Feynman, a complicated legacy
Ethan Siegel is the author of the “Starts with a Bang” newsletter on BigThink, which is a great read and I recommend it to everyone interested in the latest developments in Astronomy, but also in Physics in general. He is also a facebook friend. In his Nov 1st newsletter Ethan addresses a question from one of his readers, which ends with: “It seems to me that you have a somewhat ambivalent relationship with R. Feynman. Is there a deeper reason for this?”. Ethan here gives a very detailed answer acknowledging Feynman’s scientific accomplishments before going on to highlight some of Feynman’s more controversial character aspects, and I certainly agree with his conclusion that “We can rightfully laud [Feynman] for his great accomplishments while still being critical of his unacceptable behaviors, and I would argue we have an obligation to share the full truth about Feynman, both the physicist and the human being, with subsequent generations of scientists and science-literate citizens.” But after reading the whole article, and not finding anything specific I could disagree with, I was left with a feeling that something was missing, and it took me a while to fully conceptualise the origins of my discomfort and put it down to words. Feynman was born in 1918, was mostly active during the 40s to the 60s, and died in 1988 when he was 69 years old. He was successfully treated for abdominal cancer in 1980, but then the cancer came back with a vengeance in 1988, at which point it had gotten so bad that Feynman refused treatment. In many ways his social views were a product of his time, yet his patterns of behaviour were not predictably consistent. Ethan’s article does a good job of pointing out the negatives, when viewed anachronistically through a modern lens, but in leaving out the aspects of Feynman’s character that made him “curious”, ends up with an incomplete picture of who Feynman really was as a person. Fundamentally, Feynman was an iconoclast, and it is through this lens that his character contradictions can be reconciled. He was also a prankster with little regard for authority. While working for the Manhattan project, he famously amused himself by breaking into secure safes containing nuclear secrets—not to undermine the project, but to expose how lax security was. Sometimes he would even leave notes in the safes, like “I borrowed document no. LA4312–Feynman the safecracker.” He loved the arts and was an avid bongo player who also learned to paint for fun (even holding an exhibition under a pseudonym), occasionally having intense discussions about art vs. science with his artist/mentor/friend Jirayr “Jerry” Zorthian (check out the Ode to a Flower monologue). An older contemporary colleague of his from Caltech once told me that Feynman could sometimes be found smoking weed in the Professor’s common room, much to the chagrin of everyone else. He was also a regular at the local strip club, and knew all the girls working there. He would pick up an orange juice from the bar (by that time he wasn’t a big fan of alcohol), together with a bunch of napkins or place mats, and he would watch the show or just sit there and think, scribbling down equations on the napkins, alone or with company. This was the kind of environment he felt more at ease in and he actually did quite a number of his calculations in that place. When the county tried to close the place down on account of “uncovered breasts”, he was the bar’s only regular customer willing to come forward and testify publicly in court in defense of the bar. Such stories reveal Feynman as a gadfly—a horsefly, if you will—who delighted in seeing how the social and academic order would reconfigure itself when challenged. He cared little for social norms or accolades and famously eschewed honorary degrees and pomp. His devotion was to truth, inquiry, and the freedom to explore without inhibition. Ethan’s article rightly discusses the biases prevalent in academia during Feynman’s time (and later) and how he sometimes mirrored those biases. Like most people of his time, it doesn’t seem like Feynman had carefully thought through the harmful implications of maintaining these problematic attitudes. Take, for example, a talk he gave in 1966 at the National Science Teachers Association. The topic he was asked to talk about was “What is Science?”, a title that he didn’t really like. It is a fantastic talk and I strongly encourage everyone to read the transcript, but it is also a product of its time. At some point during this talk Feynman says the following: “I listened to a conversation between two girls, and one was explaining that if you want to make a straight line, you see, you go over a certain number to the right for each row you go up–that is, if you go over each time the same amount when you go up a row, you make a straight line–a deep principle of analytic geometry! It went on. I was rather amazed. I didn’t realize the female mind was capable of understanding analytic geometry. She went on and said, “Suppose you have another line coming in from the other side, and you want to figure out where they are going to intersect. Suppose on one line you go over two to the right for every one you go up, and the other line goes over three to the right for every one that it goes up, and they start twenty steps apart,” etc.–I was flabbergasted. She figured out where the intersection was. It turned out that one girl was explaining to the other how to knit argyle socks.