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  PENGUIN BOOKS

  WHAT DO YOU CARE WHAT

  OTHER PEOPLE THINK?

  Richard P. Feynman was one of this century’s most brilliant theoretical physicists and original thinkers. Born in Far Rockaway, New York, in 1918, he studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he graduated with a BS in 1939. He went on to Princeton and received his Ph.D. in 1942. During the war years he worked at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. He became Professor of Theoretical Physics at Cornell University, where he worked with Hans Bethe. He all but rebuilt the theory of quantum electrodynamics and high-energy physics and it was for this work that he shared the Nobel Prize in 1965. Feynman was a visiting professor at the California Institute of Technology in 1950, where he later accepted a permanent faculty appointment, and became Richard Chace Tolman Professor of Theoretical Physics in 1959. He had an extraordinary ability to communicate his science to audiences at all levels, and was a well-known and popular lecturer. Richard Feynman died in 1988 after a long illness. Freeman Dyson, of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, called him ‘the most original mind of his generation’, while in its obiturary The New York Times described him as ‘arguably the most brilliant, iconoclastic and influential of the postwar generation of theoretical physicists’.

  A number of collections and adaptations of his lectures have been published, including The Feynman Lectures on Physics, QED (Penguin, 1990) The Character of Physical Law (Penguin, 1992), Six Easy Pieces (Penguin 1998), The Meaning of It All (Penguin 1999), Six Not-So-Easy Pieces (Penguin, 1999), The Feynman Lectures on Gravitation (Penguin, 1999) and The Feynman Lectures on Computation (Penguin, 1999). His memoirs, Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman, were published in 1985.

  “What Do You Care What Other People Think?”

  Further Adventures of a Curious Character

  Richard P. Feynman

  as told to Ralph Leighton

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in the United States of America 1988

  First published as a Norton paperback 2001

  Published in Penguin Books 2007

  3

  Copyright © Gweneth Feynman and Ralph Leighton, 1988 All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  ISBN: 978-0-14-193758-8

  Contents

  Preface

  Part 1 A CURIOUS CHARACTER

  The Making of a Scientist

  “What Do You Care What Other People Think?”

  It’s as Simple as One, Two, Three…

  Getting Ahead

  Hotel City

  Who the Hell Is Herman?

  Feynman Sexist Pig!

  I Just Shook His Hand, Can You Believe It?

  Letters

  Photos and Drawings

  Part 2 MR. FEYNMAN GOES TO WASHINGTON: INVESTIGATING THE SPACE SHUTTLE CHALLENGER DISASTER

  Preliminaries

  Committing Suicide

  The Cold Facts

  Check Six!

  Gumshoes

  Fantastic Figures

  An Inflamed Appendix

  The Tenth Recommendation

  Meet the Press

  Afterthoughts

  Appendix F: Personal Observations on the Reliability of the Shuttle

  EPILOGUE

  Preface

  The Value of Science

  Index

  Preface

  BECAUSE of the appearance of “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” a few things need to be explained here.

  First, although the central character in this book is the same as before, the “adventures of a curious character” here are different: some are light and some tragic, but most of the time Mr. Feynman is surely not joking—although it’s often hard to tell.

  Second, the stories in this book fit together more loosely than those in “Surely You’re Joking…,” where they were arranged chronologically to give a semblance of order. (That resulted in some readers getting the mistaken idea that SYJ is an autobiography.) My motivation is simple: ever since hearing my first Feynman stories, I have had the powerful desire to share them with others.

  Finally, most of these stories were not told at drumming sessions, as before. I will elaborate on this in the brief outline that follows.

  Part 1, “A Curious Character,” begins by describing the influence of those who most shaped Feynman’s personality—his father, Mel, and his first love, Arlene. The first story was adapted from “The Pleasure of Finding Things Out,” a BBC program produced by Christopher Sykes. The story of Arlene, from which the title of this book was taken, was painful for Feynman to recount. It was assembled over the past ten years out of pieces from six different stories. When it was finally complete, Feynman was especially fond of this story, and happy to share it with others.

  The other Feynman stories in Part 1, although generally lighter in tone, are included here because there won’t be a second volume of SYJ. Feynman was particularly proud of “It’s as Simple as One, Two, Three,” which he occasionally thought of writing up as a psychology paper. The letters in the last chapter of Part 1 have been provided courtesy of Gweneth Feynman, Freeman Dyson, and Henry Bethe.

