CURIOUS AND COMIC
patience with bureaucracy, he flew across the
US, doing his own digging, and presented his answer on TV. Feynman dropped a ring-shaped rubber gasket into a glass of ice water to demonstrate that the material would not show resilience, much like the shuttle’s O-rings on that freezing day. NASA managers had ignored their engineers’ warnings to abort the launch due to the cold. His conclusion: “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.” American physicist and author Leonard Mlodinow, Feynman’s colleague in his final years, looks at his friendship with the physicist in his 2003 book, Feynman’s Rainbow. “He himself behaved much like an electron,” Mlodinow says.
At the California Institute of Technology, he was a regular at local strip clubs, seeing them as ideal places to clear his head as he worked out theories on napkins.
That he played the bongos is legendary. But Feynman played them well enough to accompany performers at a ballet. A few years after he’d developed his diagrams, he bartered physics coaching for art lessons with the artist Jirayr Zorthian. His work covered everything from portraits to sketches of strippers and female nudes.
During the Manhattan Project, he passed the time at the remote New Mexico facility by learning to crack open safes containing sensitive material about bomb building. They installed better locks but he just got smarter, leaving notes inside signed ‘Feynman the Safecracker’. He was eventually banned from entering several offices. After the war, he pursued his love for puzzles by becoming an expert on Mayan hieroglyphics.
He’s used probability theories to chat up women, he experimented with drugs, he was probably the only Nobel laureate to have gatecrashed a wedding reception. And on campus, he drove a van decorated in his famous diagrams, bearing vanity license plates that spelt QUANTUM. sodium ferrocyanide in the bathroom towels and an iron salt in the soap to give his mother blue hands from the ink they’d create when combined. She was horrified and screamed — but only about her good linen.
He taught himself trigonometry, analytic geometry and calculus, ultimately getting a perfect score in the maths and physics entrance exams at Princeton.
Life changed when his childhood sweetheart and wife Arline died of TB four years into their marriage, the same year the bomb Feynman helped develop was dropped on Japan. He says in Feynman’s Rainbow, “I didn’t get mad... Who was there to be mad at? I couldn’t get mad at God because I don’t believe in God. And you can’t get mad at bacteria, can you?”
Still, he lost focus, womanising and frequenting Vegas for the show girls. Then one day, in the university canteen, a plate thrown by a student at lunchtime clattered to the floor. Feynman observed that it rotated faster than it wobbled, making him wonder if the two motions were related. It broke the spell and got him thinking again. The story goes that when a reporter phoned him in the middle of the night to say he’d won the Nobel Prize, Feynman told him to call back at a decent hour, and hung up. The pleasure, he said, was not in awards but in finding things out and seeing that knowledge applied.
If scientists see Feynman as an uncommon mind, the rest of us see him as the scientist with the uncommon voice. In his pursuit of breakthroughs, he pushed for reforms in science education so it was about exploring ideas rather than learning definitions. “His insightfulness, I think came from being able to understand the ideas so well himself,” says Dighe.
For Dighe, the physicist has helped in remarkable and unexpected ways. “His investigation into the Challenger disaster made everyone realise that there were real-life applications to the complicated calculations that represent physics,” he says. “He also spoke about how learning the names of things, bird species for example, is not the same as understanding them. I’ve always used it as an excuse for not remembering names.”
Richard Feynman, physicist, safe-breaker, prankster, seducer of women, prize-winning linguist, artist, member of the Manhattan Project and of a Brazilian samba band, and winner of a Nobel Prize, made physics cool. Generations of nerds, starting with my own, have sworn by Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character (it was published in 1985, when I was in high school).
It is somewhat apt that the best book I have read on Feynman, whose centenary falls this month (he was born on May 11, 1918) is Feynman, a graphic novel by Jim Ottaviani (the writer, a former nuclear physicist himself) and Leland Myrick. Feynman made physics accessible, like few others before him (and few others after him) have. His lectures on physics and talks, still popular online, are a lesson on how to explain complex issues simply. The closest anyone has come to doing this is perhaps the Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli, whose Seven Brief Lessons on Physics is a must for anyone who wants to sound knowledgeable about physics without really being so. What better way to tell the story of the life and work of the legendary physicist then, than a graphic novel.
A graphic novel is just a comic book trying to sound all grown up. And as evident from its retelling of Feynman’s story, here is a man who never really grew up. I remember having an epiphany about the true nature of genius the first time I read Ottaviani and Myrick’s book (published by First Second) in 2011; that was at a time when I was still writing a weekly column on graphic novels for a newspaper.
Feynman is a straightforward retelling of the physicist’s life, including a brief (and