Quantum Man: Richard Feynman's Life in Science. Lawrence Krauss Talk at CERN

okay I'm glad today to present you Lawrence Krauss from the university of state Arizona Lawrence got his PhD in 1982 from MIT and then he was a Harvard Society fellow for three years then he had he was have faculty in at Yale University from 85 to 93 and then he from 93 he was he became a professor and also chair of the physics department at Case Western Reserve University and 2008 he moved to a state of Arizona University well his professor of cosmology there so his expertise is service in cosmology he has about 300 applications he has a valid scientific awards but he has also written many popular articles on physics and astronomy and eight books that you may read one of them was a international bestseller physics of Star Trek and earlier this year he wrote a book on Feynman and that talk today is this book and he's writing another one from Catalina next year it will be out so I'm glad to to have Lorentz today thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you it's it's a pleasure we've a concern and I've given cloaca here before and this one's a little more popular perhaps at least in terms of the material but I want to include some science but and hopefully illuminate for you some of the aspects of Richard Feynman's life and maybe some of his science as well and some of the important legacies that that he left in fact I realized this quote is pretty important reality must take precedence over public relations for nature cannot be fooled and that we that in light of events in the last week or two I think that's pretty important anyway in fact one of the thing one of the reasons that Fineman is uh interesting to me and I think important was is the lessons he can give us in scientific integrity and there's a wonderful explanation here which I don't bother reading for you all about what science is but I think it's incredibly important that that was that that that he thought about science is how to think about things so the judgments can be made how to distinguish truth from fraud and from show and I could resist and I'll beat this dead horse one last time in this group have you I know if you've seen the xkcd cartoon that came out this week but I'll read it for you did you see the neutrino speed of light thing has everyone seen this already okay I want you to go through it okay but I remember when I when I taught at Yale I had a distinguished and wonderful colleague Fasig ER say it was a delightful man and he was asked once about a time most many people in the audience weren't alive when there was something called su6 which was which was given as a wonderful new theory of everything at the time and some reporter asked him what did that mean and he said it means Polly is dead and if you know anything about Polly then you know what that means that people could get away with saying those things because Polly wouldn't have let them get away with it when I went when a reporter asked me about this particular result which I said it meant that Fineman was dead but anyway okay now because I want to begin and as my my soon-to-be ex-wife has pointed out it's always all about me and I want to begin with me and Fineman and why I wrote why I wrote the book and why I did the research I've done as a physicist to think about firemen I was asked to UM I was asked to write a book about firemen but there's a lecture series called great or a book series called great discoveries about great scientists Rutherford and others and I was very honored to be asked to write about funny but I was particularly thrilled because he had a very personal relationship in my mind with me all of you no doubt were also inspired by him in one way or another when I was in high school I I was on a science program for high school students and I was very bored and the teacher came down and gave me a book and said you should you should read this book by this guy richard fineman he told me he had just won the Nobel Prize for saying the particles were anti particles grantee particles were particles going backwards in time and there's a chapter in the character of physical law which is the messenger lectures that he gave at Cornell which are wonderful you can see them on YouTube about the arrow of time and I read it and didn't understand it I realized my teacher didn't understand it I also realized what my teacher had said was wrong but that's the way it is in high school and but it was very important to me because that was I remember that specific moment and u-mall probably had some moment like that when I thought about being a physicist for the first time because up until that time physics has been taught to me as something it would have been done 200 years ago by dead white men and this was the first time when I realized that there was things left that it was still an exciting field that there were puzzles to be solved and I remember thinking that right then and there in high school but physics might be interesting so Fineman had a role in that regard and then of course like most of you when I was an undergraduate I cared around not the little red book but the big red books and an Android and I didn't understand them but I carried them around hoping that by osmosis I would I would learn and only when I was a graduate student that I really begun to appreciate them and then it turns out actually I did get to spend time with a little time with flymoon when I was an undergraduate a conference and um and then later on when I was at Harvard I and I gave a colloquium at Caltech I brought Fineman was in the audience and an ask a question is about neutrinos in fact their glow clear and afterwards he he wanted to talk to me more and I really wanted to remind him of the time I met him as an undergraduate because even though we spent much of the weekend in bars together because I had got my girlfriend and she was one of the few women at the meeting and that I sure was sure he'd forgotten about it and a very annoying assistant professor who some of you may know would not stop asking me questions at the end of the lecture and I was very happy that this person didn't get tenure at Cal Tech because Fineman waited around and finally gave up and walked away and I thought well I'll next time I see him I'll remind him of that but he died shortly thereafter words so for me writing the book was kind of cathartic because I could at least connect with him one more time and uh and what I wanted to do in this book and and it was was write a book that maybe physicists and members of the poplar the public could appreciate because Fineman is well known among everyone for his antics and his and and the fact that he was a curious character but that is unimportant what really is important is his science and that I did not feel was appreciated as much and I thought if I could use the interesting aspects of his life as an arc to understand his science that that would be maybe useful and so that's what I tried to have tried to do is his focus on his science and I'll try and focus on that today while I talk about his story now would you have known when Richard Fineman was it was a young man that he would become one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century and I think not perhaps he was his childhood was very normal he was a smart young Jewish kid from Long Island had a chemistry sets and was quite quite interested in that but but he didn't he his life was normal which was vitally important in my opinion because he wasn't exposed in in New York City to all of the academic excellence and and and in awe of any of any of that he just cared about his father taught him about a little bit about nature and and the fact that he he had a regular childhood and could appreciate what what it was like to be a regular person was incredibly important I think in