Preface

I first met Richard Feynman in 1981 at Caltech in Pasadena, where he had been a professor of physics for thirty years. I had read about him in a wonderful book called Disturbing the Universe by the English physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson. They had driven across America shortly after the second world war, and had spent a night together in a brothel in Vinita, Oklahoma. That night they could not sleep, and Feynman told Dyson about his first wife and great love, Arline, about the building of the atomic bomb, about Hiroshima and his deep conviction that the world was going to end rather soon.

I wanted to make a documentary for BBC TV about Feynman’s life and work, but over the phone he told me the idea didn’t interest him at all. He did agree to meet for ten minutes or so after his Thursday-morning lecture for graduate students "to see what you got to say". I went to the lecture, and although I could understand nothing at all of the physics, I was fascinated by something Feynman did near the end. He looked at the wall clock—11:50—then at the blackboard, and told his students: "There are two ways of dealing with this problem: one is complicated and messy, and the other is simple and very elegant. We don’t have much time left, so I’ll just show you the complicated and messy way."

Afterwards, we went to his office. He sat back in his chair and said, "Yes, sir?" in such a way that I was certainly scared of him.

I tried to talk about what I thought I wanted to do. He listened, and then he told me again that my idea was "dumb—it would be a ‘Do you like lobster?’ movie". I didn’t understand what he meant. He said, "Well, you know—the answer is either yes or no, and who cares? It’s like people who ask each other where they come from—everyone comes from somewhere, but so what?"

We went to lunch at a café near Caltech, and argued a bit about science and art. By now I was convinced that there would be no film. I felt I had nothing to lose, so I told him that I thought his apparent dismissal of anything outside science was narrow-minded and arrogant. This must have done the trick, because Feynman smiled and said, "Well, I did read a novel once. It was called Madame Bovary and it was kind of nifty." He winked, and then he asked me what, exactly, did I want him to do?

I tried to explain that I wanted to make a film for laymen (like me) about the excitement of doing science, and that this was difficult unless it was attached to a person and a life. Somehow he warmed to this: "Oh, you mean, a sort of a life story with scientific hairs hanging off of it? Yeah, I’ll do that!" So he did, and we made a documentary called The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. It was a kind of autobiography which consisted of Feynman sitting in a chair, talking for fifty minutes—there was really no need for much else.

I wanted to show Feynman the rough-cut, but he said no. "If the thing’s any good, that’s to your credit", he said, "and if it’s lousy, that’s your problem".

Feynman often spoke in a strange, ungrammatical way which was very much part of his charm: "There’s no such a thing as you do it by algebra", "Bigger is electricity!", or "Nature’s there, and she’s gonna come out the way she is!". He often used the definite article where most of us do not: ‘the nature’, ‘the physics’, or ‘the science’. All this led a pompous Daily Telegraph TV previewer to miss the point badly: "Feynman is a ‘legendary teacher’, we’re told, in view of which I found it curious that he speaks such dreadfully sloppy English—hardly a complete grammatical sentence in fifty minutes’ nonstop talk."

Fortunately, everyone else saw Feynman for what he was—a great communicator of what science is, and why people do it.

Feynman was born in 1918 in Manhattan and died in 1988 in Los Angeles. He brought to bear on the world a curiosity so intense and an intellect so powerful that he won a Nobel Prize for a fundamental physics discovery made in his late twenties. He also looked for adventure outside science, and invariably found it—in art, travel, family, and friendship.

In 1984, Feynman and his friend and drumming-partner Ralph Leighton published Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman!— a remarkable collection of autobiographical stories which became a best-seller. Feynman sent me a copy, and on the flyleaf he wrote: "After your program people think I am wise, so I had to publish this to bring the balance back." But Feynman was wise, and when he died people all over the world who had never met him felt the loss.

This book is based on The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (1981) and the other films I made with and about Feynman for BBC TV—The Quest for Tannu Tuva (1988), No Ordinary Genius (1993), and a series of six short programs called Fun to Imagine (1983). The text is edited from interviews and conversations recorded during research and filming with Feynman, his family, his friends, and some of his scientific colleagues. The arrangement is neither strictly chronological nor thematic, and the only constant is the unique personality of Feynman himself.

Some of the stories have appeared elsewhere. I once asked his daughter, Michelle, whether she and the rest of the family ever got tired of hearing them. Not at all, she said, "He had such a gift for telling them that it was always new. The other thing is that it gave him so much pleasure to tell them. I remember I came downstairs one night, and he was laughing hysterically—tears were running down his face, he was laughing so hard. When I asked him what he was reading, he sheepishly looked up, and showed me the cover of his own book, and he said by way of excuse, "I was such a crazy character!"

Freeman Dyson once wrote to his parents that Feynman was "half-genius, half-buffoon", but has recently changed this to "all-genius, all-buffoon". Whatever the correct proportions, Feynman seemed to know better than most how to enjoy the world and everything in it, despite his share of tragedy.

The last time I saw him was in February 1988 at a Mongolian barbecue restaurant in Pasadena—Ralph Leighton had arranged a party there. Feynman loved it, although he was obviously in pain. His wife Gweneth took him home early, and he went into hospital for the last time. (Gweneth also had cancer. She died a year later, after adventures in Antarctica and Egypt. I regret that I never recorded an interview with her)

I remember Feynman as always smiling, and he made me wish I had been a scientist. I think he should be a household name, and that is why I have compiled this book.