Two by Feynman: Occasional pieces add up to an autobiography

 

Feynman explaining one of his diagrams, and a couple of helpful hints for his students

Richard P. Feynman. Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman? (1985) Feynman’s memoirs, recorded, assembled and edited by his student and friend Ralph Leighton.

Feynman is one of my heroes. Ever since I heard his anecdote about how his father showed him the difference between knowing words and knowing things, I’ve been hooked on his straightforward common sense. I don’t understand his contributions to quantum mechanics, because I can’t do the math of quantum mechanics. But I understand that his approach to making sense of the world works.

He was an intensely curious man. If he came across something he didn’t understand, he tried to figure it out. The puzzles that he loved most were about physics, but he also strove to make sense of art (he learned to draw, which trained his perception well enough that he could tell the difference between a Raphael and painting by one of Raphael’s students). He wanted to understand dreams, and how we can make images when we don’t have sensory stimuli to prompt perception (he died before fMRI scans provided the basis for an answer). He wanted to understand hallucinations, and spent several sessions in Dr Lilly’s sensory deprivation tanks.

He liked mastering gadgets, earning pocket money as a boy by fixing broken radios. He wanted to master drumming, so he practiced, practiced, practiced. He did the same with combination locks used on file cabinets at Los Alamos when he worked at the Manhattan Project, demonstrating how insecure they were, which eventually prompted the authorities to buy better safes. (He tells how a big-wig colonel who wanted the best safe for himself didn’t bother resetting the combination from the factory setting, thus proving well before computers that the greatest weakness in any security scheme is the human being). When he discovered something that mattered to him, he changed his behaviour: when he was still a young man he stopped drinking because he didn’t want to screw up his thinking machine.

He didn’t suffer fools gladly, especially when they came on stage with pompous claims to scientific rigour. His Caltech commencement address dissected “cargo cult science”, of which he found depressingly many examples in the social sciences. He didn’t like what receiving the Nobel Prize did to his reputation: he found his fame was used by many institutions to attract audiences. To have a Nobelist as a guest speaker reflected glory on the sponsor. Feynman hated that.

I’ve heard Feynman speak on recordings and in videos available on YouTube. Reading this book, I heard his voice again. A wonderful book by a wonderful human being. ****

Richard P. Feynman. “What Do You Care What Other People Think?” (1988) More memoirs, lectures, and anecdotes, as well as letters, sketches, and reports. Part 1 includes the title piece,  Feynman’s memoir of his first wife Arlene, who died of tuberculosis of the lymph glands. Part 2 is a dossier of his participation in the Challenger investigation. His key insight, that the rubber sealing rings in the booster joints could not adapt to cold temperatures, was prompted by his Pentagon minder, a General Kutyna, who was savvy in the ways of Washington, and so was able to give Feynman the hint that set him on the trail. The book also includes photographs, badly printed, but good enough to get an impressions of people and the occasion.

Two things stood out for me. First, that Feynman was a private man, who took great care in showing only what he wanted to show of his inner life. His love for his wives and his family nevertheless comes through, as do his essential playfulness, and his fierce love of the truth. Then there’s his integrity. He won’t fudge the truth as he sees it, nor will he pretend certainty where there is none. A remarkable man. ****

Update 2026-05-11: I've come across a video supposedly showing Feynman explaining why getting to Mars is impossible. It was generated using AI.  Th explanations are valid, but they're not quite in the style of Feynman. "Feynman" is shown in colour, but his facial expressions are limited, and he doesn't move around like Feynman actually did. Beware: there will be many more of these.

 

Judy Martin, textile artist.

OK, this is an excuse to post a photo of Judy Martin, a textile artist who lives on Manitoulin Island. See her latest blog entry here

She describes the inspiration for her work, and posts many, many photos of it. Enjoy!

The photo shows Judy at Four and Friends, Bruce Mines, July 2008.

Cicero didn't say this, but it's still worth a comment or two.

 

A statement allegedly (1) by Marcus Tullius Cicero (January 106 – 7 December 43 BC):

The Budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, the public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed, lest Rome will become bankrupt.
People must again learn to work instead of living on public assistance.

Cicero lived in an empire, which was rich enough to pay the costs of military occupation and administration of the (ever longer) supply chains that sustained Rome. Whoever put these words in his mouth thought as if Cicero lived in a subsistence economy, one that's barely able to meet the needs of its citizens. They were wrong. (2)

We live in an economy capable of even greater over-production than Rome. We make too much, but we still think about our economy as if we can't make enough (3). That causes a lot of stupid decisions, whose effects are now becoming clear: Too many people (4), too much production and consumption, too much exploitation of natural resources (5), etc, all of which are the causes of the climate crisis, the ecological crisis, and the many sociopolitical crises around the world. The only question left is which crisis will destroy our way of life first, and just how bad it will be. If we don't learn to think differently, we won't adapt fast enough to survive in anything remotely like our present way of life (6).

Having made such gloomy pronouncements, I still wish you a good day. :-)

Footnotes:
1. From https://checkyourfact.com/2019/08/19/fact-check-cicero-quote-budgeting-treasury-public-debt/
“The quote does not appear in any of Cicero’s surviving works. It actually comes from best-selling author Taylor Caldwell’s novel about ancient Rome.”

