Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [228]
In the event, he put on white tie and tails, slicked his hair down, and grinned as he accepted the award from a bespectacled King Gustav VI Adolf. The prizewinners sped through a week of banquets, dances, formal toasts, and impromptu speeches in Sweden’s ornate and palatial civic buildings. They traveled from Stockholm to Uppsala and back, partied with students in a beer cellar, and made conversation with ambassadors and princesses. They collected their medals, certificates, and bank checks. They delivered their Nobel Prize lectures. Feynman realized that he had never read anyone’s Nobel lecture. Scientists’, especially, seemed automatically obscure. Friends told him about William Faulkner’s famous speech in 1950 (“I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail”); he did not think he could produce anything so grand, but he wanted to say something memorable, and he did not want to give the précis of quantum electrodynamics that might also be coming from his fellow winners.
He believed that historians, journalists, and scientists themselves all participated in a tradition of writing about science that obscured the working reality, the sense of science as a process rather than a body of formal results. Real science was confusion and doubt, ambition and desire, a march through fog. With hindsight, the polished histories tended to impose a post facto logic on the sequence of reasoning and discovery. The appearance of an idea in the scientific literature and the actual communication of the same idea through the community could be sharply different, Feynman knew. He decided to give a personal, anecdotal, and—he claimed—unpolished version of his route to the space-time view of quantum electrodynamics. “We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible,” he began, “to cover up all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or to describe how you had the wrong idea first.”
He described the historic difficulty of infinities in the self-interaction of the electron. He confessed his secret desire as a graduate student to eliminate the field altogether—to produce a theory of direct action between charges. He recounted his collaboration with Wheeler: “as I was stupid, so was Professor Wheeler that much more clever.” He tried to give his listeners a feeling for what had seemed a new philosophical stance—the willingness of a physicist in the post-Einstein era to accept paradoxes without stopping to say, “Oh, no, how could that be?”—and offered his memory of the way his physical viewpoint had evolved. He repeated his view of renormalization: “I think that the renormalization theory is simply a way to sweep the difficulties of the divergences of electrodynamics under the rug. I am, of course, not sure of that.”
He pointed out a remarkable irony of the story. So many of the ideas he nursed on his way to his Nobel Prize–winning work had themselves proved faulty: his first notion that a charge should not act on itself; the whole Wheeler-Feynman half-advanced, half-retarded electrodynamics. Even his path integrals and his view of electrons moving backward in time were only aids to guessing, not essential parts of the theory, he said.
The method used here, of reasoning in physical terms, therefore, appears to be extremely inefficient. On looking back over the work, 1 can only feel a kind of regret for the enormous amount of physical reasoning and mathematical re-expression… .
But he also believed that the inefficiency, the guessing of equations, the juggling of alternative physical viewpoints were, even now, the key to discovering new laws. He concluded with advice to students:
The chance is high that the