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kind of psychology. He let not only Werner Erhard but also John Lilly, an aficionado of dolphins and sensory-deprivation tanks, befriend him. He tried to ignore what he called Lilly’s “mystic hokey-poke” but nonetheless submerged himself in his tanks in the hope of having hallucinations, just as he had tried so hard to observe his own dream states forty years before. Death was not far from his thoughts. He recovered the earliest childhood memories he could dredge from his mind. He tried marijuana and (he was more embarrassed about this) LSD. He listened patiently as Baba Ram Das, the former Richard Alpert of Harvard, author of the cult book Be Here Now, instructed him on how to attain out-of-body experiences. He practiced these—OBE’s, in the current jargon—not willing to believe any of the mystical paraphernalia but happy and interested to imagine his ego floating here or there, outside himself, outside the room, outside the sixty-five-year-old body that was failing him so grievously.

Physicists did not make natural hippies. They had played too great a role in creating the technology-worshiping, nuclear-shadowed culture against which the counterculture set itself. When Feynman spoke now about his experience in the Manhattan Project, he stressed more than ever his cracking of safes and baiting of censors. He was more a rebel than an ambitious and effective group leader. Other people, “people in higher echelons,” made the decisions, he said, prefacing a 1975 talk at Santa Barbara. “I worried about no big decisions. I was always flittering about underneath.” He was hardly an enemy of technology; nor, despite his distaste for the bureaucracy of science, was he an enemy of what was now called the military-industrial complex. He had always refused to attach his name to Caltech’s grant proposals to the federal funding agencies that kept all university physics departments solvent. Still, he would emerge from Lilly’s sensory-deprivation tank, rinse off the Epsom salts in the shower, dress, and drive over to Hughes Aircraft Company, a military contractor, to deliver lectures on physics. He was not guarding his time as he had in the past. Sporadically, he worked for Hughes and several other companies as a consultant; he advised Hughes on a neural-net project sponsored by the Department of Defense and consulted with 3M Company engineers on nonlinear optical materials. For less than four hours of conversation he earned fifteen hundred dollars. These were scattered jobs, chosen with no special thought. Many of his colleagues arranged their consulting far more carefully and earned far more money. Feynman’s clients often seemed more grateful for the thrill of meeting him than for any particular technical contribution he made. He knew he was no businessman. He was Caltech’s highest paid professor, along with Gell-Mann; but Caltech kept all the royalties from The Feynman Lectures on Physics. When his old friend Philip Morrison sent him an advertisement for “seventeen towering lectures by two physics giants,” available from Time-Life Films, he wondered whether Morrison received any royalties. “I don’t,” Feynman said. “Are we physics giants business dwarfs?”

His favorite extracurricular patron in the early 1980s was the Esalen Institute at Big Sur on the California coast, a hub for many varieties of self-actualization, self-enrichment, and self-fulfillment: Rolfing, Gestalt therapy, yoga, meditation. Under the giant trees on cliffs overlooking the Pacific were the original hot tubs, fed by natural sulfur springs. For its many patrons Esalen offered an expensive form of relaxation—a “lube job for the mind,” as Tom Wolfe once put it. Feynman described it as a hotbed of antiscience: “mysticism, expanded consciousness, new types of awareness, ESP, and so forth.” He became a regular visitor. He soaked in the hot tubs, stared gleefully at the nude young women sunbathing, and learned to give massages. He gave some of his standard lectures, adjusted to fit the mental state of the audience. Barefoot, with his thin legs emerging from khaki shorts,