terms of his approach to science and his approach to explaining science it wasn't pretentious he certainly learned very early on that not to have any respect for authority because he really knew no scientific authorities and that character of of treating Sciences of interest and treating everyone as equal in science when he was a student as he said he didn't care who he was talking to once he started talking about science he forgot and that character was formed early on he was able to concentrate for incredibly long periods and his his his parents were very concerned about that if he was trying to solve a problem he could concentrate for hours even as a even before he was 10 years old he had a radio repair business when he was 11 and he became well known for fixing radios by thinking about them now and there's a very famous episode where he in the days of this was in the days of vacuum tubes and where someone came in and and had a problem and plugged in their radio and it would screech it was making a noise that bothered everyone in the neighborhood and Simon looked at it and an 11 year old he paced back and forth and thought about it then went and switched to tubes and it worked now this is the important point here I'm convinced that find the knew right away what the problem was but but he was a showman even then and he knew how to milk an audience and he knew to wait and bother everyone while he thought about that and that was another characteristic of a Fineman that was very important in his approach his being a showman but the other aspect was he was incredibly talented mathematician he tried to often later on to hide that fact but but he was a talented and he was also quite organized when he was 13 years old he took out a book from the library called the calculus for the practical man he had to tell them it was for his father because they wouldn't give it to him and he taught himself differential and integral calculus then but you can see these were the notes he made he was incredibly organized and precise in his note-taking when when in public and in seminars and in answering people's problems he appeared to come up with answers by magic and he liked to give that impression but in fact there were tens of thousands of pages of notes that he left behind when he died and one of the reasons he could solve everyone's problems in almost any area of physics was because sometime he'd solved them for himself in an organized fashion in his notes and I know that when I was writing the book I spent a lot of time with BJ James gherkin who was incredibly important to him who would spend time with firemen to to do art to demonstrate that there was a lot of work behind the genius a lot of work in an organized fashion beginning when he was a young man now oh I didn't I didn't mean to put this in you all know about the fair well at least time so I'm going to skip this out when Fineman was was uh in high school something similar happened to him that happened to me he was bored and his teacher he was bored with regular physics and his teacher said I want to explain something to you and firemen said it was it changed his view it forever he went was forever in love with this idea because he realized something remarkable and it was a principle at least action the idea that that one could describe the motion of a particle on a trajectory not by using Newton's laws which he learned and had bored him but by taking the action the sum of the action and summing it over a path and realizing that you could in fact derive the trajectory of particles by minimizing this quantity the action and moreover that that wasn't exactly identical to Newton's laws for him it was fascinating to see that this entirely different way of understanding things would produce the same result in fact ANOVA in his Nobel lecture he said that very importantly that the wonderful thing about physics is that you can understand things many different ways and each different way of understanding thing may things may produce precisely the same result but it will lead you in a different direction and you'll see that's important of course in his own physics and but what's also remarkable this is even though he said he fell in love with it and it stayed with him for the rest of his life it really didn't because when he went to MIT Ted Welton one of his schoolmates has recalled that whenever he was taking classical mechanics and one used the Lagrangian formulation of action he would he'd refused to do it he insisted upon Newton's laws and forces because for him he wanted to understand things physically and he could picture the forces in his mind and so he abandoned the action completely now of course as I'll talk about it was regaining his interest in action that led him to the Nobel Prize but another thing that I find quite remarkable is that even in his Nobel lecture he never made that connection between what led him to double prize in that and that afternoon one day in high school where he was shown the action for the first time he must have realized it but he never talked about it now oh okay well I've done it twice here okay I guess now when he was an undergraduate he went from he went to MIT as an undergraduate and he fell in love with several things now many of you may have had this experience in his first year of physics he fell in love with the self energy of the electron it's probably happened to all of you and the fact that he cared about this problem I think demonstrates in some sense the depth of his consideration of physics I don't think many undergraduates worry about the self energy electron but he was worried about the self energy electron in a very classical sense this problem really of the self energy of the electron had been around since faraday even before Maxwell because it was just the idea of how do you put together an electron if an electron is a charged shell and you take charge from infinity and different directions of course the charge will repel and you and it will be some energy required to assemble the charge but as you shrink the electron down to a point particle which it is classically then the potential energy required to amass that charge is infinite and so the electron should weigh an infinite amount and so that infinite self energy electron we think of it as a quantum mechanical problem certainly wasn't it's a classical problem and it was well known and understood to be a classical problem and people simply ignored it in a sense I mean they knew about it but it bothered Fineman and he thought the one thing he wanted to solve was this particular problem so that's the first thing he fell in love with as an undergraduate the second thing was far more important in a sense well equally important and it was arlene Greenbaum arlene was a childhood sweetheart of Fineman a family friend who had been with his family taught his sister how to play piano in fact and she was everything that Fineman wasn't she was musical artistic outgoing he was shy and awkward initially she was at home and at ease everywhere she's a wonderful compliment to him and they fell in love and it was clear to many people that they would get married eventually and they did but but what's very very important in my mind in the formation of fine men the man and formation of Lima and the scientist was it Arleen instilled with him in him a confidence to do what he believed in Arleen not only adored him and loved him and appreciated him but under him and and I think having that kind of relationship early on in his life was a vital importance to give him the kind of courage that he needed to go his own direction and if Ayman did anything it was to go in Hills own direction in science and there's a very famous episode where Arlene gave him some pencils she they had a pet name for each other Patsy and she gave him some pencils with his