Richard Feynman was my teacher long
before we met. Ten years after his death, he remains an inspiration and
example to me and to many physicists, as well as the icon of a public scientist
to a growing legion of admirers in the world at large.
Feynman in life was a remarkable
presence. There was Feynman the peerless scientist: the Nobel laureate
who had constructed the theory of photons and electrons, invented the little
diagrams that supplanted equations as the way physicists think about fundamental
processes, and spoken delphically of antiparticles as particles moving
backward through time. There was Feynman the captivating lecturer: the
performance artist, really, who took seriously both his subject and his
audience, invested himself in every lecture, and punctuated his performances
with wisecracks and homilies alike. And, of course, there was Feynman the
character: the bongo-playing safecracker who stood up for the First-Amendment
rights of topless dancers.
When I did meet Feynman—having heard
him lecture on film and in person, having studied the classic papers and
worked through his two little books on Quantum Electrodynamics and
The Theory of Fundamental Processes—I saw yet another face. One
evening at a conference at Cornell in 1971, he took me off to a quiet corner
and acted as if he expected to learn something from me. That was ridiculous,
but the man was serious! For more than an hour, he kept asking, “What do
you know?” and “How do you know that?” and “How do you think about that?”
and “What do you think that means?” It wasn’t long before I began
to feel that he had inserted a catheter into my skull and was siphoning
out every lonely thought. This was Feynman the comrade, who wanted to learn
to think the way Nature does, the man who loved ideas—and not just his
own.
The Meaning of It All is drawn
from three lectures that Richard Feynman gave in April 1963 at the University
of Washington on the theme, “A Scientist Looks at Society.” The talks came
as the world was still exhaling after the Cuban missile crisis, two weeks
after Pope John XXIII issued Pacem in Terris, at a moment when the
tyrant Trofim Denisovich Lysenko still directed the Institute of Genetics
in the Soviet Union. Feynman himself was just completing the two-year introductory
course we know as the Feynman Lectures in Physics, would soon give
the famous Messenger Lectures at Cornell (which physics students still
watch in grainy black-and-white film), and would receive the Nobel Prize
in 1965 with Julian Schwinger and Shin’ichiro Tomonaga.
In “The Uncertainty of Science,”
we find Feynman on familiar ground as the jubilant tour-guide to scientific
insights and the fervent apostle of “science as a method for finding things
out.” Of the things we have learned through science, he writes, “This is
the gold. This is the excitement, the pay you get for all the disciplined
thinking and hard work. The work is not done for the sake of an application.
It is done for the excitement of what is found out. ... [W]ithout understanding
that, you miss the whole point. ... You do not live in your time unless
you understand that this is a tremendous adventure and a wild and exciting
thing.”
As a method for finding things out,
science lives by its disdain for authority and its reliance on experimentation.
The seventeenth-century gentlemen who founded the Royal Society of London
took as their motto Nullius in verba—Don’t take anyone’s word for
it! For Feynman, science “is based on the principle that observation is
the judge of whether something is so or not.”
“Why repeat all this?” he asks rhetorically.
“Because there are new generations born every day. Because there are great
ideas developed in the history of man, and these ideas do not last unless
they are passed purposely and clearly from generation to generation.” But
Feynman does not merely “repeat all this.” He shows that the strength of
science lies in its provisional nature, its open-mindedness, its capacity
for doubt and uncertainty. Perhaps, he suggests, science’s experience with
doubt and uncertainty is its great lesson for humanity.
“It was a struggle to be permitted
to doubt, to be unsure. And I do not want us to forget the importance of
the struggle and, by default, to let the thing fall away. I feel a responsibility
as a scientist who knows the great value of a satisfactory philosophy of
ignorance, and the progress made possible by such a philosophy, progress
which is the fruit of freedom of thought. I feel a responsibility to proclaim
the value of this freedom and to teach that doubt is not to be feared,
but that it is to be welcomed as the possibility of a new potential for
human beings. If you know that you are not sure, you have a chance to improve
the situation. I want to demand this freedom for future generations.”
In “The Uncertainty of Values,” Feynman
argues that by admitting ignorance and uncertainty we may find hope for
human institutions. “Looking back at the worst times, it always seems that
they were times in which there were people who believed with absolute faith
and dogmatism in something. And they were so serious in this matter that
they insisted that the rest of the world would agree with them. And then
they would do things that were directly inconsistent with their own beliefs
in order to maintain that what they said was true.”
Feynman steps outside the safe terrain
of scientific discourse because he acknowledges the limitations of science,
and because “[w]estern civilization, it seems to me, stands by two great
heritages. One is the scientific spirit of adventure—the adventure into
the unknown, an unknown that must be recognized as unknown in order to
be explored . . . To summarize it: humility of the intellect. The other
great heritage is Christian ethics—the basis of action on love, the brotherhood
of all men, the value of the individual, the humility of the spirit.”
He sees the ideological struggle
between east and west not “as between socialism and capitalism, but rather
between suppression of ideas and free ideas.” He believes that the “writers
of the Constitution knew the value of doubt. In the age that they lived,
for instance, science had already developed far enough to show the possibilities
and potentialities that are the result of having uncertainty, the value
of having the openness of possibility. ... Doubt and discussion are essential
to progress. The United States government, in that respect, is new, it’s
modern, and it is scientific.”
Whether you find Feynman’s political
science insightful or naïve, the link between science and freedom
has not lost its importance. Czech President Vaclav Havel, who saw through
every Stalinist lie except the specious claim that the Soviet system was
“scientific,” now delivers postmodern indictments of the scientific world-view
he links with totalitarian régimes. But here is Feynman: “Where
did we ever get the idea that the Russians were, in some sense, scientific?
... [I]t is not scientific ... to be blind in order to maintain ignorance.”
The final lecture in this collection,
“This Unscientific Age,” is a grab-bag of opinions and ideas, as long in
print as the first two lectures combined. Here we find Feynman’s take on
the John Birch Society: “They don’t have a sense of proportion.” There
is also an early indication of his impatience with NASA: “It’s not necessary
that we have so many failures, as far as I can tell. There’s something
the matter in the organization, in the administration, in the engineering,
or in the making of these instruments. It’s important to know that. It’s
not worthwhile knowing that we’re always learning something [from these
needless failures].”
Most provocative is Feynman’s attitude
toward religion as an impulse toward ethical behavior. In scientific matters,
we require not only the correct conclusion, but also a correct chain of
reasoning. What matters to Feynman in human affairs is not the motivation,
but the behavior. He receives John XXIII’s encyclical letter on establishing
universal peace in truth, justice, charity, and liberty with optimism “as
the beginning, possibly, of a new future where we forget, perhaps, about
the theories of why we believe things as long as we ultimately, as far
as action is concerned, believe the same thing.”
The Meaning of It All is the
chance to spend a few hours in Feynman’s company, to ponder and debate
his ideas. It is also an unspoken challenge to physicists to think about
the cultural and spiritual value of science and, following Richard Feynman’s
example, dare to think aloud and in public.