  Part 2, “Mr. Feynman Goes to Washington,” is, unfortunately, Feynman’s last big adventure. The story is particularly long because its content is still timely. (Shorter versions have appeared in Engineering and Science and Physics Today.) It was not published sooner because Feynman underwent his third and fourth major surgeries—plus radiation, hyperthermia, and other treatments—since serving on the Rogers Commission.

  Feynman’s decade-long battle against cancer ended on February 15, 1988, two weeks after he taught his last class at Caltech. I decided to include one of his most eloquent and inspirational speeches, “The Value of Science,” as an epilogue.

  Ralph Leighton

  March 1988

  Part 1

  A CURIOUS CHARACTER

  The Making of a Scientist

  I HAVE a friend who’s an artist, and he sometimes takes a view which I don’t agree with. He’ll hold up a flower and say, “Look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree. But then he’ll say, “I, as an artist, can see how beautiful a flower is. But you, as a scien
tist, take it all apart and it becomes dull.” I think he’s kind of nutty.

  First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people—and to me, too, I believe. Although I might not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is, I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. But at the same time, I see much more in the flower than he sees. I can imagine the cells inside, which also have a beauty. There’s beauty not just at the dimension of one centimeter; there’s also beauty at a smaller dimension.

  There are the complicated actions of the cells, and other processes. The fact that the colors in the flower have evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; that means insects can see the colors. That adds a question: does this aesthetic sense we have also exist in lower forms of life? There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.

  I’ve always been very one-sided about science, and when I was younger I concentrated almost all my effort on it. In those days I didn’t have time, and I didn’t have much patience, to learn what’s called the humanities. Even though there were humanities courses in the university that you had to take in order to graduate, I tried my best to avoid them. It’s only afterwards, when I’ve gotten older and more relaxed, that I’ve spread out a little bit. I’ve learned to draw and I read a little bit, but I’m really still a very one-sided person and I don’t know a great deal. I have a limited intelligence and I use it in a particular direction.

  Before I was born, my father told my mother, “If it’s a boy, he’s going to be a scientist.”* When I was just a little kid, very small in a highchair, my father brought home a lot of little bathroom tiles—seconds—of different colors. We played with them, my father setting them up vertically on my highchair like dominoes, and I would push one end so they would all go down.

  Then after a while, I’d help set them up. Pretty soon, we’re setting them up in a more complicated way: two white tiles and a blue tile, two white tiles and a blue tile, and so on. When my mother saw that she said, “Leave the poor child alone. If he wants to put a blue tile, let him put a blue tile.”

  But my father said, “No, I want to show him what patterns are like and how interesting they are. It’s a kind of elementary mathematics.” So he started very early to tell me about the world and how interesting it is.

  We had the Encyclopaedia Britannica at home. When I was a small boy he used to sit me on his lap and read to me from the Britannica. We would be reading, say, about dinosaurs. It would be talking about the Tyrannosaurus rex, and it would say something like, “This dinosaur is twenty-five feet high and its head is six feet across.”

  My father would stop reading and say, “Now, let’s see what that means. That would mean that if he stood in our front yard, he would be tall enough to put his head through our window up here.” (We were on the second floor.) “But his head would be too wide to fit in the window.” Everything he read to me he would translate as best he could into some reality.

  It was very exciting and very, very interesting to think there were animals of such magnitude—and that they all died out, and that nobody knew why. I wasn’t frightened that there would be one coming in my window as a consequence of this. But I learned from my father to translate: everything I read I try to figure out what it really means, what it’s really saying.

  We used to go to the Catskill Mountains, a place where people from New York City would go in the summer. The fathers would all return to New York to work during the week, and come back only for the weekend. On weekends, my father would take me for walks in the woods and he’d tell me about interesting things that were going on in the woods. When the other mothers saw this, they thought it was wonderful and that the other fathers should take their sons for walks. They tried to work on them but they didn’t get anywhere at first. They wanted my father to take all the kids, but he didn’t want to because he had a special relationship with me. So it ended up that the other fathers had to take their children for walks the next weekend.

  The next Monday, when the fathers were all back at work, we kids were playing in a field. One kid says to me, “See that bird? What kind of bird is that?”

  I said, “I haven’t the slightest idea what kind of a bird it is.”

  He says, “It’s a brown-throated thrush. Your father doesn’t teach you anything!”

  But it was the opposite. He had already taught me: “See that bird?” he says. “It’s a Spencer’s warbler.” (I knew he didn’t know the real name.) “Well, in Italian, it’s a Chutto Lapittida. In Portuguese, it’s a Bom da Peida. In Chinese, it’s a Chung-long-tah, and in Japanese, it’s a Katano Tekeda. You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You’ll only know about humans in different places, and what they call the bird. So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing—that’s what counts.” (I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.)

