5:39Which I learned very, very early. So before you even knew it, you were interested in physics. What else did your dad say? If you look close, you'll find the ball does not rush to the back of the wagon. But it's the back of the wagon that you're pulling against the ball. That the ball stands still, or as a matter of fact, from the friction starts to move forward really. And it doesn't move back. So I ran back to the little wagon and set the ball up again and pulled the wagon from under it and looking sideways. And seeing, indeed, he was right, the ball never moved backwards in the wagon when I pulled the wagon forward.

6:12It moved backward relative to the wagon, but relative to the sidewalk, it was moved forward a little bit. It's just the wagon caught up with it. So that's the way I was educated by my father, those kind of examples and discussions. With no pressure, just lovely, interesting discussion. That's great that your dad was such a great teacher. Were there any other influences around you that you could learn from when you were a kid? My cousin at that time was three years old, who was in high school, and was having considerable difficulty with Zalgebra, and had a tutor. And I was allowed to sit in the corner while a tutor would try to teach my cousin out, I said to my cousin that I said, what do you try and do?

7:01I hear him talking about it actually. He said, when he had about two X plus seven is equal to 15, he said, and trying to find out what X is. I said, you mean four. He says, yeah, but you did it with a wrist dip. You have to do it by algebra. And that's why my cousin was never able to do algebra because he didn't understand how he was doing it. I was supposed to do it. I learned algebra, fortunately, by not going to school. By knowing a whole idea was to find out what X was, and it didn't make any difference how you did it. There's no such a thing as, you don't do it by arithmetic, you do it by algebra.

7:31That was a false thing that they had invented in school, so that the children who have to study algebra can all pass it. They had invented a set of rules, which if you followed them without thinking, could produce the answer. Subtract seven from both sides. If you have a multiplier divide both sides by the multiply, and so on, a series of steps by which you could get the answer, if you did understand what you were trying to do. You learned to actually solve problems, not just apply a formula. There was a series of math books, which has started arithmetic for the practical man, and then algebra for the practical man, and then trigonometry for the practical man.

8:08And I learned trigonometry for the practical man from that. Soon forgot it again, because I didn't understand it very well. But they were going to get the series coming out, and the library was going to get calculus for the practical man. And I knew by this time by reading the encyclopedia that calculus was an important subject, and it was an interesting one. And I want to learn it. This was, I was older now, I was perhaps 13. And then the calculus book finally came out, and I was so excited, and I went to the librarian to take it out. And she looks at me and she says, Hey, you're just a child.

8:44What are you taking this book out for? You're just a booker. So it was one of the few times in my life I lied. I said it was for my father, he sounded. So I took it home, and I was very calculus from it. And I tried to explain it to my father, and he started to read the beginning of it, and he found it confusing. That bugged me a little bit. I didn't know that he was so limited. He didn't understand. And I thought it was relatively simple and straightforward, that he didn't understand it. So that was the first time I knew I had learned more in some sense than he. I don't know if you'd learn more, but you somehow were able to see through the problems in a way that your dad couldn't.

9:33Yeah. What else did your dad teach you about? Well, one of the things that my father taught me beside physics, whether it was correct or not, was a disrespect for certain kinds of things, like what? For example, when I was a little boy in a rotogravure, that's the printed pictures, and newspapers first came out in the New York Times. He used to sit me again on his knee, and he'd open a picture, and there was a picture of the Pope with everybody bowing in front of him. And he'd say, now look at these humans, he'd say, here is one human standing here, and all these others are bowing. Now what is the difference?

10:06This one is the Pope, another one, maybe he hated the Pope anyway. And he'd say, the difference is epileps. Of course, not in the case of the Pope. Maybe it was a general. It was always the uniform, the position. But this man has the same human problems. He didn't like anybody else. He goes to the bathroom. He has the same kind of problems. Everybody's a human being. Why are they all bowing to him? Only because of his name and his position, because of his uniform, not because of something he especially did. Or his honor, or something like that. He, by the way, was in the uniform business. So he knew what the difference was with a man with the uniform off, and the uniform off.

