Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - The Scientists Ep. 2: Pure Genius - The Feynman Method: How a Physicist Rewired the Way We Learn

Starting point is 00:00:03 It's 1941. War is raging in Europe. The United States not yet officially involved in the war is nonetheless stirring. Richard Feynman, freshly minted Ph.D. from Princeton spends a summer working on ballistics problems. But after Pearl Harbor, the call comes. And when a call like this comes, you can't ignore it. Robert Wilson. A physicist working on uranium enrichment for a potential atomic bomb is his recruiter. Initially, at Princeton, they toiled on an isolated. device to separate uranium isotopes 235. It was complex, ultimately impractical, and it was a different alternative to what Ed Lawrence was attempting to make way across the country at UC Berkeley. But the urgency of the war effort became a powerful magnet, one Feynman

Starting point is 00:01:01 couldn't ignore. And so when, in early 1943 came the summons from Rampard-Oppin-Larner, Feynman couldn't turn down the call. He was whisked away to a secret laboratory, Los Alamos. which had been established on a remote mesa in New Mexico. Its mission was to design and build the first atomic bomb and do so before the Germans got there first. If you've seen the movie Oppenheimer, you certainly know a lot about Oppenheimer himself. Oppenheimer is a figure of immense charisma and great talent in management, which I don't think he realized as a theoretical physicist.

Starting point is 00:01:35 But you may have missed, and you'd be forgiven if you did miss, Feynman's role in the movie. It's quite small. So when Oppenheimer calls Feynman and arranges a sanatorium for his wife Arlene, who had tuberculosis in Albuquerque, not far away from Los Alamos, I mean, like many young physicists, was drawn into the project's orbit. On March 28, 1943, just a year and a quarter after World War II was brought to U.S. shores at Pearl Harbor, the young married couple headed west. At Los Alamos, Feynman was assigned to Hans Betas' prestigious theoretical physics to it.

Starting point is 00:02:10 He quickly impressed Beta, a noble laureate himself, enough to be made a group leader. And that was a remarkable feat for someone of Feynman's tender age. Together, they developed the Beta Feynman formula, which was a crucial tool for calculating the yield of a fission bomb. But Feynman wasn't just a theoretical heavyweight. He also administered the computation group. Now, these weren't AI devices like we're used to dealing with or laptops, anything of the sort. These were human computers, mostly women.

Starting point is 00:02:39 And with another scientist, Stanley Frankel, and Nicholas Metropolis, Feynman helped set up the IBM punch card systems that were the Erez supercomputers. He even invented a new method of computing logarithms, and that was a skill he'd later applied to the connection machine, one of the first massively parallel processing computers and a forerunner for many of the GPU-based devices that we know and love today. Now, La Salamis was a pressure cooker of intense scientific effort. After all, it was designed for the military war effort, not knowing at the time how it would turn out, or even if it was possible to succeed in making a fission device. But it was also a place where Feynman's playful, iconoclastic nature found an outlet. He became notorious for his safe-cracking exploits, not for doing espionage or anything untoward, mind, but to highlight security flaws. and let's be honest, for the sheer intellectual fun of it, he loved poking fun of his colleagues

Starting point is 00:03:35 and even the officiousness of the bureaucrats that worked there. He'd figure out some combinations of the safe and leave cheeky notes inside classified safes, much to the anger and consternation of the military security, guards that were supposed to be protecting it from outside. Feynman wrote, Arlene, the key to my interest in this is probably because I like puzzles so much. Each lock is just a puzzle.

Starting point is 00:03:58 You have to open without forcing it. It was classic findment. Serious work punctuated by mischievous curiosity. His responsibility extended beyond Los Alanos. He was sent to the uranium enrichment facilities at Oak Ridge, Tennessee to help devise safety procedures for storing the fizzile materials like uranium and plutonium. And this was important to prevent accidentally getting a critical mass of the fizzinable fizzile materials together. That would lead to an unwanted detonation, uncontrolled nuclear reaction, a certain way to ruin your day.

