Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [218]
As the course wore on, attendance by the kids at the lectures started dropping alarmingly, but at the same time, more and more faculty and graduate students started attending, so the room stayed full, and Feynman may never have known he was losing his intended audience.
This was the world according to Feynman. No scientist since Newton had so ambitiously and so unconventionally set down the full measure of his knowledge of the world—his own knowledge and his community’s. With intensive editing by other physicists, chiefly Robert B. Leighton and Matthew Sands, the lectures became the famous “red books”—the three-volume Feynman Lectures on Physics. Colleges and universities worldwide tried to adopt them as textbooks and then, inevitably, gave them up for more manageable and less radical alternatives. Unlike true textbooks, however, Feynman’s volumes continued to sell steadily a generation later.
Adorning each volume was a picture of Feynman in shirtsleeves, gleefully pounding a bongo drum. He came to regret that. “It is odd,” he said after hearing himself introduced yet again as a bongo player, “but on the infrequent occasions when I have been called upon in a formal place to play the bongo drums, the introducer never seems to find it necessary to mention that I also do theoretical physics. I believe that is probably because we respect the arts more than the sciences.” And when yet another request came in for a copy of the photograph—from a Swedish encyclopedia publisher who wished to “give a human approach to a presentation of the difficult matter that theoretical physics represents”—he exploded. “Dear Sir,” he scrawled,
The fact that I beat a drum has nothing to do with the fact that I do theoretical physics. Theoretical physics is a human endeavor, one of the higher developments of human beings—and this perpetual desire to prove that people who do it are human by showing that they do other things that a few other humans do (like playing bongo drums) is insulting to me.
I am human enough to tell you to go to hell.
The Explorers and the Tourists
“When you have learned what an explanation really is,” Feynman had said, “you can then go on to more subtle questions.”
Creeping philosophy. What is an explanation? Science and scientists had commandeered the practice of explanation, but the theory they left mainly to philosophers. The why seemed to fall in their domain. “With this question philosophy began and with this question it will end,” Martin Heidegger had recently said, “provided that it ends in greatness and not in an impotent decline.” Feynman, who believed that the impotent decline was well under way in the academies that supported philosophers, realized that he had had to develop a view of what constituted explanation, what legitimized explanation, and which phenomena did and did not require explanation.
His understanding of explanation did not depart far from the modern philosophical mainstream, though its jargon of explanans and explanandum was an alien language to him. Like most philosophers, he found explanations most satisfactory when they called upon a generalizing, underlying “law.” A thing is the way it is because other things of its kind are all that way. Why does Mars travel around the sun in an ellipse? Feynman explained—and ventured deep into philosophical territory—in an invited lecture series at Cornell University in 1964. He began by speaking, nominally, about the law of gravitation. In reality his subject was explanation itself.
All satellites travel in elliptical orbits. Why? Because objects tend to travel in a straight line when left alone (the law of inertia) and the combination of that unchanging motion and a force exerted toward a center of gravity—by the law of gravitation—creates an ellipse. What validates the law of gravitation? Feynman expressed the scientist’s modern view, a blend of the pragmatic and the aesthetic. He cautioned that even so beautiful a law was provisional: Newton’s law of gravitation gave way to Einstein’s, and a necessary quantum