Quantum Man

Quantum Man

Lights, Camera, Action

Could one have guessed while he was still a child that Richard Feynman would become perhaps the greatest, and probably the most beloved, physicist of the last half of the twentieth century? It is not so clear, even if many of the incipient signs were there: He was undeniably smart. He had a nurturing father who entertained him with puzzles and instilled a love of learning, encouraging his innate curiosity and feeding his mind whenever possible. And he had a chemistry set and displayed a fascination with radios.

But these things were not that uncommon for bright youngsters at the time. In most fundamental respects Richard Feynman appeared to be a typical smart Jewish kid from Long Island growing up after the First World War. Perhaps it is that simple fact, as much as anything else, that colored his future place in history. His mind was extraordinary, yes, but he remained firmly grounded in reality, even as he was driven to explore the most esoteric realms of our existence. His disrespect for pomposity came from an early life in which he was not exposed to any, and his disrespect for authority came not only from a father who nurtured this independence but also from an early life in which he was remarkably free to be a child, to follow his own passions, and to make his own mistakes.

Perhaps the first signal of what was to come was Feynman's literally indefatigable ability to concentrate on a problem for hours at a time, so much so that his parents began to worry. As a teenager, Feynman made practical use of his fascination with radios: he opened a small business fixing them. But unlike conventional repairmen, Feynman would delight in solving radio problems not merely by tinkering, but by thinking!

And he would combine this remarkable ability to focus all of his energy on a problem with an innate talent as a showman. His most famous radio repair, for example, involved an episode where he paced back and forth thinking while the broken radio shrieked in front of its owner whenever it was first turned on. Finally young Feynman pulled out two tubes and exchanged them, solving the problem. My suspicion is that Feynman let the whole thing last longer than it needed to, just for effect.

In later life almost exactly the same story would be told again. But this one originated when a skeptical Feynman was asked to examine a puzzling photograph from a bubble chamber-a device where elementary particles would leave visible tracks. After thinking for a while, he placed his pencil down on a precise spot in the picture and claimed that there must be a bolt located right there, where a particle had had an unanticipated collision, producing results that otherwise had been misinterpreted. Needless to say, when the experimenters involved in the claimed discovery went back to their device and looked at it, there was the bolt!

Reprinted from QUANTUM MAN: Richard Feynman's Life in Science by Lawrence Krauss.  Copyright (c) 2011 by Lawrence Krauss.  Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.