Starting point is 00:04:29 Feynman insisted on lecturing the rank-and-file workers on nuclear physics so that they'd understand what they were actually dealing with, in particular the dangers that this material presented to them. And that was a testament really to his belief in understanding from first principles from the ground up. He wasn't just about abstract equations. He cared for the practical human applications. And this was one of the first signs of that that would later become clear and his justly earned a reputation as a master educator. Now, at that time, Feynman had a memorable encounter with the great physicist Niels Bohr, who had visited Los Alamos under an alias. Boer initially would talk to the senior scientist, but soon he sought out Feynman. Why?

Starting point is 00:05:09 Well, as Feynman later discovered, most of the other physicists were too awestruck by Boer to challenge him. Feynman, true to form, didn't care to put on airs. If he thought something was BS or baloney, he'd say so. And Boer valued that intellectual sparring, that unvarnished honesty. But the Manhattan Project, of course, was a deeply serious world-altering endeavor. Feynman witnessed the Trinity Test, the first detonation of an atomic bomb in July, 1945. He famously viewed it without the provided dark glasses relying on the windscreen on a truck to filter at the harmful UV rays, and because he wanted to see it with his own eyes.

Starting point is 00:05:46 He wanted to experience the sheer terrible power unleashed, and indeed it did leave an indelible mark on him. This was slightly hinted at in the movie off. He later reflected on the immense responsibility. of scientists and the moral complexities of their creation. And woven through this period of intense scientific creation and global conflict was a personal tragedy. His beloved wife Arlene's death in June 1945, just weeks before the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima Nagasaki, devastated him. He received the news by phone, and after a period of quiet grief, returned to his work. He never really seemed to deal with it, and that may have affected as psychologists we'll explore in this episode and mainly in later

Starting point is 00:06:25 episodes. There'll be many, many opportunities for us to encounter Feynman, one of the most written about and interesting human beings, let alone scientists. And so he'll make for great fodder on the Scientist Podcast Network. So he admitted that the full weight of his loss didn't really hit him until much, much later. And it hit him in surprising and often psychologically devastating ways. So here we have Feynman, the brilliant physicist, the Nobel laureate, the revolutionary teacher. But what about Feynman, the man? The person, melody, the character that became almost as famous as the science he produced. Feynman's a complex tapestry and one that I never tire of learning about, and is for good reason,

Starting point is 00:07:06 that there's so many books written about him. We've already encountered three of them in this short section, and I'll have a lot of references in the show notes, and I'll highlight the books that I was most impacted by, by Feynman. I pretty much read them all, including large parts, but not all of the Feynman lectures on physics, which was his magnum opus, and certainly not a book one reads cover to cover. So Feynman's psychology is truly complex. It's punctuated by iconoclastic thinking, humor, sometimes melancholy, depression, often childlike delight, wonder, and perhaps the deepest possible curiosity to ever run the planet. And all of it was underpinned by this ferocious, intimidating intellect. I never knew Feynman. He died in 1988 before I even graduated from high school and became a

Starting point is 00:07:58 physics major, but I instantly knew about his legend from the time I really heard about his passing when I was a junior in high school. And the books written about him and by him became kind of a write of passage to read for young physics majors aspiring to take on the great challenges that Feynman left unsolved. And although his intellect touched so many different aspects of science and technology, and even the arts, it wasn't at all confined to physics. He talks about playing the bongo drums frequently, and that became part of his character, becoming somewhat proficient, as proficient as you can be in the bongo drums, I suppose. I shouldn't really comment. The only instrument I play is Spotify. He also learned to draw and made sketches, and I wanted to make the point that

Starting point is 00:08:45 although I didn't know him, I know many people. people that do know, did know him, and many of them are still alive. And so I've talked with them, including some of the subjects of these portraits that he would draw up naked young women. He will talk about his peccadillas for, shall we say, the fairer sex later on, because I don't think we can do him justice entirely without encountering some of the challenging aspects of his nature. This isn't a reckoning and a deconstruction and a takedown, but let's be honest. He wasn't the paragon in later life of ethical virtue. That's okay. That's not all we need to look up to everybody for and doesn't have any impact on the scientific findings whatsoever. Fiamen wasn't content

Starting point is 00:09:25 to stay in physics. He actually learned how to read or interpret Mayan hieroglyphs. He even dabbled in biology working in the famous Max Delbrook's laboratory and embarked on a quest later in his life Richard Leighton to visit the obscure country of Tuva simply because he had seen a postage stamp And the postage stamp was fascinating to him. And learning more, he learned about their tradition of what's called throat singing. Maybe we can add that in. So you might think this is a dilettante's approach to life, but he went so deep, so far into the different facets of his intellectual curiosity, that it's hard to really pin that on him. I mean, he was a New York City boy, and he never put on airs.

