Feynman - Transcript The Pleasure Of Finding Things Out.pdf
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Pobierz
The
Pleasure
of
Finding
Things
Out
Tbis is the edited transcript of an intewiew with Feynman made
for
the
BBC
televisionprogram
Horizon
in 1981, shown in the United
States as an episode of
Nova.
Feynman had most
of
his I$ behind
him by this time
(3e
died in 1988), so he could reflect on his experi-
ences and accomplishments with the perspective not o3en attainable
by a younger person. The result is a candid, relaxed, and
very
per-
sonal discussion
on
many topics close to Feynman? heart: why know-
ing merely the name
of
something
is
the same as not knowing any-
thing at all about it; how he and hisjdlow atomic scientists
of
the
Manhattan Project could drink and revel in the success of the terrible
weapon they had created while
on
the other side of the world in Hi-
roshima thousands of their311ow human beings were dead or dying
from
it; and why Feynman couldjust as well havegotten along with-
out a Nobel Prize.
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The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
only afierwards, when I got older, that
I
got 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.
The Beauty of a Flower
I have a friend who’s an artist and he’s sometimes taken a
view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll
hold
up a
flower and say, “Look how beautiful
it
is,” and
I’ll
agree, I
think. And he says-“you see, I as an artist can see how beau-
tiful this is, but you as a scientist,
oh,
take this all apart and
it becomes a dull thing.” And
I
think that he’s kind of nutty.
First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other peo-
ple and to me, too, I believe, although I might not be quite
as refined aesthetically as he is; but I can appreciate the
beauty
of
a flower. At the same time I see much more about
the flower than he sees. I can imagine the cells in there, the
complicated actions inside which also have a beauty.
I
mean
it’s not just beauty at this dimension
of
one centimeter, there
is also beauty at a smaller dimension, the inner structure.
Also the processes, the fact that the colors in the flower
evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interest-
ing-it means that insects can see the color. It adds a ques-
tion: Does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms?
Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which
shows that a science knowledge only adds to the excitement
and mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds; I don’t un-
derstind how it subtracts.
Tyrannosaurus in the Window
We had the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
at home and even when
I was a small boy [my father] used to sit me on his lap and
read to me from the
Encyclopaedia Britannica,
and we would
read, say, about dinosaurs and maybe it would be talking
about the brontosaurus or something, or the tyrannosaurus
rex, and it would say something like, “This thing is twenty-
five feet high and the head is six feet across,” you see, and
so
he’d stop all this and say, “Let’s see what that means. That
would mean that if he stood in our front yard he would be
high enough to put his head through the window but not
quite because the head is a little bit too wide and it would
break the window as it came by.”
Everything we’d read would be translated as best we could
into some reality and so I learned to
do
that-everything that
I read I try to figure out what it really means, what it’s really
saying by translating and so
(LAU
G
H
S
)
I used to read the
En-
cyclopaedia
when
I
was a boy but with translation, you see, so
it was very exciting and interesting to think there were ani-
mals
of
such magnitude-I wasn’t frightened that there would
be one coming in my window as a consequence of this,
I
don’t think, but
I
thought that it was very, very interesting,
that they all died out and at that time nobody knew why.
We used to go to the Catskill Mountains. We lived in New
York and the Catskill Mountains was the place where people
went in the summer; and the fathers-there was a big group of
Avoiding Humanities
I’ve always been very one-sided about science and when
I
was
younger I concentrated almost all my effort on it.
I
didn’t
have time to learn and
I
didn’t have much patience with
what’s called the humanities, even though in the university
there were humanities that you had to take. I tried my best to
avoid somehow learning anything and working at it. It was
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people there but the fathers would all go back to New York to
work during the week and only come back on the weekends.
When my father came he would take me for walks in the
woods and tell me various interesting things that were going
on in the woods-which I’ll explain in a minute-but the other
mothers seeing this, of course, thought this was wonderful
and that the other fathers should take their sons for walks,
and they tried to work on them but they didn’t get anywhere
at first and they wanted my father to take all the kids, but he
didn’t want to because he had a special relationship with me-
we had a personal thing together-so it ended up that the
other fathers had to take their children for walks the next
weekend, and the next Monday when they were all back to
work, all the kids were playing in the field and one kid said
to me, “See that bird, what kind of a bird is that?”And
I
said,
“I haven’t the slightest idea what kind of a bird it is.” He says,
“It’s a brown throated thrush,” or something, “Your father
doesn’t tell you anything.” But it was the opposite: my father
had
taught me. Looking at a bird he says,
“Do
you know what
that bird
is?
