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By Root 2365 0

had dominated the construction of a curriculum. The nascent graduate programs did not have the luxury of a liberal mix of confident instructors. Memorization replaced understanding, or so it seemed to Feynman, and he began to proselytize the Brazilian educational establishment. Students learned names and abstract formulations, he said. Brazilian students could recite Brewster’s Law: “Light impinging on a material of index n is 100 percent polarized with the electric field perpendicular to the plane of incidence if the tangent …” But when he asked what would happen if they looked out at the sunlight reflecting off the bay and held up a piece of polarized film and turned the film this way and that, he got blank stares. They could define “triboluminescence”—light emitted by crystals under mechanical pressure—and it made Feynman wish the professors would just send them into a dark room with a pair of pliers and a sugar cube or a Life Saver to see the faint blue flash, as he had when he was a child. “Have you got science? No! You have only told what a word means in terms of other words. You haven’t told them anything about nature—what crystals produce light when you crush them, why they produce light… .” An examination question would read, “What are the four types of telescope?” (Newtonian, Cassegrainian, …) Students could answer, and yet, Feynman said, the real telescope was lost: the instrument that helped begin the scientific revolution, that showed humanity the humbling vastness of the stars.

Words about words: Feynman despised this kind of knowledge more intently than ever, and when he returned to the United States he found out again how much it was a part of American education, a mind-set showing itself not just in the habits of students but in quiz shows, popular what-should-you-know books, and textbook design. He wanted everyone to share his strenuous approach to knowledge. He would sit idly at a café table and cock his ear to listen to the sound sugar made as it struck the surface of his iced tea, something between a hiss and a rustle, and his temper would flare if anyone asked what the phenomenon was called—even if someone merely asked for an explanation. He respected only the not-knowing, first-principles approach: try sugar in water, try sugar in warm tea, try tea already saturated with sugar, try salt … see when the whoosh becomes a fizz. Trial and error, discovery, free inquiry.

He resented more than just the hollowness of standardized knowledge. Rote learning drained away all that he valued in science: the inventive soul, the habit of seeking better ways to do anything. His kind of knowledge—knowledge by doing—“gives a feeling of stability and reality about the world,” he said, “and drives out many fears and superstitions.” He was thinking now about what science meant and what knowledge meant. He told the Brazilians:

Science is a way to teach how something gets to be known, what is not known, to what extent things are known (for nothing is known absolutely), how to handle doubt and uncertainty, what the rules of evidence are, how to think about things so that judgments can be made, how to distinguish truth from fraud, and from show.

Telescopes, Newtonian or Cassegrainian, had flaws and limitations to go with their wondrous history. An effective scientist—even a theorist—needed to know about both.

Faker from Copacabana

Feynman told people that he had been born tone-deaf and that he disliked most music, despite the conventional observation that mathematical and musical aptitude run side by side. Classical music—music in the European tradition—he found not just dull but positively unpleasant. Above all it was the experience of listening that he could not stand.

Those who worked near him over the years knew nevertheless about the toneless music that seemed constantly to well up through his nerve endings, that clattered and pounded through their shared office walls. He drummed unconsciously as he calculated, and he drummed to attract a crowd at parties. Philip Morrison, who shared an office with him at