Starting point is 00:10:10 And in fact, he made that his signature calling card that he didn't care about. the social conventions of the day. We'll hear stories about that and how he extended his iconoclasm, anti-authoritarianism, and his disdain for pomposity, for titles, for unearned. It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speed. That's why I chose GoogleFi wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive was buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month. Now that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore GoogleFi Wireless plans today.

Starting point is 00:10:47 Plus taxes and government fees. GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Respect. His guiding principle was curiosity. He once said, you know, probably in false humility, as he often did. He would say things like, he said, he once said, I have no particular talent. I am merely extremely inquisitive. He said he was skeptical of my own.

Starting point is 00:11:12 honors and awards, even his Nobel Prize. He said he considered turning it down, worried that it would bring unwanted attention and distract him from his work. Now, whether or not that's false modesty, I don't know. There are stories that he drilled a hole in it and made a chain out of it. That's false. He didn't do that. We're a big flavor-flaved medallion. He did have a discomfort for the reverence that he felt, but he accepted the award. And later, when he was asked what he wanted for by the media, he said, look, if I could explain it to you, Bob, it wouldn't be worth a Nobel Prize. So his first encounters, though, with societal formalities, came at Princeton University. One famous example in his most famous of his autobiographies or memoirs, that you'll hear

Starting point is 00:11:53 the title of in the moment, he's invited to the Dean's office, the stuffy affair. And the Dean's wife said, Mr. Feynman, would you like cream or lemon in your tea, sir? And Feynman was lost in thought and pretty much confused. You know, a New York City boy didn't know how to answer. He said, both, please. And thereupon a nervous ripple cackling throughout the room. And the dean's wife, Mrs. Anhardt, said, surely you're joking misdefinement.

Starting point is 00:12:21 And that would be, of course, the title of his best-selling memoir. And the one that I read soon after his death to get to know him better. He started to put on, really, started off on the wrong foot. And he never really regained his footing in societal settings. but that was okay. He was more comfortable at strip clubs and bars and Copacabana Beach than he was in any high society affairs. His humor and his playfulness were most of his, were perhaps his most enduring public traits.

Starting point is 00:12:51 The bongo drums, the jokes, the captivating storytelling. These made him an incredibly engaging figure. But it wasn't just for show. His humor was also a tool to disarm to make complex ideas more accessible or to gently or not so gently poke holes in pretentious people and arguments of their kind. It was also, I suspect, a way of navigating the world, a coping mechanism for a mind that saw both its wonders and its absurdities with equal clarity. Reading through his memoirs and those books written about him, including the very well-written genius by James Glick and other books like Quantum Man by past guest on the podcast, Lawrence Krause. And then his own books, you get a sense of the man, the playfulness, the intensity, the focus, but also the honesty.

Starting point is 00:13:38 Up to a point, I don't want to paint him as this ruthlessly high integrity, utmost integrity individual, although he's very famous for saying the first principle is that you must not fool yourself. The second principle, you're the easiest person to fool. That was really a statement about confirmation bias and the dangers of it. But you also have to realize that he was, at times, very human and very much susceptible to other types of biases, including making up stories about himself potentially. One of my least popular videos on the channel is a book called Did Feynman Fib about his interview in the late 1980s, where he says before his death, obviously, do interviews after you're dead, where he talks about having two or three patents, including a nuclear-powered airplane and all this other stuff that the government, G-Men came to his office and demanded that he sign away the rights to, and there's no record of those patents. His son has a patent, so there are patents with the name Feynman on it. He doesn't have any patents. Now, I don't know why he would have to embellish his bona fides. Maybe it was,

