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By Root 2313 0

barren: “an intellectual desert.” At first he learned more at home, often from the encyclopedia. Having trained himself in rudimentary algebra, he once concocted a set of four equations with four unknowns and showed it off to his arithmetic teacher, along with his methodical solution. She was impressed but mystified; she had to take it to the principal to find out whether it was correct. The school had one course in general science, for boys only, taught by a blustering, heavyset man called Major Connolly—evidently his World War I rank. All Feynman remembered from the course was the length of a meter in inches, 39.37, and a futile argument with the teacher over whether rays of light from a single source come out radially, as seemed logical to Richard, or in parallel, as in the conventional textbook diagrams of lens behavior. Even in grade school he had no doubt that he was right about such things. It was just obvious, physically—not the sort of argument that could be settled by an appeal to authority. At home, meanwhile, he boiled water by running 110-volt house current through it and watched the lines of blue and yellow sparks that flow when the current breaks. His father sometimes described the beauty of the flow of energy through the everyday world, from sunlight to plants to muscles to the mechanical work stored in the spring of a windup toy. Assigned at school to write verse, Richard applied this idea to a fancifully bucolic scene with a farmer plowing his field to make food, grass, and hay:

… Energy plays an important part

And it’s used in all this work;

Energy, yes, energy with power so great,

A kind that cannot shirk.

If the farmer had not this energy,

He would be at a loss,

But it’s sad to think, this energy

Belongs to a little brown horse.

Then he wrote another poem, brooding self-consciously about his own obsession with science and with the idea of science. Amid some borrowed apocalyptic imagery he expressed a feeling that science meant skepticism about God—at least about the standardized God to whom he had been exposed at school. Over the Feynmans’ rational and humanistic household God had never held much sway. “Science is making us wonder,” he began—then on second thought he scratched out the word wonder.

Science is making us wander,

Wander, far and wide;

And know, by this time,

Our face we ought to hide.

Some day, the mountain shall wither,

While the valleys get flooded with fire;

Or men shall be driven like horses,

And stamper, like beasts, in the mire.

And we say, “The earth was thrown from the sun,”

Or, “Evolution made us come to be

And we come from lowest of beasts,

Or one step back, the ape and monkey.”

Our minds are thinking of science,

And science is in our ears;

Our eyes are seeing science,

And science is in our fears.

Yes, we’re wandering from the Lord our God,

Away from the Holy One;

But now we cannot help it,

For it is already done.

But poetry was (Richard thought) “sissy-like.” This was no small problem. He suffered grievously from the standard curse of boy intellectuals, the fear of being thought, or of being, a sissy. He thought he was weak and physically awkward. In baseball he was inept. The sight of a ball rolling toward him across a street filled him with dread. Piano lessons dismayed him, too, not just because he played so poorly, but because he kept playing an exercise called “Dance of the Daisies.” For a while this verged on obsession. Anxiety would strike when his mother sent him to the store for “peppermint patties.”

As a natural corollary he was shy about girls. He worried about getting in fights with stronger boys. He tried to ingratiate himself with them by solving their school problems or showing how much he knew. He endured the canonical humiliations: for example, watching helplessly while some neighborhood children turned his first chemistry set into a brown, useless, sodden mass on the sidewalk in front of his house. He tried to be a good boy and then worried, as good boys do, about being too good—“goody-good.” He could hardly retreat