Family Life and Final Days

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Spend two hundred fifty dollars and get a hundred fifty dollar credit G go to LinkedIn. com slash free economics, terms apply Economics foday is sponsored MintMobile, Unlimited talk text and data and fast reliable coverage on the nation's largest five G network. No catch To get your new wireless plan for just fifteen bucks a month, go to mintmobile dot com slash freak. That's it. There's no catch. forty five dollars upfront payment required, equivalent to fifteen dollars a month. newew customers on first three month plan only speeds slower above forty gigabytes on unlimited plan, additional taxes fees and restrictions apply, see MintMobile for details Stepeven Dup. A couple of years ago, we made three part series about the physicist Richard Fynman, and we heard from so many of you that we have decided to replay it now. This is part two. We have updated facts and figures as necessary. The biggest update you'll want to keep in mind as you listen today is that both the Fynman familyamily home and Zorthian Ranch were destroyed in the LA Wildfires last year As always, thanks for listening july sixteenth, nineteen forty five. team of U. S. scientists based in Los Alamos, New Mexico. conducted what their leader, J. Robert Oppenheimer had named the Trinity Test They were detonating a new kind of bomb way out in the desert, a couple hundred miles from the secret lab at Los Alamos where they had created it The U. S. presresident, Harry Truman seemed to fully grasp the magnitude of this moment It is an atomic bomb It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe Rppenheimer had put together a dream team of experienced physicists, many of them recent refugees from Nazi Germany. Also playing a minor but important role was a twenty four year old physicist from Queens, New York named Richard Feynman Years later, here is how Feynman described watching the Trinity Test Okay, time comes And this tremendous flash so bright And I see this purple splotch on the floor of the truck I sust I it That's an afterimen. So I turn back up and I see this white light changing into yellow and into the orange, the clouds form. And then they disappear again. and then finally Big ball of that Our a to start at the rise billow a little bit and get a little bit black around the edges. And then you see it's a big ball of smoke with flashes on the inside of the fire going out the heat All this took about one minute. Finally, after about a minute and a half Suddenly there's a tremendous noise. Bang. And then rumbles like thunder. And that's what convinced me. Nobody had said a word during this whole minute. We're all just watching quietly. But this sound released everybody because the solidity of the sound at that distance meant it really worked The man who was standing next to me said, What's that? That was the bott Yes, that was the bomb justust a few weeks later The U. S. dropped one of these new atomic bombs on Japan. President Tuman. A short time ago, an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima and destroyed its usefulness to the enemy That bomb has more power than twenty thousand tons of TNT With this bomb, we have now added a new and revolutionary increase in destruction Hiroshima was destroyed. Tens of thousands of Japanese were killed Three days later, the US dropped a second bomb on the port city of Nagasaki Again, the carnage was extreme Six days later, Japan surrendered, putting an end to World War two The U. S victory was, of course welcome But Richard Feynman was among those who wondered about the cost of the victory. My first reaction after I was finished with this thing was, it's useless to make anything Feyman thought that With the existence of nuclear weapons, it was only a matter of time before we humans would wipe ourselves off the earth I remember being in New York with my mother in a restaurant Lightet immediately I would see people Building a bridge. And I would say they don't understand. I really believe That it was senseless to make anything, because it would all be destroyed very soon anyway take in a view and he would automatically visualize destruction from a bomb That's Michelle Fenman, his daughter his entire beinging was permeated by his effort at the war, and I don't think that it was a happy time at all His father had died His wife had died He would look at people building things and think Why bother? For five years after the war, Feynman taught physics at Cornell University. He was depressed. Restless, He had a hard time engaging in his work, a problem he'd never had before Winters in upstate New York were long and cold. He needed to get away. A friend of his said, What are you doing this summer? And he said, Oh, I was going to go to South America. And he said Fantastic come to Brazil getet to learn Portuguese quickly. That trip lasted six weeks, but Feynman returned shortly after for his sabbatical year. teach at the Brazilian Center for Research and Physics in Rio At least part of his salary was paid by the U S. State Department Fynman had grown up near the beach in Far Rockaway, Queens in New York City The beaches in Rio were a little bit different from the beaches in Queens More samba music, more sun, more fun Feynman wrote a letter to his physicist friend, Enrico Fermmi. I get lots of ideas at the beach So when his sabbatical was over Feynman happily left Cornell