Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [215]
Feynman began with atoms, because that was where his own understanding of the world began—not the world of quantum mechanics but the quotidian world of floating clouds and colors shimmering in oily water. Moments after nearly two hundred freshmen entered the hall for his first lecture in the fall of 1961, they heard these words from the grinning physicist striding back and forth upon the stage:
So, what is our over-all picture of the world?
If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation 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.
Imagine a drop of water, he said. He took them on a tour inward through the length scales, magnifying the drop until it was forty feet across, then fifteen miles across, then 250 times larger still, until the teeming molecules came into view, each with a pair of hydrogen atoms stuck like round arms upon a larger oxygen atom. He discussed the contrary forces holding the molecules together and forcing them apart. He described heat as atoms in motion … pressure … expansion … steam. He described ice, with its molecules held in a rigid crystalline array. He described the surface of water in air, absorbing oxygen and nitrogen and giving off vapor, and he immediately raised issues of equilibrium and disequilibrium. Instead of Aristotle and Galileo, instead of levers and projectiles, he was building a tangible sense of how atoms create the substances around us and why substances behave as they do. Solution and precipitation, fire and odor—he kept moving, displaying the atomic hypothesis not as a reductive end point but as a road toward complexity.
If water—which is nothing but these little blobs, mile upon mile of the same thing over the earth—can form waves and foam, and make rushing noises and strange patterns as it runs over cement; if all of this, all the life of a stream of water, can be nothing but a pile of atoms, how much more is possible? … Is it possible that the “thing” walking back and forth in front of you, talking to you, is a great glob of these atoms in a very complex arrangement … ? When we say we are a pile of atoms, we do not mean we are merely a pile of atoms, because a pile of atoms which is not repeated from one to the other might well have the possibilities which you see before you in the mirror.
He found that he was working harder than at any time since the atomic bomb project. Teaching was only one of his goals. He realized also that he wished to organize his whole embracing knowledge of physics, to turn it end over end until he could find all the interconnections that were usually, he believed, left as loose ends. He felt as though he were making a map. In fact, for a while he considered actually trying to draw one, a diagram—a “Guide to the Perplexed,” as he put it.
A team of Caltech physics professors and graduate students scrambled to keep up, week after week, designing problem sets and supplementary material, as his guide to the perplexed took shape. They met with him at lunch after each lecture to piece together what Feynman had spun from as little as a single sheet of cryptic notes. Despite the homespun lyricism of his voice, the stress on ideas rather than technique, he was moving quickly, and his fellow physicists had to work to keep up with some of his leaps.
As every physics course recapitulated the subject’s history, so did Feynman’s, but instead of surveying the Sumerians or the Greeks he chose—in his