Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [36]
Where Newton’s methods left scientists with a feeling of comprehension, minimum principles left a sense of mystery. “This is not quite the way one thinks in dynamics,” the physicist David Park has noted. One likes to think that a ball or a planet or a ray of light makes its way instant by instant, not that it follows a preordained path. From the Lagrangian point of view the forces that pull and shape a ball’s arc into a gentle parabola serve a higher law. Maupertuis wrote, “It is not in the little details … that we must look for the supreme Being, but in phenomena whose universality suffers no exception and whose simplicity lays them quite open to our sight.” The universe wills simplicity. Newton’s laws provide the mechanics; the principle of least action ensures grace.
The hard question remained. (In fact, it would remain, disquieting the few physicists who continued to ponder it, until Feynman, having long since overcome his aversion to the principle of least action, found the answer in quantum mechanics.) Park phrased the question simply: How does the ball know which path to choose?
Socializing the Engineer
“Let none say that the engineer is an unsociable creature who delights only in formulae and slide rules.” So pleaded the MIT yearbook. Some administrators and students did worry about the socialization of this famously awkward creature. One medicine prescribed by the masters of student life was Tea, compulsory for all freshmen. (“But after they have conquered their initial fears and learned to balance a cup on a saucer while conversing with the wife of a professor, compulsion is no longer necessary.”) Students also refined their conversational skills at Bull Session Dinners and their other social skills at an endless succession of dances: Dormitory Dinner Dances, the Christmas Dance and the Spring Dance, a Monte Carlo Dance featuring a roulette wheel and a Barn Dance offering sleigh rides, dances to attract students from nearby women’s colleges like Radcliffe and Simmons, dances accompanied by the orchestras of Nye Mayhew and Glenn Miller, the traditional yearly Field Day Dance after the equally traditional Glove Fight, and, in the fraternity houses that provided the most desirable student quarters, formal dances that persuaded even Dick Feynman to put on a tuxedo almost every week.
The fraternities at MIT, as elsewhere, strictly segregated students by religion. Jews had a choice of just two, and Feynman joined the one called Phi Beta Delta, on Bay State Road in Boston, in a neighborhood of town houses just across the Charles River from campus. One did not simply “join” a fraternity, however. One enjoyed a wooing process that began the summer before college at local smokers and continued, in Feynman’s case, with insistent offers of transportation and lodging that bordered on kidnapping. Having chosen a fraternity, one instantly underwent a status reversal, from an object of desire to an object of contempt. New pledges endured systematic humiliation. Their fraternity brothers drove Feynman and the other boys to an isolated spot in the Massachusetts countryside, abandoned them beside a frozen lake, and left them to find their way home. They submitted to wrestling matches in mud and allowed themselves to be tied down overnight on the wooden floor of a deserted house—though Feynman, still secretly afraid that he would be found out as a sissy, made a surprising show of resisting his sophomore captors by grabbing at their legs and trying to knock them over. These rites were tests of character, after all, mixed with schoolboy sadism that colleges only gradually learned to restrain. The hazing left many boys with emotional bonds both to their tormentors and to their fellow victims.