• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2236 0

I’ve relied on the published (and semipublished) record; on his own accumulation of personal letters, notes to himself, and other documents, released to me in 1988 by Gweneth Howarth Feynman; on letters shared by other family members and friends; on his office files and other documents stored in the California Institute of Technology Archives in Pasadena; on early material collected at the Niels Bohr Library of the American Institute of Physics in New York. I obtained recently declassified notebooks and papers from the archives of Los Alamos National Laboratory. Other material came from the libraries and manuscript collections of the following institutions: the American Philosophical Society (papers of H. D. Smyth and J. A. Wheeler); the Brooklyn Historical Society; Cornell University (papers of H. A. Bethe); Far Rockaway High School; Harvard University; the Library of Congress (papers of J. R. Oppenheimer); the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Princeton University; Rockefeller University; and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.

The leading physicists who play the largest roles in this book agreed to provide their own recollections in interviews that sometimes extended over many sessions: Hans Bethe, Freeman Dyson, Murray Gell-Mann, Julian Schwinger, Victor Weisskopf, John Archibald Wheeler, and Robert R. Wilson.

Feynman’s own voice is everywhere in his published work, of course, and toward the end of his life, wherever he went, tape recorders and video cameras seemed to be running. But several interviews of Feynman by historians and others were especially valuable. The deepest and most comprehensive—a central resource for anyone studying Feynman—is an oral history of many hundreds of pages conducted by Charles Weiner for the American Institute of Physics in 1966 and 1973; I used Feynman’s copy of the transcript, with his handwritten corrections and comments. I also consulted the AIP’s oral-history interviews with Bethe, Dyson, William A. Fowler, Werner Heisenberg, Philip Morrison, and others. The physicist and historian Silvan S. Schweber kindly shared the tape of his revealing 1980 interview on the development of quantum electrodynamics and on Feynman’s style of visualization. Lillian Hoddeson conducted a useful interview of Feynman for her technical history of Los Alamos. Robert Crease gave me the transcript of an interview for his and Charles Mann’s The Second Creation. Christopher Sykes gave me access to the uncut interview he conducted for what became the 1981 BBC-TV production, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. Sali Ann Kriegsman gave me her transcript of Feynman’s recollections of Far Rockaway.

Ralph Leighton, who drew from Feynman the reminiscences that became Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think?, generously provided the original tapes of these interviews over nearly a decade. These are the stories that Feynman retold and refined over his lifetime—mostly accurate, but strongly filtered. I have tried not to lean on them too heavily, for reasons that I hope emerge in the text.

Feynman’s family members also spoke with me at length: Gweneth, Joan, Carl, and Michelle Feynman and Frances Lewine. Helen J. Tuck, his secretary of many years, shared her invaluable memories and perceptive comments.

Among the many other colleagues, students, friends, and observers of Feynman who helped me by submitting to interviews or providing written recollections—and in some cases copies of letters and diary pages—were Jan Anbjørn, Robert Bacher, Michel Baranger, Barry Barish, Henry H. Barschall, Mary Louise Bell, Rose Bethe, Jerry Bishop, James Bjorken, Peter A. Carruthers, Robert F. Christy, Michael Cohen, Sidney Coleman, Monarch L. Cutler, Predrag Cvitanović, Cecile DeWitt-Morette, Russell J. Donnelly, Sidney Drell, Leonard Eisenbud, Timothy Ferris, Richard D. Field, Michael E. Fisher, Evelyn Frank, Steven Frautschi, Edward Fredkin, Sheldon Clashow, Marvin Goldberger, David Goodstein, Frances R. (Rose McSherry) Graham, William R. Graham, Jules Greenbaum, Bruce Gregory, W. Conyers