“ This passage clearly comes across as sexist, reflecting the prevalent attitudes of that time. However, what is more revealing about how Feynman thought, is what comes after it. Feynman doesn’t end there, but continues the thought in this fashion: “I, therefore, did learn a lesson: The female mind is capable of understanding analytic geometry. Those people who have for years been insisting (in the face of all obvious evidence to the contrary) that the male and female are equally capable of rational thought may have something. The difficulty may just be that we have never yet discovered a way to communicate with the female mind.” Feynman here seems to acknowledge the possibility that systemic issues, rather than innate differences, limited women’s participation in science. But he offers no solution to this problem and moves back to his main topic. He does not own it as his problem to solve for the whole of the country. Society for him is one thing, the scientific enterprise another, and he is primarily interested in the latter. Richard Feynman also had a younger sister, Joan. Although they were separated by nine years, Joan and Richard were close, as Joan was also very curious about how the world worked. Their mother was a sophisticated woman who had marched for women’s suffrage in her youth, but believed that women lacked the capacity to understand maths and physics. Despite that negative attitude at home, the young Richard encouraged Joan’s interest in science. From a very young age, he would train her to solve simple math problems and rewarded each correct answer by letting her tug on his hair while he made funny faces. By the time she was 5, Richard was hiring her for 2 cents a week to assist him in the electronics lab he’d built in his room. Joan grew up to become an astrophysicist, crediting her brother’s mentorship as a key influence. In his later years, Richard became acutely aware of the discrimination women faced in physics, because he saw how it affected his sister. For her part, Joan Feynman was awarded NASA’s Exceptional Science Achievement medal in 2002, for her continued support and encouragement for women to persevere and make their marks in science. Feynman’s first marriage, to Arline Greenbaum, adds another layer of complexity. They were high-school sweethearts and by all accounts their love was profound and marked by mutual respect. Feynman wrote her heartfelt letters that revealed his deep admiration for her intellect and spirit. Arline was sick for a long time, even before their marriage, and eventually died of tuberculosis in 1945, while Richard was working on the Manhattan project. When she was near death, he rushed from Los Alamos to be by her side. You can read here a remarkable letter he wrote two years after Arlene’s death, where he pours out his heart. The letter was discovered in a stash of old letters by Feynman’s biographer James Gleick. Richard Feynman got married again in 1952 to Mary Louise Bell. This second marriage was difficult, strained by differences in temperament and lifestyle choices, and ended in divorce. Mary had very conservative views and they quarrelled often. She was so fed up with his obsession with calculus and physics and reported that on several occasions, when she disturbed his calculations, which he would sometimes even do while he was lying in bed at night, or his bongo playing, he would fly into a rage. She filed for divorce in 1956. His third marriage, to Gweneth Howarth, who shared his enthusiasm for travelling and playfulness, was far more harmonious. In the book “What do YOU care about what other people think?” Feynman recalls an incident where feminist protesters (led by a man, ironically) entered a hall and picketed a lecture he was about to make in San Francisco, holding up placards and handing out leaflets calling him a "sexist pig". As soon as he got up to speak, some of the protesters marched to the front of the lecture hall and, holding their placards signs high, started chanting “Feynman sexist pig!”. Instead of reacting defensively, Feynman addressed the protesters saying: “Perhaps, after all, it is good that you came. For women do indeed suffer from prejudice and discrimination in Physics, and your presence here today serves to remind us of these difficulties and the need to remedy them”. Feynman’s attitudes certainly weren’t those of a consistent advocate for gender equality, as we might expect today, but they weren’t wholly regressive either. The idea of dismantling systemic barriers wasn’t part of his worldview, but he was not resistant to change and was willing to support those who defied convention. Criticisms of Feynman’s legacy through the lens of presentism risks overlooking the full complexity of his character and how progressive some of his views were for his time. He was a complicated individual, whose brilliance was tempered by human imperfections. He achieved remarkable things in his lifetime and inspired many physicists that came after him, both male and female. As with every figure who has left a mark on the landscape of history, fairness requires that we should be honest about who he was, acknowledging both his achievements and flaws, while considering the context of his time. His legacy cannot be flattened into an uncomplicated hero or villain narrative. Perhaps Feynman's most enduring legacy is to remind us that progress is born from questioning, curiosity, and the willingness to defy convention --all driven by the joy of discovery. To reduce such a complicated life to binary judgments, to refuse to celebrate it, pointing out warts and all, would be to forget why we study these figures at all—to question, to learn, and to grow.