10:44It's the same man for him. So he was wary of authority, and he taught you to be wary of authority. Do you think he was proud of you? He was happy with me, I believe. Once though, when I came back from MIT and Binaur a few years, he said to me, now he said, you become educated about these things. And there's one question I've always had that I've never really understood very well. And I'd like to ask you now that you've studied this. To explain it to me. And I asked him what it was. And then he said that he understood that when an atom made a transition from one state to another, he meets a particle of light called a photon.

11:25And he said, that's right. He says, well now, is the photon in the atom ahead of time that it comes out, or is there no photon in start with? I said, there's no photon in it, just that the electron makes a transition that comes out, he says, well, then where does it come from? And how does it come out? So I said, of course, I couldn't answer him. The view is that photons' numbers are conserved. They're just created by the motion of the electron. I couldn't try to explain it to him something like the sound that I'm making now. It wasn't in me. It's not like my little boy is, and when he was just little one day, he started to tell you he was talking.

12:03And he suddenly said that he could no longer say a certain word. The word was cat, because his word bag has run out of the word cat. So there's no word bag that you have inside that you use up the words as they come out, you just make them as they go along. And in the same sense, there was no photon bag in an atom. And when the photons came out, they didn't come from somewhere, but I couldn't do much better. He was not satisfied with being that respect that I'd rather was able to explain any of the things that he did understand. It's funny, it sounds like he might have understood photons better than you.

12:40So he was unsuccessfully sent me through all these universities and ought to find out these things and never did find out. Why did you get involved in the atomic program? Well, it was a completely different kind of a thing. It would mean that I would have to stop the research and what I was doing, which is by life's desire to take time off, to do this, which I felt I should do in order to protect civilization, if you want. Okay? So that was what I had to debate with myself. The first reaction, I want to get interrupted in my normal work to do this, a job. There was also the problem, of course, of any moral thing involving war, what I'd much to do with that, but it kind of scared me what I realized, what the weapon would be, which I realized.

13:34And since it might be possible, there was nothing that I knew that indicated that if we could do it, they couldn't do it, and therefore it was very important to try to cooperate. In retrospect, do you have any qualms about being involved? We've got to moral questions. I do have something I would like to say about it, because the original reason to start the project, which I had, which was the Germans were a danger, started in a process of action, which was to try to develop the system in prison, then at Los Alamos to try to make the bomb work, and all kinds of attempts to redesign, to make it a worse bomb, or whatever, and so on, and all working all this time to see if we could make it go.

14:21And so it was a project in which we all worked very, very hard, and all cooperating together. And with any project like that, you continue to work trying to get success, having decided to do it. But what I did immorally, I would say, was not to remember the reason that I said I was doing it, so that when the reason changed, which was the Germany was defeated, not the single's thought came to my mind at all about that, but that meant now that I have to reconsider why I'm continuing to do this. I simply didn't think, okay? Once you've decided to work on a project, and you're trying to solve a puzzle, you're enthralled by the puzzle.

15:05So you're in the puzzle, I can understand you not second -guessing why you're doing the puzzle. Once you've accepted doing the puzzle, even if the situation changed, how did it feel when you made progress on the puzzle? On the reaction, I remember, perhaps I was blinded by my own reaction. It was a very considerable relation and excitement, and there was quite a parties, and people got drunk, and it would make a tremendously interesting contrast of what was going on in Los Alamos at the same time as what was going on in Hiroshima. I was involved with this happy thing, and also drinking in drunk, and sitting on a hood of a Jeep and playing drums and excitement, running all over Los Alamos at the same time as they.

15:58People were dying and struggling in Hiroshima.

16:05When did it change from the celebration of the success to realizing the real world consequences? I had a very strong reaction after the war of a peculiar nature. It may be from just the bomb itself and it may be for some other psychological reasons I had just lost my wife or something. But I remember being in New York with my mother in a restaurant right after immediately there, and thinking about New York, and I knew how big the bomb in Hiroshima was, I would begin to area it covered and so on, and I realized from where we were, I got 59th speed to drop one at 34th speed, and I would spread all the way out there, and all these people would be killed, and all the things would be killed, and that wasn't only one bomb available, but it was easy to continue to make them.