for good and took a position at the California Institute of Technology. California was kind of a fresh start for him. He had open sky and sunny weather and maybe because of his time in Los Alamos and really enjoying the rugged countryside, that probably set him on a path He knew he liked the West. Calteak is in Pasadena, a picturesque and relatively old city just northeast of downtown Los Angeles It's still got flourishes of old world wealth and flourishes of California Hippie too, with the Cal tech nerd vibe snuggled comfortably between them. It seemed like a good idea for us to spend some time in Pasadena to get a better feel for Richard Feynman And we will be driving by the house where I grew up And then we're going to the cemetery and we will see where my parents Pasadena is known as the City of Roses. It hosts the annual Rose parade So we will hear about some Fnman roses Cal Tagy was a hero right up to the end And some thorns He was an old fashioned sexist curious, brilliant vanishing Mr. Feynman, part two of our series begins now This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with your host, Stephen Dubner Part two, the brilliant, Mr. Feyman. Chapter four Feynman, the scientist. Richard Fenman joined the Calteech faculty in nineteen fifty, and he stayed there until he died thirty eight years later For most of that time, he wasn't well known to the wider public. But he was a bit of a celebrity in Pasadena, especially among his fellow academics, he stood out for His wit, which had some sharp edges for his bongo playing And also for the van he drove It's a dodge tradesman van. And it's the extended version. If it's horrifying gas mileage It's super loud. It puts out clouds and clouds of hellish hydrocarbons when it runs And it's incredibly long and uncomfortable to drive is Seamus Blackley, who is best known for having helped create the Xbox for Microsoft He never met Richard Fynman, but he has been a fan since he was a teenager, which is why today he is the keeper of Feynman's old van We visited him at the garage in Pasadena where he keeps it So think of like a seventies plumber. painted his truck, this horrible two tone Beige That's what Dick Feyman decided to buy when it got a Stelba prize on the sides of the van are some painted patterns that have been mistaken for hieroglyphics Native American symbols If you don't know they are, it looks like A homeless guy has drawn on the side of this van Most people don't give it a second look. but if you're driving somewhere and a physicist sees it, they freak out and run at you and like you almost kill them and stuff So the van was a So context is my parents like to camp and not go to a campground, but go to kind of The road less traveled. you know, if you go to like a fork in the road and you see one side is kind of pristine and the other side looks treacherous, o We'll go to the treacherous side And at some point when I think I was in first grade or so, we got this cool van And they got it all set up for camping My mom was very careful and thoughtful about how things should work out. You know there was a table that could be removed. The seats would go flat so somebody could sleep there and then my brother could sleep in the back. And then I had a hammock it was in the front and curtains and so we were good to go. And then Funny enough, they had this van decorated in a custom paint job, and they decided to put Fenmann diagrams O it. And what is the Fenmann diagram So symbols that my father came up with to express I don't know, L? I'm not sorry. you'd have to talk to a physicist about that John Preskill I am the Richard P. Feynman, prorofessor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology. So picture this diagram. There are these two lines both with arrows on them And then There's a line connecting the two. So it looks like one rung of a ladder and the line going across is the wiggly line. That's the photon that's being emitted by one particle and absorbed by the other. Now we could have more photons. so now add another rung to the ladder Now we've got the one line with an arrow on it, solid line, let's say going up. And now another line with the arrow going down, that's the electron and the posititron. Now there are two rungs. There's a wiggly line and then another wiggly line, and that's another Feymn diagram. The electron and the positron can collide with one another, and that can give rise to particles of light, photons, but then those photons convert to other particles like quarks and anti quarks, and those interact with other particles like gluons and so on. and to keep track of all those things that can happen quantitatively evaluate how all those different processes contribute to the total rate, That's a pretty complicated problem. Feyman diagrams can help you organize that type of computation. These visual simplifications made quantum electrodynamics easier to work with, even for trained physicists Here is the science writer, Charles C Man These are incredibly difficult and unwieldy for ninety nine point nine nine nine nine percent of the human race. And that pointzero one percent that could work with them was Julian Schwinger Julian Schwinger and Richard Feyman had a lot in common They were both born in nineteen eighteen, bothoth grew up in Jewish families in New York, Schwinger in Manhattan, Feynman in Queens. And they both became pioneers in quantum electrodynamics Feynman's mother