The Scientists Ep. 2: Pure Genius - The Feynman Method: How a Physicist Rewired the Way We Learn

Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/list to win a meteorite 💥 This conversation explores the life and legacy of Richard Feynman, exploring his pivotal role in the Manhattan Project, his unique personality, and his innovative teaching methods. Feynman's contributions to physics and his playful approach to science are highlighted, alongside the complexities of his character and the lasting impact he has had on future generations of scientists. - Key Takeaways: 00:00 The Call to Arms: Feynman's Early Involvement in WWII 03:08 Los Alamos: The Birthplace of the Atomic Bomb 06:01 Feynman's Playful Genius: Safe-Cracking and Curiosity 08:52 The Personal and Professional: Feynman's Complex Life 12:13 Feynman's Iconoclastic Nature and Humor 15:07 The Legacy of Richard Feynman: A Lasting Impact 18:01 Feynman's Approach to Learning and Teaching 20:49 The Man Behind the Genius: Feynman's Flaws and Foibles - Join this channel to get access to perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join 📚 Get a copy of my books: Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with life-changing interviews with 9 Nobel Prizewinners: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu My tell-all cosmic memoir Losing the Nobel Prize: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA The first-ever audiobook from Galileo: Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un Follow me to ask questions of my guests: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list; just click here: http://briankeating.com/list ✍️ Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast #universe #podcast #briankeating #intotheimpossible #science #astronomy #cosmology #cosmicmicrowavebackground #intotheimpossible #briankeating #richardfeynman #manhattanproject #atomicbomb #losalamos #physics #teaching #curiosity #legacy #science #nobelprize Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

• 0:14Speaker 00

  It's 1941. War is raging in Europe. The United States, not yet officially involved in the war, is nonetheless stirring. Richard Feynman, freshly minted PhD from Princeton, spends a summer working on ballistics problems. But after Pearl Harbor, the call comes. And when a call like this comes, you can't ignore it. Robert Wilson, a physicist working on uranium enrichment for a potential atomic bomb, is his recruiter. Initially, at Princeton, they toiled on an isolation device to separate uranium isotopes 235. It was complex, ultimately impractical, and it was a different alternative to what Ed Lawrence was attempting to make way across the country at UC Berkeley.

• 0:57Speaker 00

  But the urgency of the war effort became a powerful magnet, one Feynman couldn't ignore. And so, when, in early 1943, came the summons from Robert Oppenheimer, Feynman couldn't turn down the call. He was whisked away to a secret laboratory, Los Alamos, which had been established on a remote mesa in New Mexico. Its mission was to design and build the first atomic bomb and do so before the Germans got there first. If you've seen the movie Oppenheimer, you certainly know a lot about Oppenheimer himself. Oppenheimer is a figure of immense charisma and great talent in management, which I don't think he realized as a theoretical physicist. But you may have missed, and you'd be forgiven if you did miss, Feynman's role in the movie. It's quite small.

• 1:42Speaker 00

  So when Oppenheimer calls Feynman and arranges a sanatorium for his wife, Arlene, who had tuberculosis in Albuquerque, not far away from Los Alamos, I mean, like many young physicists, was drawn into the project's orbit. On March 28, 1943, just A year and a quarter after World War II was brought to US shores at Pearl Harbor, the young married couple headed west. At Los Alamos, Feynman was assigned to Hans Beta's prestigious theoretical physics student. He quickly impressed Beta, a Nobel laureate himself, enough to be made a group leader. And that was a remarkable feat for someone of Feynman's tender age. Together, they developed the Beta-Feynman formula, which was a crucial tool for calculating the yield of a fission bomb. But Feynman wasn't just

• 2:27Speaker 00

  a theoretical heavyweight. He also administered the computation group. Now, these weren't AI devices like we're used to dealing with, or laptops, anything of the sort. These were human computers, mostly women. And with another scientist, Stanley Frankel and Nicholas Metropolis, Feynman helped set up the IBM Punch Card Systems that were the era's supercomputers. He even invented a new method of computing logarithms, and that was a skill he'd later applied to the Connection Machine, one of the first massively parallel processing computers, and a forerunner for many of the GPU-based devices that we know and love today. Now, Los Alamos was a pressure cooker of intense scientific effort. After all, it was designed for the military war effort, not knowing at the time how it would turn