16:54And therefore, that things were sort of doomed, because already it appeared to me, very early, earlier than to others, who were more optimistic, that international relations, and the way people were behaving, was no different than it had ever been before, and that it was just going to go out the same way as any other thing, and I was sure it was going to therefore to be used very soon. So I felt very uncomfortable and thought, really, believed, that it was silly, I would see people building a bridge, and I would say they don't understand, I really believe, that it was senseless to make anything, because it would all be destroyed very soon anyway, that they didn't understand that, and I had this very strange view of any construction, and I would always thought how foolish they are to try to make something.

17:48It sounds like you were really hopeless, you viewed it in a global way. Yes, I was really in a kind of depressive condition. How do you think you changed after this experience? Well, they expected me to be wonderful to offer me a job like this, and I wasn't wonderful, and therefore, I knew principle, was I'm not responsible for what other people think I'm able to do. I don't have to be good because they think I'm going to be good, and somehow I could relax about this, and I thought to myself, I haven't done anything important, well, I'm never going to do anything important, but I used to enjoy physics and mathematical things, and because I used to play with it, it was never very important, but I used to do things for the fun of it, so I decided I'm going to do things only for the fun of it.

18:38And only that afternoon when I was eating lunch, some kid threw up a plate in the cafeteria, which has a blue medallion on the plate, the Cornell sign in the cafeteria, and as he threw up the plate and it came down, it wobbled, and the blue thing went around like this, and I wondered, it seemed to me the blue thing went around faster than the wobble, and I wondered what the relation was between the two. I was just playing, no importance at all. So I played around with the equations of motion of rotating things, and I found out that if the wobble was small, the blue thing goes around twice as fast as the wobble goes around, and then I tried to figure out if I could see why that was directly from Newton's laws instead of through the complicated equations, and I worked that out for the fun of it.

19:24And then I went to Hans Bader, and I said to him, hey, by the way, I show you something amusing, and I explained this to him. And he said to me, it's very amusing and interesting, he said, but what is the use of it? What I said, that doesn't make any use. And I used, I'm just doing it for the fun of it. That sounds great. You reconnected with the thing that first connected you to physics, the fun. It didn't mean anything. It didn't have to be for anything. It was for the joy of knowledge, the joy of understanding. That's what we're here for. Well, and then Bob Wilson, who's ahead of the nuclear lid, they're the same Bob Wilson.

20:01I've had some kind of instinct or something, because it was at the same day that he called me, and he told me that when they hire a professor at the university, it's very responsibility what the professor does. And it's their risk. And if he doesn't do anything, or he doesn't come to say anything, it's not his thing to worry about that. They're taking a risk to put him in the environment, and I should do whatever I want, amuse myself, or whatever I want. So with that double combination, I could relax somehow. I was getting out from some psychological problem, and I relaxed and started to play it, as I said, with the rotation.

20:37That sounds great. It sounds like you had an inclination of going back to your roots of why you loved it, and then an administrative source came to you and supported your position. This rotation led me to a similar problem of the rotation of the spin of an electron, according to the Dirac equation. And that just led me back into quantum electrodynamics, which is the problem I've been working on. And I kept continuing now to play with it in the relaxed fashion I had originally done, and everything, it's just like a clock out of a bottle, everything just poured out. By the way, in a very short order, worked things out for which I later won the Nobel Prize.

21:20What's interesting about that is that you were working in the practical to get to the theoretical. You didn't start in the theoretical and work to the practical. So much of what we see now is taking the theoretical at face value without consideration for the practical. Well, what I essentially did, and also was known independently by two other people, also independent Tomonaga and Japan and Swinger, was to figure out how to analyze how to control, how to discuss the original theory of quantum theory of electricity in the 9th, isn't it, that it had been written in 1928, how to interpret it, so as to avoid the infinities, to make calculations, in which there were sensible results, which have since turned out to be an exact agreement with every experiment that's been done so far, so that in quantum electrodynamics, we have a theory which fits experiment in every detail, where it's applicable, not in following nuclear forces, for instance.