liked to point out to her son just how smart this Singer boy was Schwinger was an extraordinarily brilliant guy. But Burllington a different way. People always talked about them as being you know competitive. It was clear when we spoke to Schwringer that he had that kind of barbed respect that you have for a worthy adversary He clearly wasn't all that fond of Feynman. Fenman also spoke about it and he said that he thought that people like us made a bit too much of their rivalry. And he said, it was more like two people running a race But it's fundamentally a friendly competition because they're both pushing each other In nineteen sixty five, when Feynman was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics He shared it with Schwinger, as well as the Japanese physicist Sidney Tirro Tomanaga I'd asked him to explain what he'd done to win the Nobel Prize, and he started talking about quantum electrodynamics and Of course I really couldn't understand this I'm Christopher Sykes. I was a documentary filmmaker for many years for the BBC and Channel four. I found myself at some point saying Was it worth a Nobel prize? whichich did produce, I have to say, a really classic response I don't understand what it's all about or what's worth watch People in the Swedish accademy decide that X, Y or Z wins a Nobel Prize, then so be it. I won't have anything to do it I don't like honors I appreciated for the work that I did and for people who appreciate it. And I notice the physicists use my work I don't need anything else. I've already got the prize. The prize is the pleasure of finding this thing out I don't believe in honors And that's why we called the finished film the pleasure of finding things out the story goes like the first call It was, you know, three AM or something And I'm sure that was very exciting. And then I think reality, you know, he put the phone down and then it started ringing with press and so forth. And then I think the reality of Oh I don't really want all this. Do that? home with, you know Then he said to a reporter, Hey, time out C we off the record, can I ask Is it possible for me to? what's the word reject this. And the reporter said, no No, that's not something that's going to happen I mean, look, he was disdainful of all of these honorific types of things I'm Stehen Wolfram and I do science and technology he was I mean, I would probably go further than him and say, any field for which there is a prize that's defined. is a field that already has had its best days behind it. It's a field that barely has a name that's going to have the most fertile moment happen to get one of these MacArthur Awards and the very first batch of those things Pimon took me aside and said, Look, just don't make this mean that you think people have big expectations for you He was almost like prizes are a damaging thing to people, particularly early in their careers One of the things that my father taught me beside physics was a disrespect respectable certain kinds of things. For example When I was a little boy in a Rotograva, that's printed pictures and newspapers first came out in the New York Times, and he opened a picture and there was a picture of the pope with everybody bowing in front of him. And he'd say, Now look at these humans. Here's one human standing here and all these others are bowing. Now what is the difference? This one is the Pope and those are the ordinary He hated the pope anyway I you'd say The difference is epaletes, of course, not in the case of the Pope, maybe it was a general. It was always the uniform, the position. This man has the same human problems. He eats dinner like anybody else. He goes to the bathroom. He's a human being. Why are they all bowing to him? Only because of his name and his position, because of his uniform, not because of something he especially did He, by the way, was in the uniform business, so he knew what the difference was with a man with the uniform off and their uniform on. It's the same man for him To be clear, Richard Feynman did not refuse or reject his Nobel prize He attended the ceremony in Stockholm And by the looks of the many photographs in the archives at Calteech, He very much enjoyed himself We visited those archives with his daughter, Michelle She came across something else that was interesting So I love this. Everything that he was sort of like, I don't like honors and you know, can I return this prize? all of that This is so like it's such a lovely, lovely thank you This paper she found is her father's Nobel Prize acceptance speech Some background. Feynman had been outwardly cranky about the award, even complaining about the fact that he'd have to rent a tuxedo. Apparently he had a change of heart Your Majesty Your Royal Highnesses, ladies and gentlemen, the work I've done has already been adequately rewarded and recognized. Imagination reaches out repeatedly, trying to achieve some higher level of understanding until suddenly, I found myself momentarily alone before one new corner of nature's pattern of beauty and true majesty revealed. That was my reward Then having fashion tools to make access easier to the new level I see these tools used by other men straining their imaginations against further mysteries beyond There. are my votes of recognition Then comes the prize and a deluge of messages, from friends, from relatives, from students, from former teachers, from scientific colleagues, from total