with I love you putzie on written on them for to use when he was a graduate student at Princeton and one day she came to visit and she found him scraping them off the name I said why she said why are you doing that and he said well I don't embarrass myself in front of my visor John weird it's embarrassing and she said why do you care what other people think and became the title of one of the books and is vitally important that he realized that he shouldn't care that what he believed in was important and I and I I hope all of you that in my own life that's come rather late because I have someone in my life who appreciates me in that way and gives me courage to do what I believe in and she it's happened relatively late but I and she happens to be in the room right now but but for 5-minute happened early on and that was incredibly important now Flyman graduated from MIT he would have graduated early in fact he was going to graduate in three years he done all the physics classes but the university wouldn't let him graduate and he went to Princeton he was actually admitted to Harvard without applying which is a good thing if you can do it because he won the Putnam mathematics competition which some of you may have taken as you know if you don't know about it it's one of those rigorous mathematics competitions in the world for undergraduates and each university puts together a team of students to work on it the average number of problems solved when the Putman math competition is zero Fryman scored so much better than anyone else in the competition that harvard offered him a graduate fellowship in mathematics without applying Fryman was a remarkable mathematician as I say he often tried to hide it but he chose to go instead to Princeton and I don't I don't know any recorded reasons why sis Act four one of the reasons that many people went to Princeton around then is that's what Einstein was maybe also he wanted to get out of Boston and-and-and and go somewhere else he nearly didn't get into Princeton however because if you look at the admissions records from the University you'll find that he scored the highest in the physics entrance examination of anyone who'd ever applied at the University in the English entrance examination he scored lower than anyone they'd ever considered and nowadays people worry about well-roundedness and he would never have made it in then if they had worried about that but happily they only cared about the visit or enough that they were able to override his his his english deficiencies but there was another reason he nearly didn't make it in again if you look at the letter from the chairman of the physics department at Princeton to his supervisor as an undergraduate at MIT there was a letter and it said just how Jewish is he because it was a quota on Jews and it's a remarkable question when you think about it because Fineman was an atheist as most scientists are but happily for whatever reason he wasn't too Jewish because they finally admitted him and it was all that little accident would have changed history in many ways but so Fineman went to Princeton and he wanted to work with he was hoping to work with someone who'd win the Nobel Prize aventure Eugene Wigner but he didn't instead he was assigned a young assistant professor not too young in his picture but young enough John Archibald wheeler now wheeler was or many of you may you know know about wheeler but wheeler was perfect for Fineman because he was crazy but not too crazy because what wheeler did wheeler was open any problem no matter how crazy and that's just what fine they needed because climbing could come in with it with a with a wacky notion and instead of instead of being beaten down by a supervisor wheeler would ask him or one of the implications of that and find me later on said you know an idea may seem extremely paradoxical but until you check the implications of that idea you don't know if it really is and so in fact he got gave him the courage to propose to wheeler a solution he had for the self energy of the electron problem it sort was is a remarkably brash solution phiman suggested the real problem of the self energy of the electron was the electric field around the electron that electric field is what Bruce is the energy so all you have to say is that the electric field doesn't really exist it's a figment of our imagination now this is quite a remarkable statement especially if you've ever used static electricity and put a balloon up against a wall or anything and and what is remarkable is he was able to propose out to wheeler instead of wheeler kicking him out of his office wheeler said well what you know could that work and fireman suggested that well okay the idea is that there's no electric field then each electron interacts with every electron in the universe directly without any intermediate of a field now of course wheeler pointed out the problem the problem is of course we all know that the electron interacts with its own electric field as it moves okay and and finally said well no the interact the reaction that it has the force it feels is actually due to the fact that there are other electrons around it but wheeler pointed out the problem is of course accepted at certain things travel always follows the speed of light or less and that means that that there be a delay the electron wouldn't feel a force immediately as it would if it was feeling the force from its own field but it would have a delayed reaction and they said think about that and Wheeler had been thinking about a similar thing and he said wanting to think about some interactions that happen backward in time as well as forward in time and the two of them were able to show that in fact if you half the time had interactions forward in time and half the time interactions backward in time you would be able to reproduce the force on electron that it felt from its own field without the existence of a field and you'd get it happening at the right time and the fact as long as each electron could experience it as long as in any direction the universe there would be an electron which would interact with the original electrons so you'd have no trajectory out in the universe in which you wouldn't interact with another electron then you could reproduce the equations of electromagnetism and this and the motion of a charged particle and in fact Fineman and you might think because of the interactions backward in time that there'd be some violation of causality but in fact there isn't and phiman would challenge his graduate student colleagues to try and find an example but if this was the only place that happened then there'll be no problem but there was a problem the problem was that this was a classical theory and both firemen and wheeler wanted to make the quantum theory but the problem at the time of course was at the formulation of quantum mechanics from Heisenberg and Schrodinger is quite clear you define a system at a given time a wavefunction a given time and you're propagated by Schrodinger's equation and you determine the wave function at a later time but if an electron is if its behavior is determined by the by all other electrons both forward in time and backwards in time then the state of any given particle is determined by the trajectory of all other particles over all of history so you can't define a time slice and quantize the system so Flyman said how can I make a quantum theory of a system where I have to worry about trajectories over time and then you remember the action the action principle that he learned which is a principle of trajectories and so he went to he was a graduate student and he went to a well this is where he by the way he got this idea that an idea which is completely paradoxical in fact may not be paradoxical the idea that particles interact forward and backwards in time may be