Starting point is 00:14:42 as some of my critical commenters pointed out, maybe the government was so secret they had a patent, they had a, you know, kind of obscure and keep the patent redacted for now 70, 80 years. I don't believe But it's hard to know. Where others kind of eschewed or avoided bureaucracy, I mean, he was never department chair or, you know, hitting some big foundation or some academy. He actually attempted, I believe he did turn down membership in the National Academy of Sciences, claiming that they are merely serving a purpose of electing other members. But he had this ability to cut straight to the nature of physical reality. Of course, the master class of this was live on TV, you know, hamming it up in front of a live audience of congressmen and investigators, where he dunked an o-ring exactly of the same type of material that was present on the January 1986 launch of the space shuttle challenger into ice water, you know, so demonstrating how it lost its flexibility. And that really cuts straight through a demonstration showing, not telling.

Starting point is 00:15:51 So it was a master class, but all the more unique because he was a theoretical physicist. Yes, he worked on atomic physics and he worked on the bomb, but it was on the theoretical aspects of it, not on the experimental hardware engineering aspects of it. Later, he'd work on practical aspects of things like gravity and computation. He wrote books about both of those subjects that are quite good, taking his famous approach to it. But his gift for understanding and teaching was driven by this desire to understand the underlying physics. and the nature of reality. He used to say famously,

Starting point is 00:16:23 that which I cannot derive, I do not understand. And so he would never just plug numbers into formulas. He wanted to understand the underlying physics. And you get a glimpse of this, and surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman, when he talks about in high school, looking at his peers and who are doing sketches

Starting point is 00:16:38 using an artist's curve sketch device, a piece of plastic or wood, that has curves cut into it, and he would say things about the slope of the curves at different points, and the students didn't know what they knew. In other words, that the derivative or slope of a curve is zero at its highest or lowest points. Like the velocity of a ball is zero when you throw it up in the air and it reaches its apex.

Starting point is 00:16:59 He would intuit those things and then he would understand them and develop new ways of teaching himself calculus. And that led to what we call in the productivity world the Feynman technique. The Feynman technique is a first principle's visualization and intuition-based approach. So the foundation of the Feynman technique for learning is that. that you must explain something and teach something in simple terms, identify gaps in your understanding, review it and simplify it. It's a direct reflection of this approach. He was a profoundly visual thinker. And his lectures, which one of my favorite college course physics teacher, Professor Robert Brown, who's still going strong at Case Western Reserve University, he was actually a student

Starting point is 00:17:43 at Caltech when Feyn was delivering the famous Feynman lectures, and I believe he was a freshman or young undergraduate, and they were so complex that he said by the end of the course, there were only professors in the audience. Now, whether that's completely true is not really knowable, but I believe it. I've heard similar stories from other people that I've met. He was a great advisor. He was a great mentor. If you weren't a woman or you didn't have a particularly attractive spouse, I heard stories from many different people that have known him, ranging from Dick Bond to Paul Steinhart, and none of them told me any stories about his and proprieties, but those are documented. There's a book called Shirley, you're a creep

Starting point is 00:18:21 Mr. Feynman, or an essay about him. We'll talk about that in subsequent shows. So as we see the Richard Feynman persona, it's brilliant, it's quirky, bongo playing, safecracking genius, it's undeniably charismatic. It's impossible not to be attracted to such a genius. But it's also worth asking, as some have, how much of it was a carefully constructed performance? He was, by all accounts, a showman. And his attitudes towards especially women and attractive women. He talks about walking down the streets in Pasadena, past the famous Pie and Burger, I believe, where I had many lunchtime meal during my days on California Boulevard. And he talks about not even noticing any man who passed him by,

Starting point is 00:19:06 complete oblivion. But whenever a woman would pass him by, he was acutely and attentively attuned to her presence. And he talks about that in his books. And as I said, we'll get into this critique of him, at some point, I don't think I wanted to do it right now, but some of his anecdotes haven't really aged well. The so-called sexist pig incident where protesters confronted him over stories in his lectures is telling, and we can't ignore it. We can't simply dismiss it and then not address it. He has to acknowledge, he had to acknowledge, a degree of grace, and think about the broader issues of discrimination and sexism. And then he would then pivot to a joke about the structure of the proton or something. Phyman is complicated, and he's a human being. And like all human beings,