strangers, formal commendations, silly jokes, parties, presents, a multitude of messages, in a multitude of forms In each, I saw the same two common elements I saw in each joy And I saw affection. You see, whatever modesty I may have had has been completely swept away in recent days The prize was a signal to permit them to express a need to learn about their feelings Each joy, though transient still repeated in so many places amounts to a considerable sum of human happiness. And each note of affection released thus one upon another has permitted me to realize a depth of love for my friends and acquaintances which I had never felt so poignantly before. For this, I thank Alfred Noobel and the many who worked so hard to carry out his wishes in this particular way And so You Swedish people with your honors and your trumpets and your king, forgive me I understand at last, such things provide entrance to the heart Ued by a wise and peaceful people, they can generate good feeling, even love among men, even in lands far beyond your own For that lesson, I thank you. What was Feynman like as a professor Not in the catalog No grades What was it? It was Feyman standing in front of the blackboard saying, Ask me anything I'm Steven Dunner, and this is Freeconomics Radio. We'll be right back Economics Radodi is sponsored ever Pure. Data is crucial to businesses, but managing it can create friction, risk, and manual work Pure transforms static data into a living system, intelligent, instantly accessible, secure, energy efficient, and ready to perform. Plus there is zero downtime for upgrades and maintenance. Whether your data is in the cloud, on premises, or at the edge, Everpure makes data management so simple it feels like second nature. Tame your data chaos with Everpure. Visit eververpuredata. com to learn more For kids, summer isn't just time off, it's time dri with confidence and curiosity. But when school meals pause, millions of children lose the food they count on. Your support helps the Feeding America Network nourish every child's potential. 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That's rula. com to find the therapist the easy wayay Chapter five, Fynman, the Professor. The word most commonly attached to Richard Feynman would seem to be genius. That is the title of the deffinitive Feynman biography published in nineteen ninety two by James Glick Feyman himself did not like the label. He maintained there was nothing exceptional about his intelligence How did he become a giant of theoretical physics Here's how Fenman put it in a BBC documentary called Fun too Imagine You ask me if an ordinary person By studying hard be able to imagine these things like I imaginine. Of course I was an ordinary person who studied hard There's no talent, a special Miracle ability to understand quantum mechanics or a miracle ability to imagine electromagnetic fields problems. without practice and reading and learning and study take an ordinary person who's willing to devote a great deal of time and study and work and thinking and mathematics, then he's become a scientist Physicist John Preskill. Feynman officially taught an undergraduate class at Caltech Only for two years And those were captured. by some now famous books called the Feynman Lectures on physics. There are three big red books Fiman worked very hard on that. He thoughtought fair Deeply about how to organize the material and they're rather extraordinary. I think I didn't really appreciate them until I was a more senior physicist When he gave a talk or a lecture, he was kind of meserizing and really grabbed your attention I have the privilege of calling your attention today to what is probably one of the most far reaching generalizations of the human mind And while he spoke Things would seem extraordinarily clear and obvious And many people had the experience that then afterward when you tried to reconstruct the arguments, you'd find it very difficult Somehow he made it seem easy But there were nuances that he made seem natural when he spoke of them But then when you try to follow the path again, we're actually very subtle And what is the law of gravitation It is that every object in the universe attracts every other. with a force proportional to the mass of each And varying inversely is a square of the distance between them. If you like mathematics, you can write that same thing as an equation. Blackboard choreography would be very carefully thought out. They would end exactly on time. They had been prepared with great care. So he really put everything into it The filmmaker Christopher Sykes I turned up at Caltech for this lecture. and I have to say it was extraordinary because find when I came in and they're about I don't know if sixteen or twenty students all wearing shorts and trainers with their feet up on the tables and stuff. and none of them were taking any notes Fenwin was lecturing and I couldn't of course understand anythingthing, it was in a really high level quantum physics But towards the end, he looked up at the clock and he said, lookook, we've only got eight minutes left and this particular problem we're talking about you said there's two ways of tackling it. One's very elegant clear and easy. and the other one is just incredibly messy. He said, But we've only got a little time left, so I'll just deal with the incredibly messy one. And I thought, well, this was great Although that was the only