crazy but what determines what's crazy is not your opinion or even the opinion of your colleagues its nature and so you compare the predictions with experiment to decide if something's paradoxical in any case he went to a beer party this is what beer parties looked like back then in Princeton and he met and talked to a German physicist Herbert Yeley and he said have you ever heard of anyone who rely upon mechanics using an action principle ors talked about that and yelling said you know that this is guide Dirac I think in 1932 he wrote a paper about about this and so the next day they went to the physics library at Princeton here's the physics library for instant and Fineman there and they found a racks paper a Lagrangian formulation quantum mechanics and in the paper Dirac had proposed that you could make such a formulation and argued that it should work but Dirac made an argument and that was it so Flyman sat down in front of yellow and he took the argument and he turned into a specific example for intestinal times and was able to show that from a Lagrangian you could reproduce exactly basically Schrodinger's equation and so you could actually show that it wasn't just an analogy that actually would allow you to derive quantum mechanics and the first thing Yeley said was he said you Americans are so practical because he'd you know for him it was good enough for Galactus say it should work but here was Fineman working out from a problem in explicit detail to see if it would work but more than that he realized that this young guy was pretty smart because in front of his eyes he'd just seen him read alive quantum mechanics in a way that no one else had done before and of course that Lagrangian formulation of quantum mechanics with an action principle laid the basis of fineman's PhD and ultimately his work that led to the Nobel Prizes I'll discuss now the other thing I want to point out and I often spend more time with popular audiences talking about this here's a later picture of 5 min with Dirac Dirac was fineman's Idol which is remarkable when you think about it because Dirac was as different as fine as a human could being could be from Fineman phiman was outgoing and joking and and all over the place and as you know Dirac spoke like 400 words in his life and was serious and took everything seriously and but but I think it's remarkable that these that and and and you know for the public who have a stereotype in their mind of what scientists are all awkward mathematical geniuses like Big Bang Theory or something that it's really important to present these to man as the fact that he was his idol and they're so different that when science is healthy it takes all types and I want to tell you an anecdote which you may you know there many direct stories you've probably heard of but my favorite one which is relevant and I'm going to tell you so you can tell other people I guess is it is a story that was between Bohr and Rutherford as you know Dirac studied in England for with Rutherford and then went to Bohr to Copenhagen as a postdoc and Bohr wrote back to Rutherford and said why did you send me this idiot he doesn't do anything he just sits in his office and one that we wrote him back and said and told him a story about a man who goes into a parrot shop to buy a parrot and and he says I like to buy parrot and how much is this parrot here it's very colorful and how many words is to speak and a man says five words and he goes good how much is that and a man says $500 that's too expensive what what about this ugly bird over here that doesn't really you know just sitting in the corner well don't worry about that bird okay okay what about this bird here it's much prettier it has many more colors how many words does it speak 20 words how expensive is it $5,000 what about this ugly bird over here how many words does it speak doesn't talk at all how much is it hundred thousand dollars is what this bird is pretty five words five hundred twenty words I thought this ugly bird doesn't speak at all hundred thousand dollars why is it a hundred thousand dollars and the man who owns the shop says that bird thinks a lesson too many of us anyway Fryman was there pearl particularly happy when when big nor later on said about richard fineman he's another dirac only this time human and so fireman developed his path integral formulation which in fact I suspect for many of you it certainly is for me the way I think of quantum mechanics when I try and have a heuristic understanding of quantum mechanics it's the notion that particles are doing many things at the same time and I think in terms of space-time pictures as firemen did it so that one can determine the probability amplitude of a particle going from A to B by looking at all trajectories and the thing that determined the probability amplitude in the direct trajectory as you know is the action so the idea was that you look at the action and sum up over all the probabilities and squared and get the probability amplitude and that was that was his idea that's and it was for not nonrelativistic particles but it would reproduce all the equations of quantum mechanics and for me the intuitive way I think about quantum mechanics is still that way is that particles are taking all trajectories at the same time every different possible trajectory at the same time now phiman that was eventually good enough to get his ph.d and it was very important for phiman to get his PhD because he had decided and he and arlene had decided when he got his PhD that he would get married they would get married this was a difficult thing to do because his parents did not want them to get married not because they didn't love Arlene but because Arlene had come down with tuberculosis and was very very ill and fine his mother a typical Jewish mother in New York at the time did not want him she saw how he can he get a job and how can he be productive if he has a sick wife she was very worried about that but Flyman and arlene had decided they would get married and that was going to be it when he got his PhD and they did get married and it's kind of tragic and in a sense beautiful if you read the letters between them which I recommend you do they got married when he got his PhD if day afterwards he bought a car he didn't own a car and he he put a mattress in the back of the car I drove up to Long Island picked up Arlene who couldn't stand lie down they drove to New Jersey she was able to get up and before Justice of the Peace they got married before witnesses who didn't know who they were and then for the honeymoon he drove her to a sanitarium for people who were too poor to pay for it she stayed in that Hana terraeum he drove back to his dorm room at Princeton that was their honeymoon it sounds not very much fun but the two of them were so happy and so much in love that it didn't matter but more important a very important and wonderful thing happened for their lives World War two because if it hadn't been for World War two Fryman who was very bright would have gotten a job in a very boring place like Princeton and he wanted their life would have been very much like it was when he's a graduate student Arlene would have been in the sanitarium the two of them would have been there and she would have died and there would have been no adventure whatsoever but and around that time Niels Bohr visited Princeton talked to John Wheeler in fact but the fact that the Nazis were probably building an atomic bomb and wheeler of course eventually they went through the intermediary of Leo's lard they talked to Einstein and Einstein pinned or at least signed a letter to Roosevelt saying the Nazis are building an atomic bomb we should build one too and the United States embarked on the Manhattan Project run by robert Oppenheimer now Oppenheimer was of Melling up brilliant physicists but a