It’s a brown throated thrush; but in Portuguese
it’s a
. . .
in Italian a
. . .
,”
he says “in Chinese it’s a
. . .
,
in
Japanese a
. . .
,”
etcetera. “Now,” he says, “you know in all
the languages you want to know what the name of that bird
is and when you’ve finished with all that,” he says, “you’ll
know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You only
know about humans in different places and what they call the
bird. Now,” he says, “let’s look at the bird.”
He had taught me to notice things and one day when I was
playing with what we call an express wagon, which is a little
wagon which has a railing around it for children to play with
that they can pull around. It had a ball in it-I remember
this-it had a ball in it, and I pulled the wagon and I noticed
something about the way the ball moved, so I went to my fa-
ther and I 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,” and
I
says, “why is that?” And he said,
“That nobody knows,” he said. “The general principle is that
things that are moving try to keep on moving and things that
are standing still tend to stand still unless you push on them
hard.”
And
he says, “This tendency is called inertia but no-
body knows why it’s true.” Now that’s a deep understanding-
he doesn’t give me a name, he knew the difference between
knowing the name
of
something and knowing something,
which I learnt very early. He went on to say, “If you look
close you’ll find the ball does not rush to the back of the
wagon, but it’s the back of the wagon that you’re pulling
against the ball; that the ball stands still or as a matter of fact
from the friction starts to move forward really and doesn’t
move back.”
So
I ran back to the little wagon and set the ball
up again and pulled the wagon from under it and looking
sideways and seeing indeed he was right-the ball never
moved backwards in the wagon when I pulled the wagon for-
ward. It moved backward relative to the wagon, but relative
to the sidewalk it was moved forward a little bit, it’s just [that]
the wagon caught up with it.
So
that’s the way I was educated
by my father, with those kinds of examples and discussions,
no pressure, just lovely interesting discussions.
Algebra
for
the
Practical
Man
My cousin, at that time, who was three years older, was in
high school and was having considerable difficulty with his
algebra and had a tutor come, and I was allowed to sit in a
corner while
(L
A
UGHS)
the tutor would try to teach my
cousin algebra, problems like
2x
plus something.
I
said to my
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Finding Things
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comfortable and
I
lied and
I
said it was for my father, he se-
lected it.
So
I
took it home and
I
learnt calculus from it and
I
tried to explain it to my father and he’d start to read the be-
ginning of it and he found it confusing and it really bothered
,tne a little bit.
I
didn’t know that he was so limited, you
know, that he didn’t understand, and
I
thought it was rela-
tively simple and straightforward and he didn’t understand it.
So
that was the first time
I
knew
I
had learnt more in some
sense than he.
cousin then, “What’re you trying to do?” You know,
I
hear
him talking about
x.
He says, ”What do
you
know-2x
+
7
is
equal to
15,”
he says “and you’re trying to find out what
x
is.”
I
says, “You mean
4.”
He says, “Yeah, but you did it with
arithmetic, you have to do it by algebra,” and that’s why my
cousin was never able to do algebra, because he didn’t un-
derstand how he was supposed to do it. There was no way.
I
learnt algebra fortunately by not going
to
school and know-
ing the whole idea was to find out what
x
was and it didn’t
make any difference how you did it-there’s no such thing as,
you know, you do it by arithmetic, you do it by algebra-that
was a false thing that they had invented in school so that the
children who have to study algebra can all pass it. They had
invented a set of rules which if you followed them without
thinking could produce the answer: subtract 7 from both
sides, if you have a multiplier divide both sides by the mul-
tiplier and so on, and a series
of
steps by which you could
get the answer if you didn’t understand what you were trying
to do.
There was a series of math books, which started
Arithmetic
for
the Practical Man,
and then
Algebrafor the PracticalMan,
and
then
Trigonometly
for
the Practical Man,
and
I
learned trigon-
ometry for the practical man from that.
I
soon forgot it again
because
I
didn’t understand it very well but the series was
coming out, and the library was going to get
Calculus
for
the
Practical Man
and
I
knew by this time by reading the
Ency-
clopaedia
that calculus was an important subject and it was an
interesting one and
I
ought to learn it.
