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Dear Rothstein:

Don’t bug me, man!

R. P. Feynman.

The result was a demonstration organized by a Berkeley group at the APS meeting, with women carrying signs and distributing leaflets titled “PR ? TEST” and addressed to “Richard P. (for Pig?) Feynman.”

Despite the women’s movement that emerged in the sixties, science remained forbiddingly male in its rhetoric and its demographics. Barely 2 percent of American graduate degrees in physics went to women. Caltech did not hire its first female faculty member until 1969, and she did not receive tenure until she forced the issue in court in 1976. (Feynman, to the surprise and displeasure of some of his humanities colleagues, had taken her side; he had spent many pleasant hours in her office reading aloud such poems as Theodore Roethke’s “I Knew a Woman”: “I measure time by how a body sways… .”) Like most men in physics, Feynman had known a few women as professional colleagues and believed that he had treated them, individually, as equals. They tended to agree. What more, he wondered, could anyone ask?

The Berkeley protesters had discovered his lady-driver anecdotes but had overlooked other examples of a style of speaking in which, habitually, the scientist is male and nature—her secrets waiting to be penetrated—is female. In his Nobel lecture Feynman had recalled falling in love with his theory: “And, like falling in love with a woman, it is only possible if you do not know much about her, so you cannot see her faults.” And he had concluded:

So what happened to the old theory that I fell in love with as a youth? Well, I would say it’s become an old lady, that has very little attractive left in her and the young today will not have their hearts pound when they look at her anymore. But, we can say the best we can for any old woman, that she has been a good mother and she has given birth to some very good children.

In 1965 a large audience of men and women could listen to these words without taking offense or hearing a politically charged subtext. In 1972 Feynman was able to defuse the protest easily when he took the podium, by declaring: “There is in the world of physics today a tremendous prejudice against women. This is a ridiculous thing and should stop, as there is no sense to it whatsoever. I love the subject of physics and it has always been my desire to try to share the delights of understanding it with any minds that were able to—male or female… .” Many of the demonstrators applauded. In 1985 Feynman once again seemed to some feminists a symbol of male dominance in physics. Real life was complex: one tough-minded Caltech professional would close her door and confide to a stranger that Feynman, even in his sixties, was the sexiest man she had ever known; others, wives of colleagues, resented their husbands for loving him so uncritically. Meanwhile, the status of women in the profession of physics had barely changed.

Despite himself, he was stung by the occasional criticism of Surely You’re Joking. He knew, too, that some of the physicists who had known him longest were disappointed by a self-portrait that made Feynman seem more joker than scientist. His old friends in Hans Bethe’s generation were often pained, or shocked, though they did repeat Feynman’s stories about them with relish, detail for detail, as though from their own memory, Feynman’s voice having transplanted itself into their brains. Others saw through to the essence of what they loved in Feynman. Philip Morrison, writing in Scientific American, said: “Generally Mr. Feynman is not joking; it is we, the setters of ritual performance, of hypocritical standards, pretenders to care and understanding, who are joking instead. This is the book of a powerful mind honest beyond everything else, a specialist in spade-naming.” Feynman nonetheless upbraided people who called the book his autobiography. He wrote in the margin of a science writer’s draft manuscript about modern particle physics: “Not An Autobiography.