wonderful manager of people and in order to make the bomb he wanted to bring together the best physicists around the world and that meant finding out who they were and wheeler was one of them and wheeler told them about Fineman and and finally did not want to work on the bomb he didn't really he didn't really want to work on the project at all but Oppenheimer was able to convince him in two ways first of all he made a phone call and asked him it was the first long-distance call Kleinman had ever received he was incredibly impressed to be called by this famous scientist but more importantly Oppenheimer knew that if you want to convince people to work with you you actually have to think of what their needs are as people not just as scientists let that be a lesson to any department chairs in this crowd and so he actually had found out about our lien and he found out there was a sanitarium in Albuquerque they told firemen about this a family was so touched that he'd be concerned about him that he had agreed to work for on the project but for Arlene and Fineman it was a wonderful thing it was an adventure they'd never been outside New York New Jersey Boston area and suddenly to go to the West was for them the greatest possible adventure Arlene said they were the luckiest people in the world they went out in the Train to Los Alamos and uh and Fineman worked at the lab arlene was in the sanitarium a hundred miles away and every Friday firemen would either hitchhike forget a bus to Albuquerque hoping to arrive before the hospital closed if it didn't he slept on a bench outside the hospital but the weekend with Arlene and then did the same thing on Sunday and then during the week basically worked on every problem associated with the atomic bomb from metallurgy to diffusion and of course to computing priming helped develop the first parallel processing computer which consisted at that time of the spouses of physicists who at that time the spouses were women in a row each doing a calculation part of the calculation and passing it backwards to the person behind them and doing doing massive calculations in parallel later on he built actually a real computer came from IBM and and before the before the the IBM person came prime and put it together and along with a colleague and actually built the first computer and their parents said no one had ever done that before Fryman was always quite interested in computers and that we'll come back in a moment so if Lyman worked feverishly on this and then of course eventually Trinity happened the atomic bomb explosion but a month before the explosion Arleen died and he heard that she was dying and he managed to blow a car and get to her bedside before she died which is wonderful and when she when she died the clock stopped in the room at the moment she died now for me this is a very important story because Fineman used to say that the easiest person to fool is yourself and he used to tell experimental physicists that all the time critically important and so this is the moment in his life when he was in the greatest grief the greatest vulnerability to nonsense and superstition most people would say there's something cosmic significance to that but even in the moment of his greatest grief I mean look at that clock and said you know what I think the nurse came in when she died and picked up the clock to record the moment her deaths for her death certificate put it back down it was an old clock that's what's often and so even in the moment when most of us would be most susceptible to thinking that there's something out there that means something Fryman wouldn't let himself be deluded by nonsense that shows the kind of scientist he was in fact he used to go up to people one of who used to love to go up to people and say you won't believe what happened to me today you won't believe what happened to me if people say what he'd say absolutely nothing because he would tell people that people all think that when something significant happens to us and significant when it's sometimes an accident and again as I say many experimental physicists here notice that when you are working on experiment and there's an interesting result the temptation is to assume the interesting result is correct instead of trying to convince yourself why it isn't I'll stop talking there but but phiman Nam worked under the atomic bomb project for for her Hans bethe of course was the greatest nuclear theorist of his time and again beta was not just a brilliant although he was a very unassuming guy it was not just a brilliant guy he was also also a brilliant manager of people again because the other thing that's important remember for those of you who and some of you who haven't yet gotten jobs maybe is it often the first job offer you receive is the most important one because it's the first time anyone really appreciates you and you'll have a special fondness for that and beta a meet knew that Fineman was brilliant and they and and the fact that the two of them would talk and and as you know bata was organized and and and and and accurate and he would write it these famous for writing equations and on a blackboard and starting here and ending up here without any cross outs and always getting the right answer and Fineman would start out here and go here and in the urine and it was all over the place and and when the two of them would walk around los alamos was called the battleship in the mosquito boat and but bata appreciated Fineman and so early on after one year los alamos not only did he make him a division director a graduate student he also offered him a job at Cornell assistant professorship and by the end of the war of course Flyman had entered Los Alamos it was incredibly important for fireman Tobin at Los Alamos because he entered Los Alamos is someone brilliant known to the professors of Princeton but by the end of the war he'd worked with the greatest physicists in the world and they knew that he was great and he'd received offers at that time from every major university but he went to Cornell the first job offer he got and he also had immense respect for bata because data also instilled in him the very important result which Fineman was central define 'men which is if you can't calculate something and compare it to an experimental result you're not doing physics and that stayed with him forever and data shared that characteristic so finally went to Cornell and hated it and if you've ever been to Cornell it's easy to understand especially in the winter but he hated not just because it was a little town with nothing happening in cold and damp and the rest but because it was a difficult time for him his wife had just died but like many scientists who had just built the bomb the scientists were seduced by the technical problems during them during the war and were fascinated by them and but only after the atomic bomb went off did they realize what they'd done and for Fineman the impact was not so much sadness as about what they'd done but the realization of for him the world was over as he said what one fool can do any other fool can do and he was sure there as he knew the Soviet Union build a bomb and he was convinced that that would be used and so he went back after Arlene died to New York City and he looked at the big skyscrapers and he just he just figured that was no there was no purpose in life really it would be over soon he went back to Cornell and you know he lived a me realistic existence he looked like an undergraduate even though he's a professor so he used to go to undergraduate parties and seduce undergraduates which used to be allowed and and he just yet but he also couldn't work he well there was a big problem few big problems and again many of you can relate this but the first problem was in Los Alamos it was an incredibly exciting time with not deep problems