• 3:12Speaker 00

  out, or even if it was possible to succeed in making a fission device. But it was also a place where Feynman's playful iconoclastic nature found an outlet. He became notorious for his safe-cracking exploits, not for doing espionage or anything untoward, mind, but to highlight security flaws. And let's be honest, for the sheer intellectual fun of it, he loved poking fun of his colleagues and even the officiousness of the bureaucrats that worked there. He'd figure out some combinations to the safe and leave cheeky notes inside classified safes, much to the anger and consternation of the military security guards that were supposed to be protecting him from outside, probably, honestly. Feynman wrote Arlene, "The key to my interest in this is probably because I like puzzles so

• 3:56Speaker 00

  much. Each lock is just a puzzle you have to open without forcing it." It was classic Feynman, serious work punctuated by mischievous curiosity. His responsibility extended beyond Los Alamos. He was sent to the uranium enrichment facilities at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to help devise safety procedures for storing the fissile materials like uranium and plutonium. And this was important to prevent accidentally getting a critical mass of the fissible fissile materials together. That would lead to an unwanted detonation, uncontrolled nuclear reaction, a certain way to ruin your day. Feynman insisted on lecturing the rank and file workers on nuclear physics so that they'd understand what they were actually dealing with, in particular, the dangers that this material presented to them. And that was a testament, really, to his belief

• 4:41Speaker 00

  in understanding from first principles, from the ground up. He wasn't just about abstract equations. He cared for the practical human applications. And this was one of the first signs of that, that would later become clear, clear, and his justly earned reputation as a master educator. Now, at that time, Feynman had a memorable encounter with the great physicist Niels Bohr, who had visited Los Alamos under an alias. Bohr initially would talk to the senior scientists, but soon he saw on Feynman. Why? Well, as Feynman later discovered, most of the other physicists were too awestruck by Bohr to challenge him. Feynman, true to form, didn't care to put on airs. If he thought something was BS or baloney, he'd

• 5:21Speaker 00

  say so. And Bohr valued that intellectual sparring, that unvarnished honesty. But the Manhattan Project, of course, was a deeply serious, world altering endeavor. Feynman witnessed the Trinity Test, the first detonation of an atomic bomb in July 1945. He famously viewed it without the provided dark glasses, relying on the windscreen on the truck to filter out the harmful UV rays, and because he wanted to see it with his own eyes. He wanted to experience the sheer terrible power unleashed. And indeed, it did leave an indelible mark on him. This was slightly hinted at in the movie. He later reflect on the immense responsibility of scientists and the moral complexities of their creation. And woven through this period of intense scientific creation and global conflict

• 6:04Speaker 00

  was a personal tragedy. His beloved wife Arlene's death in June 1945, just weeks before the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki devastated him. He received the news by phone and, after a period of quiet grief, returned to his work. He never really seemed to deal with it, and that may have affected his psychology, as we'll explore in this episode and mainly in later episodes. There'll be many, many opportunities for us to encounter Feynman, one of the most written about and interesting human beings, let alone scientists. And so he'll make for great fodder on the Scientist Podcast Network. So he admitted that the full weight of his loss didn't really hit him until much, much later. And it hit him in surprising and often psychologically devastating ways. So here

• 6:48Speaker 00

  we have Feynman, the brilliant physicist, the Nobel laureate, the revolutionary teacher. But what about Feynman, the man? The personality, the character that became almost as famous as the science he produced. Feynman's a complex tapestry and one that I never tire of learning about and is for good reason that there's so many books written about him. We've already encountered three of them in this short section and I'll have a lot of references in the show notes and I'll highlight the books that I was most impacted by Feynman. I've pretty much read them all, including large parts, but not all of the Feynman lectures on physics, which was his magnum opus and certainly not a book one reads cover to cover. So Feynman's psychology

• 7:32Speaker 00

  is truly complex. It's punctuated by iconoclastic thinking, humor, sometimes melancholy, depression, often childlike delight, wonder, and perhaps the deepest possible curiosity to ever roam the planet. And all of it was underpinned by this ferocious, intimidating intellect. I never knew Feynman. He died in 1988 before I even graduated from high school and became a physics major, but I instantly knew about his legend from the time I really heard about his passing when I was a junior in high school. And the books written about him and by him became kind of a rite of passage to read for young physics majors aspiring to take

• 8:14Speaker 00

  on the great challenges that Feynman left unsolved. And although his intellect touched so many different aspects of science and technology and even the arts, it wasn't at all confined to physics. He talks about playing the bongo drums frequently and that became part of his character, becoming somewhat proficient, as proficient as you can be in the bongo drums, I suppose. I shouldn't really comment. The only instrument I play is Spotify. He also learned to draw and made sketches and I wanted to make the point that although I didn't know him, I know many people that do know, did know him and many of them are still alive. And so I've talked with them, including some of the subjects of these Portraits that he would draw of naked young women.

