The Wonderful Wizard of Quark

By R.Z. Sheppard

Richard P. Feynman, 66, is a Nobel-prizewinning physicist who talks like a New York City cabby, plays the bongo drums and, to judge from his uninhibited autobiography, thinks as much of his ability to crack safes as he does of his genius for breaking cosmic codes. As part of the brain trust that made the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, Feynman amused himself during quiet desert nights by entering colleagues' offices and picking the locks meant to guard nature's most destructive secrets. Since 1951 he has opened thousands of young minds as a professor at the California Institute of Technology, where he is regarded as that rarity, an eminent theorist who is a first-rate teacher. He is also a mixed-media event, featured on a novelty poster dressed as a mock mystic and appearing on public television. His directness, warmth and spontaneity are not lost in print.

The Feynman that leaps directly off the page is impish and aggressively unpretentious. One of his favorite words is "stuff." He rattles off his adventures in physics, biology, art and music (he once played a sort of frying pan in a Brazilian samba band) and has the nerve to describe himself as "a one-sided guy." He talks offhandedly of his associations with Einstein, Bohr and Oppenheimer and enthusiastically about discussing gambling odds with Nick the Greek. His life has been full of unforgettable characters, including his father, a salesman in the uniform business.

Mel Feynman appears to have been unusually successful in selling his son on the joys of acquiring and applying knowledge. At about age twelve, Richard was the youngest radio repairman in Far Rockaway, an oceanside community on New York's Long Island. The gifted problem solver breezed through high school math and went on to stir up M.I.T. and Princeton, where the inverse proportion between his mental capacities and his social skills soon became obvious. The book's title is taken from the dean's wife's remark after she asked the young graduate student if he wanted cream or lemon in his tea, and he answered, "Both."

Why not? The unconventional approach has served Feynman splendidly. The work that led to a Nobel Prize in 1965 had begun some years earlier while he was watching someone toss a plate. He noticed that the spin of the dish seemed much faster than the rate of its wobble. The observation led to some playful calculations, idle musings about electron orbits and, finally, basic theories of quantum electrodynamics.

It does not take an extravagant IQ to figure out that Feynman's sportive style masks serious content. He defines science as "an understanding of the behavior of nature," and provides numerous examples of how that understanding is thwarted. As a guest lecturer in Rio de Janeiro, he discovered that nearly all his students could parrot their lessons but could not explain what they meant. The rote method was obviously an unscientific way of teaching science. Years later, as a member of a California state board of education curriculum committee, Feynman was appalled by the quality of math textbooks he was asked to review. His expert opinion: "Everything was written by somebody who didn't know what the hell he was talking about."

Feynman's curiosity has led him to unexpected places: close to the ground where he used his nose to learn how bloodhounds follow a trail, into topless restaurants where he indulged his interest in sketching anatomy, and inside sensory-deprivation tanks to experience hallucinations. His attention wavers and his patience wanes at forms of political and social studies that assume the trappings of science without the rigor. He insists on intellectual integrity, "a kind of leaning over backwards," to discover possibilities that may not be congenial to the investigator's conclusions.

When Feynman asserts that we live in an unscientific age, he means there is a scarcity of rational thought about the technological forces that have shaped the modern world. He was there at the creation. His enlisted-man's version of brain-storming days at Los Alamos seizes the spirit of the place with typical zest and informality: "What (Hans) Bethe needed was someone to talk to, to push his ideas against. Well, he comes in to this little squirt in an office and starts to argue, explaining his idea. I say, 'No, no, you're crazy. It'll go like this.' And he says, 'Just a moment,' and explains how he's not crazy, I'm crazy. And we keep on going like this. You see, when I hear about physics, I just think about physics, and I don't know who I'm talking to, so I say dopey things . . . But it turned out that's exactly what he needed."

Feynman witnessed the first atomic test blast through the windshield of a truck parked 20 miles from ground zero. He claims to be perhaps the only person not wearing dark glasses to look directly at the explosion, "this white light changing into yellow and then into orange." A chain reaction is not a bad analogy for Feynman's life. From a critical mass of gray matter it goes off in all directions, producing both heat and light.