but immediate problems real problems how to design a bomb how to how to worry about the diffusion and these are the problems you can come up with think about one day come up with a proposal and test the next day and work on the week afterwards suddenly he went from that exciting atmosphere to going back to basically it's like sitting in an office thinking about issues as any of you theorists know where you can sit in an office for years and not come up with anything and it was a and also none of us are taught to be professors of course he was new thing for him he was a difficult experience but the other thing what that was a problem was it he felt like he was a fraud one year after he got an assistant professorship at at Cornell he was offered tenure at Princeton and at the Institute of read study and he had not yet published a paper this time his undergraduate and he said what did they're crazy and he was paralyzed by the fact that he felt that the people thought he he felt like a loser has been he was over the hill and you know I have to say and it may have happened to some of you when I when I you mentioned that I was in the Society fellows I was it did my PhD at MIT where there were 300 graduate students in physics at the time I remember and I no one knew who I was I got this fancy postdoc at Harvard and suddenly one in the community knew who I was I hadn't done anything and I remember the first six months I was in Harvard I couldn't do anything because I felt like it was a fraud in my case it might've been more true but in this case it wasn't and so he couldn't anything until one day he was in in in the cafeteria and someone threw up a plate and he noticed that it wobbled twice for every revolution that it did he said I could solve that problem he went back and people said why do you want to solve that problem it's an unimportant problem he said who cares it's fun and then the dam broke once he realized that physics was fun again suddenly everything else went away and he was able to work and around the same time of course most importantly in physics an experimental result came out because experiment drives theory good theory and as you know of course it was the lamb shift the great result that even when you quant when you applied relativity to to quantum mechanics produces gerak had done producing quantum electrodynamics and you calculated the levels of hydrogen which were now correct with up to the point where lamb suddenly was able to improve the experimental accuracy by a factor of over a thousand why did he do that because he could another important lesson that I try and explain to people when they say why do things if you're an experimentalist is all the experimentalists in the audience know you do things not because theorists say if anything because who the hell cares it's because you could do it because each time you open a window on the universe you're likely to be surprised in this case lamb could open that window discovered the fact that when you apply QED a tree level you got the wrong answer the answer was wrong by measurable amount and you had to do more sophisticated higher-order calculations but when you did the higher-order calculations with this relativistic theory you got infinite answers and phiman realized that he could in fact do calculations as I'll show you in fact with his path integral formulation and he could use any could and what he would do with using an action principle was allowed him to do relativistically invariant calculations because with the action of course you're independent of the of the of the the the space-time labels so he told bethe I can do a calculation that's relative this screen variant and get a answer and in fact he was able to ultimately do it and I'll talk in a moment but the interesting thing is that he wasn't convinced it was important until a few years later at the American Physical Society meeting in 1951 I think in New York City which was a time when the physics community was so small that every physicists the United States could fit in a single hotel in New York and for the annual meeting and Murray flockin was a was a postdoc at the Institute of ran studies and had just done tried to do a theory with them the new particles Mezen theory a relativistic calculation came up with result and he was verbally destroyed by Oppenheimer who was the president of the American Physical Society at the time so that's nonsense I have a postdoc working on this at the Institute and it's you're wrong Fryman arrived at the meeting late missed that missed the big debate and wanted to find out what's happening so people told him and he said you know I'll try and reproduce the calculation and he got someone to explain to him nezam theory which he knew nothing about massan's at the time and he went back to his room and did the calculation that's locked in and done and the next morning he sought him out to say let me compare to see if you're right or not and slot can was kind of a little surprised because first of all if I made had done the complete calculation is lock and had only done it in a little approximation but it taken stock in three years to do the calculation find me did overnight slot Caen wasn't happy but finally was because he realized that he had just developed the formalism that allowed him to do in a single night where people who required three years before and do it in more generality and as he said that's when I won my Nobel Prize that's when I got the satisfaction the prize itself was irrelevant that's when I realized I did something useful because I could allow people to calculate and compare with the experiment in a way they never did before now most of the world didn't know most physicists didn't or didn't appreciate what he done and this is probably the reason this is how he wrote what I'm trying to do is bring birth to clarity which is really a half-assedly thought-out pictorial semi vision thing in describing climate diagrams so it's not too surprising that most people in the community we're quite sure if this guy really was real and if the technique which it allowed him to do things was really any anything useful and in fact I was going to show you a picture of Freeman Dyson it was really Freeman Dyson who convinced the world that finest techniques were useful in fact Freeman Dyson's paper on climbing on the path integral formulation base of these and Fineman the first fly man diagram to appear was in vices paper it actually appeared before any of fineman's papers and so it was really Dyson that convinced the world and you can see there's a wonderful history that kind of look at the dispersion of Fineman diagrams throughout the world within how it came from Cornell to Princeton and there were first two then six papers on it and then it exponentiated so of course now in every issue of physics of every physics journal finding diagrams are everywhere now if I'm in left Cornell after that for many reasons there were many complications a number of pregnant women and other things but but which happened to be true but but that was meant that may have been one of the reasons to leave but he was actually convinced to leave by Robert batcher who was in a new chair at Caltech which wasn't much of an institution at the time convinced by me to come and they gave him an offer which again some those of you who trying to improve people it's a very good way to make an offer they said you can come and you will pay you for two years but you don't have to show up so mommy said that's not a bad idea so finally said I'll move to Cork Caltech and of course what he did was go to Rio de Janeiro and spend a little over a year there and for finding that was incredibly important it was actually a very unproductive period of physics for him he spent his time doing many other things it wasn't actually was quite useful for Brazil