THE JOY OF DISCOVERY: FEYNMAN AND ART SCIENCE

He picked locks, played drums in a samba band, drove a van painted with his own equations, and once explained to a room of graduating students that the easiest person in the world to fool is yourself. He also changed how physics is done, and left behind a way of drawing the invisible that is still on every blackboard in the field. This is the life of Richard Feynman told in order, from a boy in Far Rockaway who was slow to speak to a dying man who complained that dying was boring. Along the way: a young wife in a sanatorium, a mesa in New Mexico, the worst lecture of his career, a plate wobbling in a cafeteria that turned into a Nobel Prize, a friend he refused to listen to, two marriages that went wrong, one that went right, and a rubber ring squeezed into a glass of ice water on live television. But this is not a collection of anecdotes. Feynman told his own stories so well that he turned himself into a character, and the character has been quoted for forty years while the work sat quietly behind it. Here the work comes forward. Why summing over every possible path gives the right answer. Why a diagram is a way of keeping accounts rather than a picture of anything. Why he introduced particles inside the proton and then flatly refused to say what they were. Why he called one of his own great achievements a piece of hocus-pocus and used it anyway for thirty years. And what happens if you take seriously a remark he tossed off in 1949, almost as an aside, about an electron going the other way. The book also does something he would have insisted on and his admirers usually skip: it holds him to his own standard. The protests outside his lecture hall are here, along with the divorce testimony, the letter his ex-wife sent to J. Edgar Hoover, and the chapter of his memoir that has aged worst. So is the discrimination case he took up on behalf of a colleague nobody expected him to defend, and the sister he taught to look at the sky when their mother told her women could not understand such things. Measured facts on one side, declared reputations on the other. The reader is left to do the sorting, which is exactly what he taught. What emerges is an argument rather than a portrait. The pleasure Feynman took in figuring things out was not a charming side effect of his talent. It was the instrument. A false answer does not feel like anything. Only a real one gives you that particular jolt. Which means the joy and the honesty were never two separate virtues, and a person who stops enjoying the work is usually the last to notice that he has started fooling himself. Keywords: Richard Feynman, quantum electrodynamics, scientific integrity, history of physics, curiosity, Manhattan Project, Challenger disaster