• 8:56Speaker 00

  And he will talk about his peccadilloes for, shall we say, the fairer sex later on, because I don't think we can do him justice entirely without encountering some of the challenging aspects of his nature. This isn't a reckoning and a deconstruction and a takedown, but let's be honest, he wasn't the paragon in later life of ethical virtue. And that's okay. That's not all we need to look up to everybody for, and it doesn't have any impact on the scientific findings whatsoever. Feynman wasn't content to stay in physics. He actually learned how to read or interpret Mayan hieroglyphs. He even dabbled in biology, working in the famous Max Del Brook's laboratory, and embarked on a quest later in his life with Richard Leighton to visit the obscure country of

• 9:41Speaker 00

  Tuva, simply because he had seen a postage stamp. And the postage stamp was fascinating to him. And learning more, he learned about their tradition of what's called throat singing. Maybe we can add that in. So you might think this is a dilettante's approach to life, but he went so deep, so far into the different facets of his intellectual curiosity that it's hard to really pin that on him. I mean, he was a New York City boy, and he never put on airs. And in fact, he made that his signature calling card that he didn't care about, the social conventions of the day. We'll hear stories about that and how he extended his iconoclasm, anti-authoritarianism, and his disdain for imposcity, for titles, for unearned.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  Your sausage McMuffin with egg didn't change. Your receipt did. The sausage McMuffin with egg extra value meal includes a hash brown and a small coffee for just $5, only at McDonald's for a limited time.

• 10:37Speaker 00

  Price and participation may vary. Promotion pricing may be lower than meal pricing. Respect. His guiding principle was curiosity. He once said, you know, probably in false humility, as he often did, he would say things like, He said, he once said, "I have no particular talent. I am merely extremely inquisitive." He said he was skeptical of honors and awards, even his Nobel Prize. He said he considered turning it down, worried that it would bring unwanted attention and distract him from his work. Now, whether or not that's false modesty, I don't know. There are stories that he drilled a hole in it and made a chain out of it. That's false. He didn't do that. We're a big Flavor Flav medallion. He did have a discomfort for the reverence that he felt, but he accepted the award. And later, when he was asked what he wanted for by the media,

• 11:21Speaker 00

  he said, "Look, if I could explain it to you, Bob, it wouldn't be worth a Nobel Prize." So, his first encounters, though, with societal formalities came at Princeton University. One famous example in his most famous of his autobiographies or memoirs that you'll hear the title of in a moment, he's invited to the dean's office, the stuffy affair, and the dean's wife said, "Mr. Feynman, would you like cream or lemon in your tea, sir?" And Feynman was lost in thought and pretty much confused. You know, a New York City boy didn't know how to answer. He said, "Both, please." And thereupon, a nervous ripple cackling throughout the room. And the dean's wife, Mrs. Anhardt, said, "Surely you're joking,

• 12:04Speaker 00

  Mr. Feynman." And that would be, of course, the title of his bestselling memoir and the one that I read soon after his death to get to know him better. He started to put on, really, started off on the wrong foot, and he never really regained his footing in societal settings, but that was okay. He was more comfortable at strip clubs and bars and Copacabana Beach than he was in any high society affairs. His humor and his playfulness were most of his, were perhaps his most enduring public traits. The bongo drums, the jokes, the captivating storytelling. These made him an incredibly engaging figure. But it wasn't just for show. His humor was also a tool to disarm, to make complex ideas more accessible, or

• 12:47Speaker 00

  to gently, or not so gently, poke holes in pretentious people and arguments of their kind. It was also, I suspect, a way of navigating the world, a coping mechanism for a mind that saw both its wonders and its absurdities with equal clarity. Reading through his memoirs and those books written about him, including the very well-written Genius by James Gleick Other books like Quantum Man by past guest on the podcast, Lawrence Krauss, and then his own books, you get a sense of the man, the playfulness, the intensity, the focus, but also the honesty. Up to a point, I don't want to paint him as this ruthlessly, high integrity, utmost integrity individual, although he's very famous for saying,

• 13:30Speaker 00

  the first principle is that you must not fool yourself. The second principle, you're the easiest person to fool. That was really a statement about confirmation bias and the dangers of it. But you also have to realize that he was at times very human and very much susceptible to other types of biases, including making up stories about himself potentially. One of my least popular videos on the channel is a book called Did Feynman Fib? About his interview in the late 1980s, where he says, before his death, obviously, do interviews after you're dead? Where he talks about having two or three patents, including a nuclear powered airplane and all this other stuff that the government G men came to his office and demanded that he sign away the rights to.