22:23And it was the work that I did in 1947 to figure out how to do that, from which I won the Nobel Prize. How do you feel to win the Nobel Prize? I said. I don't know anything about the Nobel Prize. I don't understand what it's all about or what's worth what. And if the people in the Swedish Academy decided that X, Y, or Z wins the Nobel Prize, then so be it. I won't have anything to do with the Nobel Prize. It seems like you're more interested in the work than the acclaim. I don't like honors. I appreciate it for the work that I did, and for people who appreciate it, and I notice that the physicists use my work.

23:06I don't need anything else. I don't think there's any sense to anything else. I don't see that it makes any point that someone in the Swedish Academy decides that this work is noble enough to receive a prize. I've already got the prize. The prize is the pleasure of finding a thing out, the kick in a discovery, the observation other people use it. Those are the real things. The honors are unreal to me. I don't believe in honors. But bothers me. Honours bothers me. Honours is epilets. Honours is uniforms. My papa brought me up this way. I can't stand it. It hurts me. When I was in high school, one of the first honors I got was to be a member of the Arraster, which is a group of kids who got good grades.

23:56Everybody wanted to be a member of the Arraster. And when I got into the Arraster, I discovered that what they did in their meetings was to sit around and to discuss who else was worthy, to join this wonderful group that we are. Okay, so we sat around trying to decide who it was who would get to be allowed into the Arraster. This kind of thing bothers me psychologically for one or another reason I don't understand myself. It's because you don't want to put yourself over other people. You see people as people. We're all the same. We're all one. I had trouble with when I became a member of the National Academy of Science, and I had ultimately to resign because they were another organization.

24:37Most of whose time were spent in choosing who was illustrious enough to join, to be allowed to join us in our organization. Including such questions as we physicists have to stick together, because there's a very good chemist that they're trying to get in, and we haven't got enough room for so to... What's the matter with chemists? The whole thing was rotten, because the purpose was mostly to decide who could have this honor. Yeah, okay, I don't like honors. It sounds like people who are focused on that live for that and not the work. One way that's kind of a fun analogy to try to get some idea of what we're doing and trying to understand nature is to imagine that the gods are playing some great game like chess, let's say a chess game, and you don't know the rules of the game, but you're allowed to look at the board at least from time to time, and in a little corner perhaps.

25:28And from these observations, you try to figure out what the rules are of the game, what the rules of the pieces moving. You might discover after a bit, for example, that when there's only one bishop around on the board, that the bishop maintains its color. Later on, you might discover the law for the bishop as it moves on a diagonal, which would explain the law that you understood before that it maintains its color. And that would be analogous to we discover one law and then later find a deeper understanding of it. Then things can happen, everything's going good, you got all the laws, it looks very good, and then all of a sudden some strange phenomenon occurs in some corner.

26:04So you begin to investigate that, to look for it, it's castling, something you didn't expect it. We're always, by the way, in a fundamental physics, always trying to investigate those things in which we don't understand the conclusions. We're not trying to check all the time arc conclusions, we have to check them enough, we're okay. The thing that doesn't fit is the thing that's the most interesting. That sounds like what's most exciting. Yeah, part that doesn't go according to what you expected. Also, we could have revolutions and physics after you've been noticed that the bishops maintain their color and they go along the diagonals and so on for such a long time, and everybody knows that that's true.

26:42Then you suddenly discover one day in some chess game that the bishop doesn't maintain its color, it changes its color. Only later do you discover there's new possibility that the bishop is captured and that a pawn went all the way down to the queens and to produce a new bishop that could happen, but you didn't know it. And so it's a very analogous to the way our laws are. They sometimes look positive, they keep on working, and all of a sudden some little gimmick shows that they're wrong, and then we have to investigate the conditions under which this bishop change of color happened and so forth, and gradually learn the new rule that explains it more deeply.

27:18So it sounds like we have to hold all of these ideas loosely enough to allow the thing that doesn't fit to show itself and teach us what we don't know, we don't know. Unlike the chess game though, in the case of the chess game, the rules become more complicated as you go along, but in the physics, when you discover new things, it looks more simple. It appears on the whole to be more complicated because we learn about a greater experience, that is we learn about more particles and new things, and so the laws will complicate it again. So the reason it looks complicated is because we don't see enough of the picture to see how simple it actually is.