Starting point is 00:19:51 he has flaws and foibles. And we won't shy away from them. We'll investigate in upcoming episodes of the scientists, some of the complexities, the core of his persona, which remains compelling. He was a unique mind that influenced many generations of physicists, and still does to this day, a mind that's relently curious, fiercely independent, and deeply engaged with the joy of discovery with a mix of iconoclastic, anti-authoritarian showmanship. There's just no way around it. He's not necessarily a role model in all ways and in all senses, but that's okay. We're free to pick and choose whatever aspects we like.

Starting point is 00:20:30 Feynman wasn't just solving problems. He was playing with the universe. And in some ways, we're still playing along with him to this day. We'll conclude here with the conclusion of his life before going back to the beginning of his life and his great discoveries that we haven't even had time to talk. on in this first encounter with the genius Richard Feynman. He died on February 15th, 1988. That's Galileo's birthday, by the way. He was only 69 when he died after a long battle with abdominal cancer. He didn't believe his cancer was caused in any way by his work on the Manhattan

Starting point is 00:21:02 project, I should know. His passing was mourned not just by the scientific community, but by the world, a world that had come to see him as something more than just a brilliant physicist. He was an icon, a cultural symbol of the power of curiosity, relentless, intelligent, prospecting, and the importance of independent thought, but also the sheer joy of understanding. His legacy is immense and enduring, and we'll encounter it. We'll talk about quantum electrodynamics. We'll talk about Feynman diagrams. We'll talk about the part-on models, work on superfluidities, work on computation, is work on gravitation. He touched so many different areas of physics. It's impossible to think of another physicist with that much breadth in the modern age. But his willingness to sort of

Starting point is 00:21:41 accept and to be truly humble when it counted, to admit ignorance and have skepticism about authority, even his own authority, was a way of championing the idea of science as a way of knowing, a process, not a completion, a process of discovery rather than a fixed body of facts. Feynman encourages us to ask questions, to challenge authority, to embrace assumptions, and to always teach. As I said earlier, he wrote a final epitaph to himself on the blackboard at his office. You can see this online. It was written just before he died and said, what I cannot create, I do not understand. An epitaph that is particularly fitting for a man who spent his entire life trying to create, not just understanding for himself, but for the world.

Starting point is 00:22:28 He wasn't just a character in science. He was a character of science, science at its best. Yes, he was flawed, deeply human, as all the scientists that we will encounter on this podcast are and will be. he was always chasing the next puzzle, the next insight, and indeed the next lap. He left the world richer and more interesting and a standing invitation to all, and a standing invitation to all of us to keep questioning, keep exploring, and never, ever stop being curious. Okay, that's the podcast today for The Scientist, Episode 2, Richard Feynman. Send me your comments, wherever you're listening to this, and send me some suggestions. Join my Monday Magic mailing list,

Starting point is 00:23:12 Briancating.com slash list, and be entered to win, a copy of Flatland, which is the subject of episode one. And you'll also be able to send me emails and send me recommendations for who to feature next. On the scientists. I've got a backlog.

Starting point is 00:23:30 As David Senator says, 400 books have been read. There's only 1,000 more to go. There'll always be 1,000 more to go. And next time we encounter Feynman, we'll get into some of the books written about him, genius, quantum man, the beat of a different drum, and Feynman's Rainbow, all of which have great takes and anecdotes about him, and we'll also explore books by him, including Tuva Orbust, which is subtitle as Feynman's Last Journey.

Starting point is 00:23:59 And that was by Ralph Layton, who was also at Caltech, a design some of the telescopes we use in the Owens Valley Radio Observatory in near Bishop, California, if you've ever been up there. It's quite a startling place to go and visit. And it's a place Feynman probably was having many walkabouts, enjoying his time in the California sunshine. So for now, I am enjoying the California sunshine. This has been The Scientist, Episode 1, and look forward to episode number two. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank.

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - The Scientists Ep. 2: Pure Genius - The Feynman Method: How a Physicist Rewired the Way We Learn

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