• 14:14Speaker 00

  And there's no record of those patents. His son has a patent, so there are patents with the name Feynman on it. He doesn't have any patents. Now, I don't know why he would have to embellish his bona fides. Maybe it was, as some of my critical commenters pointed out, maybe the government was so secret, they had a patent, they had a, you know, kind of obscure and keep the patent redacted for now 70, 80 years. I don't believe that, but it's hard to know. Where others kind of eschewed or avoided bureaucracy. I mean, he was never department chair or, you know, heading some big foundation or some academy actually attempt. I believe he did turn down membership in the National Academy of Sciences,

• 14:58Speaker 00

  claiming that they are merely serving a purpose of electing other members. But he had this ability to cut straight to the nature of physical reality. Of course, the masterclass of this was live on TV, you know, hamming it up in front of a live audience of congressmen and investigators, where he dunked an O ring exactly of the same type of. Material that was present on the January 1986 launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger into ice water, you know, so demonstrating how it lost its flexibility. And that really cuts straight through a demonstration showing, not telling. So it was a masterclass, but all the more unique because he was a theoretical physicist.

• 15:41Speaker 00

  Yes, he worked on atomic physics and he worked on the bomb, but it was on the theoretical aspects of it, not on the experimental hardware engineering aspects of it. Later he'd work on practical aspects of things like gravity and computation. He wrote books about both of those subjects that are quite good, taking his famous approach to it. But his gift for understanding and teaching was driven by this desire to understand the underlying physics and the nature of reality. He used to say famously, "That which I cannot derive, I do not understand." And so he would never just plug numbers into formulas. He wanted to understand the underlying physics. And you get a glimpse of this, and surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman, when he talks about in high school, looking at his peers and who are doing sketches using an artist's

• 16:25Speaker 00

  curve sketch device, piece of plastic or wood that has curves cut into it. And he would say things about the slope of the curves at different points and the students didn't know what they knew. In other words, that the derivative or slope of a curve is zero at its highest or lowest points. Like the velocity of a ball is zero when you throw it up in the air and it reaches its apex. He would intuit those things and then he would understand them and develop new ways of teaching himself calculus. And that led to what we call in the productivity world, the Feynman technique. The Feynman technique is a first principles visualization and intuition based approach. So the foundation of the Feynman technique for learning is that you must explain something

• 17:07Speaker 00

  and teach something in simple terms, identify gaps in your understanding, review it and simplify it. It's a direct reflection of this approach. He was a profoundly visual thinker. And his lectures, which one of my, my favorite college course physics teacher, Professor Robert Brown, who's still going strong at Case Western Reserve University. He was actually a student at Caltech when Feynman was delivering the famous Feynman lectures. And I believe he was a freshman or young undergraduate and they were so complex that he said by the end of the course, there were only professors in the audience. Now, whether that's completely true is not really knowable, but I believe it. I've heard similar stories from other people that I've met. He was a great advisor. He was a great mentor.

• 17:49Speaker 00

  If you weren't a woman or you didn't have a particularly attractive spouse. I heard stories from many different people that have known him, ranging from Dick Bond to Paul Steinhardt, and none of them told me any stories about his improprieties, but those are documented. There's a book called Surely You're a Creep, Mr. Feynman, or an essay about him. We'll talk about that in subsequent shows. So as we see the Richard Feynman persona, it's brilliant. It's quirky, bongo playing, safe cracking genius. It's undeniably charismatic. It's impossible not to be attracted to such a genius. But it's also worth asking, as some have, how much was, how much of it was a carefully constructed performance?