  He said, “For example, look: the bird pecks at its feathers all the time. See it walking around, pecking at its feathers?”

  “Yeah.”

  He says, “Why do you think birds peck at their feathers?”

  I said, “Well, maybe they mess up their feathers when they fly, so they’re pecking them in order to straighten them out.”

  “All right,” he says. “If that were the case, then they would peck a lot just after they’ve been flying. Then, after they’ve been on the ground a while, they wouldn’t peck so much any more—you know what I mean?”

  “Yeah.”

  He says, “Let’s look and see if they peck more just after they land.”

  It wasn’t hard to tell: there was not much difference between the birds that had been walking around a bit and those that had just landed. So I said, “I give up. Why does a bird peck at its feathers?”

  “Because there are lice bothering it,” he says. “The lice eat flakes of protein that come off its feathers.”

  He continued, “Each louse has some waxy stuff on its legs, and little mites eat that. The mites don’t digest it perfectly, so they emit from their rear ends a sugar-like material, in which bacteria grow.”

  Finally he says, “So you see, everywhere there’s a source of food, there’s some form of life that finds it.”

  Now, I knew that it may not have been exactly a louse, that it might not be exactly true that the louse’s legs have mites. That story was probably incorrect in detail, but what he was telling me was right in principle.

  Another time, when I was older, he picked a leaf off of a tree. This leaf had a flaw, a thing we never look at much. The leaf was sort of deteriorated; it had a little brown line in the shape of a C, starting somewhere in the middle of the leaf and going out in a curl to the edge.

  “Look at this brown line,” he says. “It’s narrow at the beginning and it’s wider as it goes to the edge. What this is, is a fly—a blue fly with yellow eyes and green wings has come and laid an egg on this leaf. Then, when the egg hatches into a maggot (a caterpillar-like thing), it spends its whole life eating this leaf—that’s where it gets its food. As it eats along, it leaves behind this brown trail of eaten leaf. As the maggot grows, the trail grows wider until he’s grown to full size at the end of the leaf, where he turns into a fly—a blue fly with yellow eyes and green wings—who flies away and lays an egg on another leaf.”

  Again, I knew that the details weren’t precisely correct—it could have even been a beetle—but the idea that he was trying to explain to me was the amusing part of life: the whole thing is just reproduction. No matter how complicated the business is, the main point is to do it again!

  Not having experience with many fathers, I didn’t realize how remarkable he was. How did he learn the deep principles of science and the love of it, what’s behind it, and why it’s worth d
oing? I never really asked him, because I just assumed that those were things that fathers knew.

  My father taught me to notice things. One day, I was playing with an “express wagon,” a little wagon with a railing around it. It had a ball in it, and when I pulled the wagon, I noticed something about the way the ball moved. I went to my father and said, “Say, Pop, I noticed something. When I pull the wagon, the ball rolls to the back of the wagon. And when I’m pulling it along and I suddenly stop, the ball rolls to the front of the wagon. Why is that?”

  “That, nobody knows,” he said. “The general principle is that things which are moving tend to keep on moving, and things which are standing still tend to stand still, unless you push them hard. This tendency is called ‘inertia,’ but nobody knows why it’s true.” Now, that’s a deep understanding. He didn’t just give me the name.

  He went on to say, “If you look from the side, you’ll see that it’s the back of the wagon that you’re pulling against the ball, and the ball stands still. As a matter of fact, from the friction it starts to move forward a little bit in relation to the ground. It doesn’t move back.”

  I ran back to the little wagon and set the ball up again and pulled the wagon. Looking sideways, I saw that indeed he was right. Relative to the sidewalk, it moved forward a little bit.

  That’s the way I was educated by my father, with those kinds of examples and discussions: no pressure—just lovely, interesting discussions. It has motivated me for the rest of my life, and makes me interested in all the sciences. (It just happens I do physics better.)

  I’ve been caught, so to speak—like someone who was given something wonderful when he was a child, and he’s always looking for it again. I’m always looking, like a child, for the wonders I know I’m going to find—maybe not every time, but every once in a while.

  Around that time my cousin, who was three years older, was in high school. He was having considerable difficulty with his algebra, so a tutor would come. I was allowed to sit in a corner while the tutor would try to teach my cousin algebra. I’d hear him talking about x.