2. Any empire capable of maintaining itself for any length of time clearly was capable of producing far more than its citizens needed. Rome had about three times as many “statutory holidays” (several of them lasting two or more days) as we have, thus a much shorter working year. Even slaves got some time off on those holidays.

3. The USA spends over a trillion dollars per year on its armed forces and the wars they fight.

4. In my lifetime, the Earth’s human population has grown more than fourfold. 1940: about 2 billion.  2021: over 8 billion.

5. It’s likely that there won’t be enough food to feed all humans being sometime between 2025 and 2050.

6. Just how different will it be? Best case: Something like a medieval life-style for the survivors: small farms producing enough food to sustain the necessary artisans and traders in the settlement. Worst case: back to the stone age, with perhaps some of the survivors being able to scavenge useful materials like iron from the ruins.

Update 2021-09-23: Typos fixed, and a couple of clarifying edits.

Numbers (Andrew Hodges: One To Nine)

 Andrew Hodges. One to Nine (2007) Hodges takes each of the first ten natural numbers (including zero in the chapter about The Unloved One), and talks about their significance and meanings. It’s mostly about the math, but Hodges has a large store of cultural relevance to share as well. Again, much of that is about the math: It took a surprisingly long time moving from the practical use of negative numbers to denote debts in casting accounts to the acceptance of their places in mathematics. The same is true of complex numbers, which were still labelled “imaginary numbers” when I was in middle school.
     Hodges writes an easy style, which should give this book a wide audience. But his inclusion of real math and problems for the reader to solve will limit his audience to those with enough math background to understand his narrative, even if only vaguely. Luckily, I am one of those. I enjoyed the book, skipped almost all the problems, and followed the math far enough to get the flavour of that which was beyond me. A tasty treat. ***

     The cover shows a magic square. Rows, columns, and diagonals all sum to 15.

A wife goes missing, and DCI Barnaby must find her.

 

Caroline Graham. Faithful Unto Death (1996) A woman disappears, then a ransom note from her kidnappers demands 50,000 pounds. Her husband apparently suicides, but a couple of oddities attract DCI Tom Barnaby’s attention. Murder it is. And so a well-done police procedural proceeds.
   Graham’s Barnaby is a lot like DCI Wexford, but his sidekick DS Tory is nothing like Wexford’s DI Mike Burden. Like Rendell, Graham has a sharp eye for human frailties and self-delusion, but a much more acid tongue. I get the impression that she would have preferred to write a comedie humaine: the crime and its investigation are a pretext for character analysis and moral commentary. She has the gift of making every sentence and paragraph count: apparently throw-way asides add to ambience, sharpen context, clarify relationships, shift point of view. A good read. ***

What is Life? A comment on viruses.

There have been many definitions of “life”. I think the simplest definition of life is this one: Life a system that acquires the substances and energy needed to continue to exist and to reproduce. If it fails to do this, it ceases to exist. Any such system is an organism.

By that definition, a virus is alive. It’s the simplest form of life: a packet of genetic information that drifts about until it latches onto a cell that it can invade. It then uses the cell to acquire the substance and energy it needs in order to reproduce.

Since a virus needs another organism to survive and reproduce, it is a parasite. Most parasites either do not harm their hosts or provide some benefit. A few (mostly microbes) are necessary for their host’s well-being and even continued existence. A few parasites harm their hosts, and some kill their hosts. A parasite species will survive only if its hosts do not die out.

It’s likely that many viruses, like many microbes, are not merely beneficial but necessary for their hosts’ well being. We know enough about bacilli, for example, to know that without them, we humans would have trouble digesting much of our food. We don’t know that much about viruses. But we do know that some of them kill bacteria that are dangerous to us. We also know that viruses can transport bits of DNA between species, and that this sometimes results in beneficial changes to an organism’s genome.

What all this amounts to is that we are woefully ignorant of viruses’ roles in the web of life. The handful that bother us create the impression that we would be better off without them. That is certainly false. We just don’t know enough. Yet.

Footnote: Very early on, some programmers wrote small programs with a rather strange property: they would use the computer’s operating system to write copies of themselves into every available memory space. Rewriting these programs so that they would send copies of themselves to other computers was the next step. Thus the computer virus. Are any of them alive? Yes, any virus that can prevent the computer from shutting down, thus maintaining the energy it needs for continued existence. Are there such computer viruses? I don't know. But anything I can imagine, anyone with similar information can imagine. Therefore, someone has imagined such a virus. And when a programmer can imagine a program's functions, creating the program is just a matter of time and effort.

Covid Variant Mu

 Covid variant Mu: Some tangential thoughts.

The Guardian reports on a new “variant of interest”, labelled Mu

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/01/who-monitoring-new-coronavirus-variant-named-mu

Mu may turn out to be a problem if it is more transmissible than Alpha or Delta, and/or can evade immune system defenses better. It all depends on whether it makes people sicker and/or kills more people. So it could be bad. Hence the monitoring.

However,  if Mu turns out to be much more transmissible yet much milder in its effects than Alpha or Delta, it could be exactly what we want: A tolerable, flu-like version of covid. For higher transmissibility would enable it to outcompete the other variants. There would still be occasional epidemics of the more serious versions, as happens with the flu, but it’s likely that better treatments would blunt their effects.

In short, a highly transmissible but mild Mu could buy the time needed to develop good treatment and even better vaccines. Hope, or wishful thinking?