I
was older now,
I
was
perhaps thirteen; and then the calculus book finally came out
and
I
was so excited and
I
went to the library to take it out
and she looks at me and she says, “Oh, you’re just a child,
what are you taking this book out for, this book
is
a [book for
adults].”
So
this was one of the few times in my life
I
was un-
Epaulettes and the Pope
One of the things that my father taught me besides physics
(LA
U
GHS),
whether it’s correct or not, was a disrespect for re-
spectable
. . .
for certain kinds of things. For example, when
I
was a little boy, and a rotogravure-that’s printed pictures in
newspapers-first came out in the
New
York
Times,
he used to
sit me again on his knee and he’d open a picture, and there
was a picture of the Pope and everybody bowing in front of
him. And he’d say,
“Now
look at these humans. Here is one
human standing here, and all these others are bowing. Now
what is the difference? This one is the Pope”-he hated the
Pope anyway-and he’d say, “the difference is epau1ettes”-of
course not in the case of the Pope, but if he was a general-it
was always the uniform, the position, ”but this man has the
same human problems, he eats dinner like anybody else, he
goes to the bathroom, he has the same kind of problems as
everybody, 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 special he did, or his
honor, or something like that.’’ He, by the way, was in the
uniform business, so he knew what the difference was be-
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tween the man with the uniform off and the uniform on; it’s
the same man for him.
He was happy with me, I believe. Once, though, when I
came back from MIT-I’d been there a few years-he said to
me, ‘‘Now,” he said, “you’ve become educated about these
things and there’s one question I’ve always had that I’ve
never understood very well and I’d like to ask you, now that
you’ve studied this, to explain it to me,” and I asked him
what it was. And he said that he understood that when an
atom made a transition from one state to another it emits a
particle of light called a photon.
I
said, “That’s right.” And
he says, “Well, now, is the photon in the atom ahead of time
that it comes out, or is there no photon in it to start with?”
I
says, “There’s no photon in, it’s just that when the electron
makes a transition it comes” and he says “Well, where does
it come from then, how does it come out?”
So
I
couldn’t just
say, “The view is that photon numbers aren’t conserved,
they’re just created by the motion of the electron.”
I
could-
n’t try to explain to him something like: the sound that I’m
making now wasn’t in me. It’s not like my little boy who
when he started to talk, suddenly said that he could no
longer say a certain word-the word was “cat”-because his
word bag has run out of the word cat
(
LAUGHS
).
So
there’s
no word bag that you have inside so that you use up the
words as they come out, you just make them as they go
along, and in the same sense there was no photon bag in an
atom and when the photons come out they didn’t come
from somewhere, but
I
couldn’t do much better. He was not
satisfied with me in the respect that
I
never was able to ex-
plain any of the things that he didn’t understand (
LAUGHS
).
So
he was unsuccessful, he sent me through all these univer-
sities in order to find out these things and he never did find
out (
LAUGHS
).
Invitation to
the
Bomb
[while working on his PhD thesis, Feynman was asked
to
join the
project
to
develop the atomic bomb.]
It was a completely differ-
ent kind of a thing. It would mean that I would have to stop
the research in what I was doing, which is my life’s desire, to
take time off to do this, which I felt I should do in order to
protect civilization. Okay?
So
that was what
I
had to debate
with myself. My first reaction was, well,
I
didn’t want to get
interrupted in my normal work to do this odd job. There was
also the problem, of course, of any moral thing involving
war.
I
wouldn’t have much to do with that, but it kinda
scared me when
I
realized what the weapon would be, and
that since it might be possible, it must be possible. There was
nothing that I knew that indicated that if we could do it they
couldn’t do it, and therefore it was very important to try to
cooperate.
[In early 1943 Feynman joined Oppenheimer’s team at
Los
Alamos.]
With regard to moral questions, I do have some-
thing
I
would like to say about it. The original reason to start
the project, which was that the Germans were a danger,
started me off on a process of action which was to try to de-
velop this first system at Princeton and then at
Los
Alamos,
to try to make the bomb work. All kinds of attempts were
made to redesign it to make it a worse bomb and so on. It was
a project on which we all worked very, very hard, all co-oper-
ating together. And with any project like that you continue to
work trying to get success, having decided to do it. But what
I
did-immorally I would say-was to not remember the rea-
son that I said I was doing it, so that when the reason
changed, because Germany was defeated, not the singlest
thought came to my mind at all about that, that that meant
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