From The New Atlantis, Number 55, Spring 2018, pp. 61-84.
How a cerebral hedonist became a scientific hero
“Energy is eternal delight,” the poet and painter William Blake declared, and the consummate physicist Richard Feynman — born in May 1918 — embodied that credo as far as a human being can in his allotted earthly span. The modern world is sometimes called disenchanted, denuded of magic, because science has annihilated the invisible homeland of the spirits, where angels, demons, and God himself were believed to dwell. But Feynman spoke unabashedly of the wonders and miracles to be found in nature as modern science describes it; the physical world enchanted him because it gave him so much to think about. His mind cavorted as he unlocked some of nature’s most daunting puzzles. The quantum world with its intricate bizarrerie, which upended the established order of classical physics indisputable since Newton, flummoxed an intelligence as monumental as Einstein’s. But Feynman made himself comfortable there, as though it were his native habitat.
The secrets Feynman uncovered of the infinitesimal clarified the world of objects we can see and feel. He was a signature contributor to the theory of quantum electrodynamics (QED), describing the interaction of subatomic particles with light. From QED, one could derive “the basic rules for all ordinary phenomena except for gravitation and nuclear processes,” as he explained in his Lectures on Physics, the text of the two-year introductory course he taught at Caltech in the early 1960s:
… out of quantum electrodynamics come all known electrical, mechanical, and chemical laws: the laws for the collision of billiard balls, the motions of wires in magnetic fields, the specific heat of carbon monoxide, the color of neon signs, the density of salt, and the reactions of hydrogen and oxygen to make water are all consequences of this one law.
The world apparent to all is the starting point for the most arcane investigations of the privileged few. To look hard at every scene as it passes before your eyes, to examine every phenomenon and unpack its inner workings — physics unfolds from such boundless elemental curiosity. In the Lectures, Feynman describes the complex of sights and sounds that a person standing on the seashore experiences, and he proceeds to ask the consequent questions that constitute science’s fundamentals:
Is the sand other than the rocks? That is, is the sand perhaps nothing but a great number of very tiny stones? Is the moon a great rock? If we understood rocks, would we also understand the sand and the moon? Is the wind a sloshing of the air analogous to the sloshing motion of the water in the sea? What common features do different movements have? What is common to different kinds of sound? How many different colors are there?
These are the unsophisticated questions an intelligent child might ask; and Feynman as a child asked precisely such questions. A ball lying in his little red wagon would roll to the back when he pulled the wagon forward, and it would roll to the front when the wagon stopped. The little boy wanted to know why this happened. His father, a uniform salesman, who according to family lore said that if his first child were a boy he would be a scientist, explained to his son what inertia is, but added that nobody knows why it works as it does.
Feynman would learn not to trouble himself with the unanswerable question of why things ultimately are as they are, leaving that to philosophers and religious operatives, whom he thought pretty much useless. Describing what things are and how they work provided excitement enough, and truth enough, for a scientific devotee. The intellectual thrill of seeking — and sometimes discovering — the truth was the medium in which he thrived. He proselytized for the modern scientific project, not as the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate but as the effort to understand nature for the joy of knowing. As he insisted in The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist, a series of lectures given in 1963, “You cannot understand science and its relation to anything else unless you understand and appreciate the great adventure of our time. You do not live in your time unless you understand that this is a tremendous adventure and a wild and exciting thing.” The great adventure had nothing to do with social, moral, or medical benefit; it gloried in exploration for its own sake. Feynman fairly scoffed at the journalistic proclivity to relate every scientific advance to a possible cure for cancer. Even after he was diagnosed with two rare types of cancer whose combined strength would bring him down, he never resorted to special pleading for himself or his fellow sufferers, and there was no evident change in his thinking about the ultimate purpose of science. He would recall the nonpareil mathematician John von Neumann, a colleague on the Manhattan Project, telling him that he was not responsible for the condition of the world. He found this insight — apolitical, perhaps even amoral, and inimical to the beliefs of such scientific colossi as Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer, Marie Curie and Linus Pauling and James D. Watson — profoundly liberating. He was free to search the universe for whatever knowledge it might yield, and there was nothing else that drove him with a comparable passion.
As much as he despised philosophy, and especially ancient philosophy, Feynman was willy-nilly a descendant of Epicurus, the philosophical champion of pleasure. Though Feynman’s pursuit of pleasure was more frenetic than that of the tranquil garden-dweller, both found political life deeply displeasing compared to the joys of the life of the mind and the liberating thought that all is matter. Feynman begins his famous lectures on physics by noting that “all things are made of atoms” — a characteristically Epicurean doctrine, and to Feynman the most important single statement of scientific knowledge. And like the ancient philosopher, he saw in natural science a way to refute received religious ideas and to accept the inherent meaninglessness of the universe. In a 1959 television interview that the station deemed morally objectionable and decided not to air, Feynman offered this perspective of the moral conflicts and travails of humanity:
It doesn’t seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different plants, and all these atoms with their motions and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil — which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama.....
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