Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [5]
There are two kinds of geniuses, the “ordinary” and the “magicians.” An ordinary genius is a fellow that you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what they have done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians. They are, to use mathematical jargon, in the orthogonal complement of where we are and the working of their minds is for all intents and purposes incomprehensible. Even after we understand what they have done, the process by which they have done it is completely dark. They seldom, if ever, have students because they cannot be emulated and it must be terribly frustrating for a brilliant young mind to cope with the mysterious ways in which the magician’s mind works. Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest caliber.
Feynman resented the polished myths of most scientific history, submerging the false steps and halting uncertainties under a surface of orderly intellectual progress, but he created a myth of his own. When he had ascended to the top of the physicists’ mental pantheon of heroes, stories of his genius and his adventures became a sort of art form within the community. Feynman stories were clever and comic. They gradually created a legend from which their subject (and chief purveyor) seldom emerged. Many of them were transcribed and published in the eighties in two books with idiosyncratic titles, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think? To the surprise of their publisher these became popular best-sellers. After his death in 1988 his sometime friend, collaborator, office neighbor, foil, competitor, and antagonist, the acerbic Murray Gell-Mann, angered his family at a memorial service by asserting, “He surrounded himself with a cloud of myth, and he spent a great deal of time and energy generating anecdotes about himself.” These were stories, Gell-Mann added, “in which he had to come out, if possible, looking smarter than anyone else.” In these stories Feynman was a gadfly, a rake, a clown, and a naïf. At the atomic bomb project he was the thorn in the side of the military censors. On the commission investigating the 1986 space-shuttle explosion he was the outsider who pushed aside red tape to uncover the true cause. He was the enemy of pomp, convention, quackery, and hypocrisy. He was the boy who saw the emperor with no clothes. So he was in life. Yet Gell-Mann spoke the truth, too. Amid the legend were misconceptions about Feynman’s accomplishments, his working style, and his deepest beliefs. His own view of himself worked less to illuminate than to hide the nature of his genius.
The reputation, apart from the person, became an edifice standing monumentally amid the rest of the scenery of modern science. Feynman diagrams, Feynman integrals, and Feynman rules joined Feynman stories in the language that physicists share. They would say of a promising young colleague, “He’s no Feynman, but …” When he entered a room where physicists had gathered—the student cafeteria at the California Institute of Technology, or the auditorium at any scientific meeting—with him would come a shift in the noise level, a disturbance of the field, that seemed to radiate from where he was carrying his tray or taking his front-row seat. Even his senior colleagues tried to look without looking. Younger physicists were drawn to Feynman’s rough glamour. They practiced imitating his handwriting