• 18:29Speaker 00

  He was, by all accounts, a showman and his attitudes towards especially women and, and attractive women. He, he talks about walking down the streets in Pasadena, past the famous Pie and Burger, I believe, where I had many lunchtime meal during my days on California Boulevard. And he talks about not even noticing any man who passed him by, complete oblivion. But whenever a woman would pass him by, he was acutely and attentively attuned to her presence. And he talks about that in his books. And as I said, we'll get into this critique of him at some point. I don't think I wanted to do it right now, but some of his anecdotes haven't really aged well. The so-called sexist pig incident where protesters confronted him over stories in his lectures

• 19:13Speaker 00

  is telling and we can't ignore it. We can't simply dismiss it and then not address it. He has to acknowledge, he had to acknowledge a degree of grace and think about the broader issues of discrimination and sexism. And then he would then pivot to a joke about the structure of the proton or something. Feynman is complicated and he's a human being. And like all human beings, he has flaws and foibles. And we won't shy away from them. We'll investigate in upcoming episodes of The Scientist, some of the complexities, the core of his persona, which remains compelling. He was a unique mind that influenced many generations of physicists and still does to this day.

• 19:54Speaker 00

  A mind that's relentlessly curious, fiercely independent, and deeply engaged with the joy of discovery with a mix of iconoclastic, anti-authoritarian showmanship. There's just no way around it. He's not necessarily a role model in all ways and in all senses, but that's okay. We're free to pick and choose whatever aspects we like. Feynman wasn't just solving problems. He was playing with the universe. And in some ways, we're still playing along with him to this day. We'll conclude here with the conclusion of his life before going back to the beginning of his life and his great discoveries that we haven't even had time to touch on in this first encounter with the genius Richard Feynman.

• 20:34Speaker 00

  He died on February 15th, 1988. That's Galileo's birthday, by the way. He was only 69 when he died after a long battle with abdominal cancer. He didn't believe his cancer was caused in any way by his work on the Manhattan Project, I should note. His passing was mourned not just by the scientific community, but by the world, a world that had come to see him as something more than just a brilliant physicist. He was an icon, a cultural symbol of the power of curiosity, relentless intelligence, prospecting, and the importance of independent thought, but also the sheer joy of understanding. His legacy is immense and enduring, and we'll encounter it. We'll talk about quantum electrodynamics. We'll talk about Feynman diagrams. We'll talk about the parton model, his work on superfluidity, his work on computation,

• 21:17Speaker 00

  his work on gravitation. He touched so many different areas of physics. It's impossible to think of another physicist with that much breadth in the modern age. But his willingness to sort of accept and to be truly humble when it counted, to admit ignorance and have skepticism about authority, even his own authority, was a way of championing the idea of science as a way of knowing, a process, not a completion, a process of discovery rather than a fixed body of facts. Feynman encourages us to ask questions, to challenge authority, to embrace assumptions, and to always teach. As I said earlier, he wrote a final epitaph to himself on the blackboard at his office. You can see this online.

• 21:59Speaker 00

  Is written just before he died and said, what I cannot create, I do not understand. An epitaph that is particularly fitting for a man who spent his entire life trying to create, not just understanding for himself, but for the world. He wasn't just a character in science. He was a character of science, science at its best. Yes, he was flawed, deeply human, as all the scientists that we will encounter on this podcast are and will be. He was always chasing the next puzzle, the next insight, and indeed, the next laugh. He left the world richer and more interesting and a standing invitation to all, and a standing invitation to all of us to keep questioning, keep exploring,

• 22:40Speaker 00

  and never, ever stop being curious. Okay, that's the podcast today for The Scientist, episode two. Richard Feynman, send me your comments wherever you're listening to this, and send me some suggestions. Join my Monday Magic mailing list, briankeating.com/list, and be entered to win a copy of Flatland, which was the subject of episode one. And you'll also be able to send me emails and send me recommendations for who to feature next on The Scientist. I've got a backlog. As David Sandler says, 400 books have been read, so only 1,000 more to go. There'll always be 1,000 more to go. And next time

• 23:23Speaker 00

  we encounter Feynman, we'll get into some of the books written about him. Genius, Quantum Man, The Beat of a Different Drum, and Feynman's Rainbow, all of which have great takes and anecdotes about him. And we'll also explore books by him, including Tuva or Bust, which is subtitled as Feynman's Last Journey. And that was by Ralph Leighton, who was also at Caltech and designed some of the telescopes we use in the Owens Valley Radio Observatory in near Bishop, California. If you've ever been up there, it's quite a startling place to go and visit. And it's a place Feynman probably was having many walkabouts, enjoying his time in the California sunshine. So for now, I am enjoying the California sunshine. This has been The Scientist, episode one, and look forward to episode number two.

• 24:21Speaker 01

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• 24:33Speaker 00

  Price and participation may vary. Promotion pricing may be lower than meal pricing.