official undergraduate class that Vimman taught at Caltech, there was an informal class of which he taught for many years. It was not in the catalogue. It was not documented anywhere. The freshmen called it physics sex. It was intended especially for freshmen. And by word of mouth, It would become known that Feynman was going to be in a certain classroom at a certain time and that You could come and interact with him Not in the catalog No grades What was it? It was Feynman standing in front of the blackboard saying, As me anything. And there were rules The roules were Don't ask me about coursework Don't ask me how to do this problem in such and such a course. Don't ask me about somebody's paper I haven't read it, I don't care about it Don't ask me about somebody's theorem. I don't know that either. I can't tell you. Ask me about trying to understand something. Ites't matter what it is. Everything is interesting My colleague, Kip Thorne Rembers That when he was a freshman, that must have been around nineteen fifty eight He heard the rumor He went to the rumored room at the rumored time, and Fenan was there And he says, Okay, what do you want to talk about today And somebody says Oh, let's talk about waves on Mars. Where that came from? I have no idea So he starts to talk about waves on Mars Well, let's say there's not really water on Mars, but let's suppose there is. mayaybe there were oceans before The gravity is different than Earth. So that means water waves will propagate at a different speed and he work that out. But another thing, the atmosphere is thinner. so there's less wind and that's not going to work up you know such high waves blowing across the surface of the water, how high will the waves be? and you work that out And Kip came away from this enormously inspired. You know, that you can just look at nature And you ask questions and you can calculate answers Samus Blackle And I don't think Feynman was trying to teach students who were not going to understand what he was saying. He wasn't trying to reach out in an inclusive way. and elevate everyone Okay Cal tech is very hard on their undergraduates, right? There's like a Lord of the Fies f thing going on. In the sixties it was even worse It's a cultural thing that Caltech struggles to this day. And those lectures are built for those people who are going to go somewhere. And those were the people that Feymin was interested in I don't mean to make him out to be such a prick, but I think that he was really interested in the really bright students who asked really bright questions and thinking about stuff Now that said He obviously spent a huge amount of time in his career communicating ideas in a very clear way to general audiences. but I think Those are two separate things Be of the success of science There is a kind of I think a kind of pseudo science that Social science is an example of a science which is not a science They follow the forms You gather data and you do so and so on and so forth, but they don't get any laws. They don't haven't found that anything Maybe someday they will, but it's not very well developed. But what happens is Even more mundane level, we get experts on everything that sound like they're sort of scientifically There's all kinds of myths and pseudoscience all over the place Sthven Wilfram. his distaste for social science came from the fact that it just is not a bedrock kind of field I'm sure if he was talking about that or about economics or something like that, he would say, what is this? Is it something where you have axioms for how people work And then you're trying to figure out the consequences. That's kind of more like the way he was doing physics. There are these underlying laws of physics and then we're working out their consequences Well at Caltak he was a hero right up to the end admired Bye his colleagues And by the students, I don't know who worshiped him more. And, you know, that he was an extraordinary personerson. and thinker appreciated. Now, he was a bit of a narcissist You know, he was a show off. He did it in a way which maybe irritated some people which was also charming It'sound like he tried to hide it You know, he thought pretty highly of himself. I mean, he did want to have quirks and to have storyies about him You know, he really wanted to create this persona. Lisa Randall, and I'm a physicist professor at Harvard. I do theoretical particle physics and cosmology sounds kind of obnoxious, but if you're smart enough to do particle physics, You're probably smart enough to do other jobs where you make a lot more money, you get a lot more prestige in other ways. So you know, sort of your currency is, you know How important you're considered and what you've accomplished and what people think of you So for some people, that's more important than others, he's a born performer He clearly liked the adulation. You know, I think he was a decent guy. And what was really interesting is to read these pages and pages sometimes of letters that people wrote That's Michelle Fynman again The letter is Hello, My name is Gary Fership. At the present time, I'm a junior at UC Berkeley and a majoring in physics. I would be interested in hearing your views on the present fields of research and physics as of now I'm interested in either plasma, space, or low temperature physics I would appreciate it very much if you could send Me some information on your current research efforts. My