I know if there any Brazilian physicists here but but at the time he actually he learned Portuguese and he actually taught and he did a great job of convincing the Brazilians that they were teaching physics incorrectly they were basically teaching people to memorize four equations by rote and he said that doesn't teach them anything so he was very influential in Brazilian physics but it was also relevant for him because he didn't have much of a life before that but he didn't Brazil he learned how to live and here he is right here he Lori's joined a street group and and learned how to and during carnival I was a musician so he learned how to drum and of course you all know he became famous as a bongo drum player later but this is where he first began to learn music and there many other things he did there that I won't go into but he went back to Cornell I went back to Caltech and room okay I realize I'm showing you the wrong one I wanted to I wanted to have one with a little more science in it before I get to this what he what he did when he went to Cornell was leave the area of elementary particle physics behind for a while but I've always wondered why he immediately after after doing QED left behind particle physics and he went in to look at thing about liquid liquid helium and superfluidity and it's rather fascinating one of the thing one of the reasons why I wrote the book in fact was so that I could read all of Lyman's papers because as many of you know but most people the public don't know we never go back to the original literature in physics because why because as you also know that with ideas get distilled and made clearer and simpler and often it's almost impossible to read the original papers and I figured without that motivation I wouldn't read find his papers but for me there was something fascinating I was trying to understand why whether what had led him to work on on liquid helium and it's interesting if you read those papers what you can see is at the time mez on theory the particle accelerators were just coming online and particle physics was a zoo it was incomprehensible what was happening the experiments were very confusing they weren't definitive they weren't clear and firemen said this isn't the area where we can learn anything maybe I should look at an area of physics that's not understood but for which the experiments are clear and fascinatingly he turned to liquid helium and his interest if you read the papers four times in the paper to look on liquid helium we talked about mesons and he says maybe the techniques we've use here to describe liquid helium will be useful in mez on three why because what do you wanted to describe was a straw we interacting theory where maybe you could make an approximation and treat it as a weakly interacting gas in fact I was going to show you some images but they're not on this particular presentation of his description of liquid helium using just that principle and of course as many of you know that's exactly the idea he later unused in part on theory and QCD how to understand to make sense of at that time the scaling experiments experiments at SLAC and understand them by treating a strongly interacting system and approximating by weakly interacting degrees of freedom was the same kind of techniques so what he was really doing was tooling up and yeah and it's clear to me that he was doing that as I say what there's no other reason to mention maisons in the theory in in a discussion of super fluidity now phiman of course went came back after that and worked on the weak interaction with Gelman and continued of course his love affair with ultimately with with with quantum chromodynamics and part on theory but but he but he branched out in a 1960 one of the more important and fundamental papers he wrote was called lots of room at the bottom it was it was a suggestion that we should engineer things not based on human scale things but in fact if we made machines smaller and smaller and smaller we would finally be able to have make machines that depended on quantum mechanics and actually what firemen said is the reason I want to develop a machine that depends on quantum mechanics to operate is I don't understand quantum mechanics if I build machines that utilize quantum mechanics in their operation maybe I'll understand quantum mechanics better and he was so interested in that he gave two prizes in 1960 of $1000 he announced two prizes first for anyone who had built a motor that was one 64th of an inch on the side which at the time he thought was too small to use classical principles and secondly for anyone who would be able to write a single page of say the Bible on a way for 125 thousandths of an inch across which and he'd get off of those two prizes $1000 was five years before his Nobel Prize there was a lot of money and to his great dismay someone came up within six months William McClellan with a regular little mo that satisfied everything and it was just there was nothing new about it and Fineman wrote him and said what you showed me is exactly what I had in mind I'm a little disappointed that no major new techniques were needed to develop to make the motor I was sure he had to I had it small enough so you couldn't do it directly congratulations now don't start writing small I don't intend to make good on my second prize since writing the article I've gotten married and bought a house but he did he did eventually make good on the second price 20 years later a graduate student Stanford using photo lithography did that and of course then it was $1,000 was trivial and he gave away the second prize but of course in that tape in that paper really the bottom he was talking about using quantum mechanics for computation he became fascinated with computers and in fact as you know started talking about what eventually became quantum is the field of quantum computation day and nanotechnology now I think I think I'm going to skip his hatred of string theory because I have some friends here with string theorists but farmers legacy was in many areas of science not just in the things that particle physicists know about but as I say superfluidity quantum computing and of course ultimately he was quite interesting quantum gravity and in fact developed the techniques we use for many other gauge theories in trying to think of quantum gravity because he asked he was thinking about gravity and he asked Marie gomen he was talking about this problem ergo Manuel game I said well you know he was thing about gauge theories and murray gell-mann said why do you think about gravity and it was the techniques of ghosts and other things that he developed to think about gravity that we now use in all the rest of the gauge theories that we deal with but as legacy is elsewhere in many other places here's a legacy I want to conclude with two things here's a from a friend of mine craig Venter who's a biologist and some of you may know helped to sequence the human genome Venter and his collaboration developed also the first synthetic genome building it part letter-by-letter and in order to demonstrate importantly that it was human induced in case it was outside the laboratory in the genome are various quotations embedded and there's one from James Joyce and there's one here from Richard Fineman what I cannot build I cannot understand now after he announced is the genome the Caltech archives gave him showed him fly man's blackboard on the day Fineman died and here are two things on his blackboard know how to solve every problem that has ever been solved and what I cannot create I do not understand so they got it wrong the quotation but you see the important point here is it doesn't matter because this genome will mutate and one day it will get the quotation right but the most important legacy what I think that phiman could give us is the courage to