Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [241]
We must remove the rigidity of thought… . We must leave freedom for the mind to wander about in trying to solve the problems… . The successful user of mathematics is practically an inventor of new ways of obtaining answers in given situations. Even if the ways are well known, it is usually much easier for him to invent his own way—a new way or an old way—than it is to try to find it by looking it up.
Better to have a jumbled bag of tricks than any one orthodox method. That was how he taught his own children at homework time. Michelle learned that he had a thousand shortcuts; also that they tended to get her into trouble with her arithmetic teachers.
Do You Think You Can Last On Forever?
Although he had never liked athletic activity, he tried to stay fit. After he broke a kneecap falling over a Chicago curb, he took up jogging. He ran almost daily up and down the steep paths above his house in the Altadena hills. He owned a wet suit and swam often at the beachfront house in Mexico that he had bought with his Nobel Prize money. (It had been a shambles when he and Gweneth first saw it. He told her that they did not want it. She looked at the glass wall facing the warm currents sweeping up from the Tropic of Cancer and replied, “Oh yes, we do.”)
Traveling in the Swiss Alps in the summer of 1977, he frightened Gweneth by suddenly running to the bathroom of their cabin and vomiting—something he never did as an adult. Later that day he passed out in the téléphérique. Twice that year his physician diagnosed “fever of undetermined origin.” It was not until October 1978 that cancer was discovered: a tumor that had grown to the size of a melon, weighing six pounds, in the back of his abdomen. A bulge was visible at his waistline when he stood straight. He had ignored the symptoms for too long. He had had other worries: just months before, Gweneth had herself undergone surgery for cancer. Feynman’s tumor pushed his intestines aside and destroyed his left kidney, his left adrenal gland, and his spleen.
It was a rare cancer of the soft fat and connective tissue, a myxoid liposarcoma. After difficult surgery, he left the hospital looking gaunt and began a search of the medical literature. There he found no shortage of probabilistic estimates. The likelihood of a recurrent tumor was high, though his had appeared well encapsulated. He read a series of individual case studies, none with a tumor as large as his. “Five-year survival rates,” one journal said in summary, “have been reported from 0% to 11%, with one report of 41%.” Almost no one survived ten years.
He returned to work. “You are old, Father Feynman,” wrote a young friend in a mocking bit of verse,
“And your hair has turned visibly gray;
And yet you keep tossing ideas around—
At your age, a disgraceful display!”
“In my youth,” said the Master, as he shook his long locks,
“I took a great fancy to sketching;
I drew many diagrams, which most thought profound
While others thought just merely fetching.”
“Yes, I know,” said the youth, interrupting the sage,
“That you once were so awfully clever;
But now is the time for quark sausage with chrome.
Do you think you can last on forever?”
Younger physicists, including Gell-Mann, had already stepped aside from the research frontier, but Feynman turned to problems in quantum chromodynamics—the latest synthesis of field theories, so named because of the central role of quark color. With a postdoctoral student, Richard Field, he studied the very-high-energy details of quark jets. Other theorists had realized that the reason quarks never emerged freely was that they were confined by a force unlike those with which physics was familiar. Most forces diminished with distance—gravity and magnetism, for example. It seemed obvious that this must be so, but the opposite was true for quarks. When they were close