address in Berkeley is All right, so then he says, I'm sorry, but neither you nor I have the time it would take for me to expound my views on the research being done in physics. And I am interested in all fields I mean, it's honest dont think he's being mean. it's just I'm going tell you like it is. You ask me, I'm going tell you, I don't have time to solve all your problems and just FYI, I'm interested in everything. He didn't have a lot of judgment with people, you know, So he went to a topless bar and he liked watching the girls and he liked drawing them and you know, he would have conversations and at some point People were trying to shut the place down because They' had enough of it or something. And so he showed up in court and said, No no, this is a fine place. I go here all the time. Everything's above board. And it could have been also true that the neighbors were right about all of their concerns because ultimately the place did shut down My point is that he had his own Moral compass which he was very strongly committed to We had a lot of artist friends that I think were incredibly attractive to him because they were just free thinkers I grew up right here. Richard Feyman would come in and sit right here and My dad would sit over there If F was an ordinary dude. You meet him, you thought he was like some dude off the street of New York My name is Alen Zorothian and I am an architect My dad was Jerar Zorthheian He was an artist. That was his main profession he was very good at it My father met Richard P. Feynman in the mid fifties when Feynman was playing bongos at a party and my dad needed to make a big splash, so he was dancing around. and they became good friends The friendship continued until Richard's death in nineteen eighty eight. And they were very close Zorthian Ranch is in the hills above Pasadena. The land is steep and scrubby. It looks a lot like where they used to shoot Mash, the old TV show with Ellen Alda is actually not far away The ranch itself is a sprawl of farm animals and shaggy dogs, sculptures and mosaics. buildings quite a bit past their prime In its heyday, when Drear Zorthian was holding court, the ranch was known for its bohemian vibes and wild parties. Richard Feynman spent a lot of time up here. He and Zorian had a special relationship You know, they would argue if they like to express their opinions One of the things they were talking about was you scientists don't appreciate Beauty It's a friendly type argument. It went til very late in the evening and then he went home and he started thinking about it And he called my dad up said, Well, look, I think the problem is I don't understand what you do and you don't understand what I do So why don't we educate each other and then they start doing this thing and they were serious. They did it They decided I don'tember every other Sunday, I think it was Feynman would come up. My dad did the first one. He was going to teach Feynman how to draw because Feinb wasn't interested in art and so he came up But he said my dad was a good teacher. My dad was good he was positive and stuff So he started to learn to draw and he eventually became very good. And then he tried to teach my dad something about physics and my dad didn't learn Feyan liked the idea that my dad could give women to post nude too My dad would send him models and stuff like that When you read Fenman's own books, you see that he was completely enamored with women She tells story after story of chasing women in ways that ranged from In the beginning, he had been madly in love with Arlene, his first wife But she died from tuberculosis in her twenties, and it's unclear if he ever fully recovered from that He wrote her a love letter two years after she died I bet you were surprised that I don't even have a girlfriend, except you, sweetheart Only you are left to me My darling wife, I do adore you I love my wife. My wife is dead PS, please excuse my not mailing this, but I don't know your new address He did get remarried to Mary Louise Bell, whom he met while teaching at Cornell They were, by all accounts, a poor match, and the marriage lasted just four years. In their divorce, Belle claimed that she was subjected to a variety of cruelties. For years, Feynman had cultivated a reputation as a womanizer of the worst sort James Glick, in his book Genius, reports that while he was teaching at Cornell, Feynman slept with undergraduates and the wives of graduate students Here's Charles Man He was an old fashioned sexist. Every woman that we ever talked to about this would say this, but they would also say things I know a female physicist who The way she put it was this Feineman would do these sexist things like say, wouldould you give me a cup of coffee? you know, these classic sexist tropes? But she said I never met a person who helped me understand the physics better. She said, ultimately, I'm a physicist and that's what counts. Yes, this was annoying, incredibly annoying. I want to slap him. When he talked to me about physics, I loved it Lisa Randall When I was entering the field, I went out of my way to learn the physics of people and to learn as little about their personality as possible. Because I have to say, many times when I found out about the people, I was disappointed, I just felt like I didn't want to know it. I just wanted to focus on the physics itself. Look, you can try to justify him, but the fact is he was proud