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more hard-edged than the quaint arguments he found in Descartes, for example, whom Arline was reading. The Cartesian proof of God’s perfection struck him as less than rigorous. When he parsed I think, therefore I am, it came out suspiciously close to I am and I also think. When Descartes argued that the existence of imperfection implied perfection, and that the existence of a God concept in his own fuzzy and imperfect mind implied the existence of a Being sufficiently perfect and infinite as to create such a conception, Feynman thought he saw the obvious fallacy. He knew all about imperfection in science—“degrees of approximation.” He had drawn hyperbolic curves that approached an ideal straight line without ever reaching it. People like Descartes were stupid, Richard told Arline, relishing his own boldness in defying the authority of the great names. Arline replied that she supposed there were two sides to everything. Richard gleefully contradicted even that. He took a strip of paper, gave it a half twist, and pasted the ends together: he had produced a surface with one side.

No one showed Feynman, in return, the genius of Descartes’s strategy in proving the obvious—obvious because he and his contemporaries were supposed to take their own and God’s existence as given. The Cartesian master plan was to reject the obvious, reject the certain, and start fresh from a state of total doubt. Even I might be an illusion or a dream, Descartes declared. It was the first great suspension of belief. It opened a door to the skepticism that Feynman now savored as part of the modern scientific method. Richard stopped reading, though, long before giving himself the pleasure of rejecting Descartes’s final, equally unsyllogistic argument for the existence of God: that a perfect being would certainly have, among other excellent features, the attribute of existence.

Philosophy at MIT only irritated Feynman more. It struck him as an industry built by incompetent logicians. Roger Bacon, famous for introducing scientia experimentalis into philosophical thought, seemed to have done more talking than experimenting. His idea of experiment seemed closer to mere experience than to the measured tests a twentieth-century student performed in his laboratory classes. A modern experimenter took hold of some physical apparatus and performed certain actions on it, again and again, and generally wrote down numbers. William Gilbert, a less well-known sixteenth-century investigator of magnetism, suited Feynman better, with his credo, “In the discovery of secret things and in the investigation of hidden causes, stronger reasons are obtained from sure experiments and demonstrated arguments than from probable conjectures and the opinions of philosophical speculators of the common sort.” That was a theory of knowledge Feynman could live by. It also stuck in his mind that Gilbert thought Bacon wrote science “like a prime minister.” MIT’s physics instructors did nothing to encourage students to pay attention to the philosophy instructors. The tone was set by the pragmatic Slater, for whom philosophy was smoke and perfume, free-floating and untestable prejudice. Philosophy set knowledge adrift; physics anchored knowledge to reality.

“Not from positions of philosophers but from the fabric of nature”—William Harvey three centuries earlier had declared a division between science and philosophy. Cutting up corpses gave knowledge a firmer grounding than cutting up sentences, he announced, and the gulf between two styles of knowledge came to be accepted by both camps. What would happen when scientists plunged their knives into the less sinewy reality inside the atom remained to be seen. In the meantime, although Feynman railed against philosophy, an instructor’s cryptic comment about “stream of consciousness” started him thinking about what he could learn of his own mind through introspection. His inward looking was more experimental than Descartes’s. He would go up to his room on the fourth floor of Phi Beta Delta, pull down the shades, get into bed, and try to watch