be a scientist to go where you believe you should go independent of what people say and be governed by nature and nothing else and so I want to leave you with fineman's the legacy of Fineman as Fineman himself would say it so here's richard fineman you see one thing is I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things but I'm not too sure of anything and the many things I don't know anything about such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here and what the question might mean I might think about a little bit if I can't figure it out then I go to something out but I don't have to know an answer I don't have to I don't feel frightened by not knowing things by being lost in a mysterious universe without having a purpose which is the way it really is as far as I can tell possibly it doesn't frighten me so that's the legacy that finally I want to leave and for my colleagues working on the Argosy the real lesson is don't be frightened thank you are there time for some questions yes thank you very much left ins sorry I meant to have a few more scientific flies in there but they weren't in anyway any questions about fineman's physics or his life from anybody yes the answers well you know there are a lot of parking stories about firemen and firemen like to create the myths of firemen there's no doubt about that I don't think everything I see I know about firemen however would not suggest that he would do that he he went to seminars because he was interested learning in fact I mean if you knew firemen the most amazing thing it was like Fermi these two physicists were the same in that room following when they showed an interest in what you were doing first of all all of their attention would be on you and there was nothing as flattering as having all of fineman's attention on you or Fermi's in that regard but he would go to every seminar and ask questions and in fact up very bearish who many of you know here in the book I have a few reminiscences from Barry said to me when he was a postdoc at at Berkeley he went down to Caltech for a job interview as you know he's now at Caltech and he was giving a seminar and he was and he was just so flattered that Fineman attended his seminar and asked questions they thought wow I must be really significant he left out and then he talked to someone about that and he said well Flyman attends every seminar and I think and I really don't think Flyman needed to show off at that level he was he asked questions because he cared about now the where I do think that story comes from is often when he was asked questions and answered them he as I say would often make it seem like he would the answers were coming out of nowhere there's no doubt that the answers came from careful preparation that had been done before I think that aspect defined was true he liked to give the appearance of being able to just come up with answers to questions with where in fact he'd really solved that many things so many things in detail that the answers he'd worked on every area physics and so it was easier for him to answer those kind of questions yeah did he ever wonder about Newton well what about neutrinos well of course I mean well the weak interaction was incredibly important if I'm in government theory the weak interaction was a vital importance in fact there was a case where he asked a question that wasn't his and very famous one during a presentation by yang I think or was Italy I can't remember in 1955 at the Rochester conference a good friend of ours whose main name escapes me for the moment maybe you were an experimentalist was rooming with Fineman and they were talking about parity and he asked him the question you know is this parity could have to be conserved and Fineman first it of course and then he started to think about it and realized that there was no necessarily he couldn't think of an experiment that would verify that parity was conserved in the weak interaction so Fineman actually asked the question of yang in at this talk this conference is does parity have figure but he actually attributed to the other fellow and Murray gell-mann later on said Flyman attributed the other fellow because he was too embarrassed to ask the question himself but I confirmed that indeed they did talk about it I went to speak to vote to the guy and he did say that in the room he talked about it and interesting enough yang gave a very deceptive answer for what it's worth because they Li and yang had already were thinking about that that himself and and phiman later sort of beat himself up and his sister who was a physicist by the way beat five men up a lot because she said you could have you could have you knew enough that if you were interested enough in actually reading the literature which Jaime never did you could have actually realized that parody was not conserved and and proposed experiment which is exactly and yang didn't and so she encouraged him to actually think about it it was later on when he had the when he had idea for two-component neutrino theory of the weak interaction and and and Gelman had the same idea that phiman actually got excited enough to write it up in fact the other famous story which some of you know of is that there was the only time I know we're finding wasn't generous Fryman often was more interested in getting things right than getting credit for them and there are many famous examples there's one very famous example in condensed matter physics of a phase transition involving two dimensions and and he actually derived a result and and discovered that some young people had done the same thing he never published the paper and he always said it's always better to be right I just rather know I got it right who cares about the credit but he was so excited about that theory since the first time I understand her nature works and I'm the first person and he wasn't the first person gell-mann had understood it in fact then there were actually a young graduate student at Rochester - understood it who never really got credit for it but phiman was so depressed by his other experience that he wrote up the paper and in fact he and young man were writing up competing papers when Thatcher was the chairman of the physical arm and said no you'll put them together and if you read the fine and gell-mann paper of the weak interaction it's a remarkable paper but it's a it's like a Bach ibaka Sonata I mean there's these they're these two different themes going on at the same time and you can see exactly what part is fineman's and what part is come and a gal man of course hated the part that was fine when finally didn't hate the part that was so much of a god man's because phiman liked to make a man mad by not but not by you know by poking him along anyway so hit so that very important paper was motivated by the fact that firemen thought you could write things as in a two-component formulation and he even said if Dirac had thought about it rate he would have done it that way and he was very fascinated so those neutrinos that really drove him to that a long answer and maybe long enough to end thank you you

Channel: Muon Ray

Views: 80,879

Rating: 4.8565736 out of 5

Keywords: Richard Feynman (Physicist), Lawrence Krauss, CERN, Lecture, Quantum Theory, Quantum Mechanics, Manhatten Project, Paul Dirac, Physics, Science, Books, Biography, Lawrence M. Krauss (Academic), Richard Feynman (Academic)

Id: ZnxNQuSxScU

Length: 65min 36sec (3936 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 10 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/l00pee]

Am I the only one that isn't a Krauss fan? Ever since I saw him interrupt Noam Chomsky multiple times, to the point Noam had to tell him to "let me finish" I lost respect for him. I love his origins talks that he hosts, but he is an annoying mc and should spend more time speaking less.