enough that it becomes the centerpiece of his book I do think we give people a free pass for things they do to women in ways that we don't give them a free pass and things that happen to other people. I mean, look, I've been to Kale Tech recently. I really like being there. It's really fun But when I took the PSATE, I did very well, and I was sent a pamphlet that said literally, what's a nice girl like you doing in a place like Caltech And I thought, wow, that is one place I do not want to go You know, it's very interesting in this day and age because growing up in the age of the women's movement, a lot of other movements A lot of it was about not focusing on your identity, being just considered like anyone else. And today's identity politics is very much the opposite. So it's very confusing coming up How much did Richard Feyman come to regret his reputation Fyimman got the obituary from the LA. Times. he was able to read his own obituary I'm Stehven Dener, this is Freeconomics radio We'll be right back F Ecomics Radio is sponsored by Southern Company. The world and its energy needs are always changing. 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No squeaks, fewer callbacks, no problem When the schedule is tight and performance matters, head to huberwood. com slash addvantech to lay the foundation of a solid build Free Economics Radio is sponsored hels. com. Some names really do say it all. hotels. com is one of them When travelers book a hotel, they want savings that work for them and hotels. com makes it simple. With saave Your way, members choose how to save take an instant discount now or bank as rewards to use on later stays. No tricks or pressure, just flexibility and real value For straightforward savings on your next stay, trust the hotel experts Visit hotels. com It's all in the name. Chapter six, Fenman, the parent Michelle Feynman still lives in Pasadena, not far from the house where she grew up was a shy seven or eight year old. I didn't relish the idea of telling a friend, No, I don't really want to spend the night at your house. And so somehow my dad and I had this conversation and he said, well, I got an idea. We'll have a code. If you say so and so wants to know if I can spend the night, I'll say, no, I'm sorry, not tonight. And then I'll be the bad guy. And if you say, is it all right Or if I ask with myself as the first,, I'm wondering if I can, Is it okay if I spend the night, something like that? then I'll give you an honest answer and maybe it's yes, maybe it's no. but at least we know where we are. Honestly, he nailed it every single time. We're speaking with Michelle in the garden of the hotel in Pasadena, where the fre economics crew is staying. We chose this hotel, the Huntington, because it is where Michelle's parents were married. On september twenty fourth of nineteen sixty, Richard Feynman took Gwyenneth Howorth to be his third wife She was from West Yorkshire, England How did they meet They met on a beach in Switzerland because she had aspirations to travel the world. and She thought a fun way she liked children and a fun way would be to be an au pair and to live in people's houses and take care of their children and see the world. So she went to France And then to Switzerland and met my dad. I think he was there for a conference. and Apparently he said kind of a joke, you're like, Oh, you could come to California and take care of me. Then the next day he saw her again and said, you know, that wasn't I'm sorry, that was out of line. And she said, no no. I'll come to California I'd love to. I'd love to come to America and that sounds great. They rented a house completely a platonic relationship. He was in the front of the house. She was in the back, I guess. At some point, he realized that he was falling in love with her and he thought, no, no, too soon, too fast T impulsive. So he went to a calendar and he paged forward about six months and he marked the date on the calendar and said, If I still feel the same way on this date, I will ask her to marry me. The Pasadina freeway is right near here and the story is they hopped on the freeway right after the wedding They ran out of gas I mean, it's a good litmus test for a relationship. you know, how is this going to work? And to my mom's credit, she just laughed and okay, I guess this is how it's gonna to go. And they were, you know, they were in it Feyman had two children, Michelle, whom they adopted in nineteen sixty eight, and Carl, who was born to the couple six years earlier Today, Carl is a computer scientist living near Boston When I was seventeen, I didn't get along with my parents great which was basically the period when I was deciding where to go for college I wanted to go to one of the schools where they taught AI And that was MIT, Carnegie Mellon or Stanford. MI two is my first choice And MIT was the furthest one away It was on the other side of the country So I wanted to get away from my parents and, you know be an independent faraway guy. So I moved there almost immediately regret it. being so far away. because my relations with my parents were then Improved Buty by then I was committed, and by the time I graduated, I had decided that I loveved Boston. So I stayed out here Wh was a nice man who would tell you how the world worked We'd go for walks after dinner we go out on the streets or and then nearby golf course Now we talk about everything under the sun Hed tellld me wonderful stories about his time in the Manhattan proroject. You know, when I was a teenager He would repair his car a lot He would always dive right in. he didn't know anything about car repair. So We'd dive right in and then he'd sit back and look at it with his hand on his chin and theorize and then dive back in again and, you know, usually make things worse. He did take me to one football game And everybody he says So what do you think? And I said I really didn't like that. I don't think I want to go to any moreore football games And he was like, Oh, thank God I mean, you know, I was very into science. I read science fiction, I drew lots of pictures of spaceships I was that kind of kid And you know, he thought that was great and took me to Hughes aircraft to their rocket factory and stuff like that. It was great as a little kid I was in that world. I wanted to be, you know, one of those cool people with the short sleeve white shirts and the black ties Yeah, we had a rocket scientist living across the street. Well, he enjoyed. Be being a father. and so and we have Gwyneth to thank for that because she gave him a stable family life is Ralph Leayton. He is a longtim family friend who was Feynman's writing partner and drumming partner Carl and Michelle were delights to him And he learned that each of them liked different things about him. So Carl responded to certain things and Michelle responded to other things I could just see the happiness and fun when I came over for my Wednesday evening proper meal, I was a stay at home dad and A lot of Feynman's philosophy came out with our kids, you know, just one little saying which I kept thinking of is don't take advantage of your position So you never say, because I said so It's better to have that philosophy of ignorance, like, oh Yeah, that's an interesting question. I don't know the answer to that. Let's go find out So he was on the curriculum commommission And so they all looked at textbooks and decided that you this one should be approved and this one should not My mom talked about how passionate he was about it. She said he would be in the basement and it was like an explosion from down below because he would just be incensed by the inane math problems like, you know, Johnny sees a star of three thousand degrees. He sees another star of six thousand degrees. What's the total number When would you ever need to know any of that in nature? You just wouldn't But he had a collection of good bath textbooks So I would go down to a study and just, you know, read these map textbooks for high schoolers When I was a little kid So I learned a lot of math that way. When I was doing math in high school, my dad would look over my shoulder and say, Oh yeah, hang on. I got a good way you could do that. I can think of five ways. and let me just show you one. And so I would take it to school and go, check this out. And the teacher did not share my enthusiasm and said, well, No, I mean, yes, you got the right answer, but no, that's not what we're doing here And so at a certain point, my dad had enough and went to go see the teacher. and teacher knew who he was My dad was really, really trying to play it cool and just be sort of, you know, I'm Michelle's dad And at some point the guy said something like You should try reading a math book and I can just imagine my dad sort of holding it all in and then at that point, it just couldn't. he just pulled himself up and said, Sir I have written math books and Then I think the counselor told the teacher who my dad was And the next day I was not in that class anymore. He didn't mind being a confused old man would'd be in a restaurant and he'd look at the menu and get out his glasses and be confused in front of the waiter and take a long time And now the confused old man will look through the bndue. You know, he didn't mind being that And you know, what other times, Well, he did some Pret impressive stuff And he wasn't afraid to say yeah, I did some pretty impressive stuff when my brother went to MIT, he met a like minded person, Danny Hillis, Danny and Cheryl Handler were starting a company called Thinking Machines I worked with him later at Thinking Machines Corporation And he was clearly farying the computation by that point Very interested All over it. There are some things that a computer does much better than a human and you'd better remember that if you're trying to compare machines to humans He felt like physics was kind of tapped out that he was past the point of Making contributions because both he had changed and the field had changed So he's more interested in computing The machine we were building was called a connection machine. It's a very strange computer And he figured out a way to get it to do cosines and logarithms and other transental functions It was very poor at multiplication was very good at addition and shuffling bits around And he figured out a way to do transceental functions without multiplication by using the patterns of the bits to do something extremely clever, whose details I no longer remember. In nineteen seventy eight, Feynman was diagnosed with abdominal cancer For the next decade, he had multiple treatments, including surgeries It was suggested that his cancer may have been caused by exposure to nuclear radiation at Los Alamos Feynman refused to consider that possibility Ralph Layton. I got a call from The L.A. Times wondering if he was near death and