The Beat of a Different Drum: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

684 Pages·1994·39.51 MB·English

by  Jagdish Mehra

Ed Regis
London Review of Books
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The Beat of a Different Drum
Playing the bongo drums. (Courtesy: California Institute of Technology, Pasadena,
California.)
The Beat of a
Different Drum
The Life and Science of
Richard Feynman
JAGDISH MEHRA
CLARENDON PRESS : OXFORD
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
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© Jagdish Mehra, 1994
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First published 1994
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First issued in paperback (with corrections) 1996
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Mehra, Jagdish.
The beat of a different drum: the life and science of Richard
FeynmanjJagdish Mehra.
1. Feynman, Richard Phillips. 2. Physicists—United States—
Biography. I. Title.
QC16.F49M45 1994 530'.092—dc20 [B] 93-28295
ISBN 0 19 853948 7 (Hbk)
ISBN 0 19 851887 0 (Pbk)
Printed in the United States of America
To Marlis,
in love and friendship

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
N WRITING this book I have received assistance from many people who
knew about this or that aspect of Richard Feynman’s multifaceted life and
scientific work or had collaborated with him in some venture. It is impossible
for me to thank them all adequately for sharing with me their knowledge of
Feynman’s life, work, and personality, and what I can do here is no more than
record my gratitude to them. Although I had the opportunity of talking to a lot
of people on whose memories and impressions I have drawn, I alone am
responsible for the context in which I have made use of conversations and
interviews with them and the conclusions I have drawn.
More than anybody else, I owe my greatest debt of gratitude to Richard
Feynman himself for sowing the seed of this book in my mind and for many
extensive conversations and interviews I had with him in preparation for
writing this work. Among these conversations and interviews, the last ones I
had with him in January 1988, shortly before his death, were the most
important. Feynman cooperated with me in answering all the questions I
posed to him, and encouraged me in writing about his life and scientific work,
in particular about his unique and special way of contemplating arid thinking
about nature and the problems of physics. I had the good fortune of learning
directly from Feynman himself about the origin and execution of his various
scientific projects and the varied adventures of his life and thrills of the mind.
While I had the opportunity of talking to many people about various
aspects of Feynman’s life and work, it was with Feynman alone that I was able
to talk about all of them. With this general acknowledgement of my
indebtedness and gratitude to Feynman for opening up to me, I shall mention
in the following the names of people who have contributed to my knowledge
and understanding of his life and work treated in the different chapters of this
book.
For Chapters 1 and 2, dealing with Feynman’s childhood, upbringing, and
family life in Far Rockaway, New York, I learned most of the details from
Feynman himself, but numerous essential ingredients were filled in by Mrs
Adele Curott (née Rosenbaum), a distant cousin of Feynman’s, with whose
Vill Acknowledgements
family Feynman had close interactions in his early boyhood. Elmer Heller,
Harold Gast, David Leff, and Jessica Fleischmann (née Soffer), all of whom
attended Far Rockaway High School with Feynman, shared with me their
recollections of him, as did Abram Bader, Feynman’s physics teacher in the
last year of high school. I also learned a good deal about Feynman’s
relationship with Arline Greenbaum, whom he later married, during their
high school years from Elmer Heller and Harold Gast; Heller also shared with
me the letters and other details which Feynman had communicated to him
during his studies at MIT.
Theodore Welton attended MIT with Feynman and became his closest
friend there. Later on he worked in the Technical Computations Group in the
Theory Division, of which Feynman was the group leader, at the Manhattan
Project in Los Alamos during the war years. He kindly shared with me an
unpublished manuscript dealing with his memories of Richard Feynman, and
answered a number of my questions dealing with that period of Feynman’s life.
Feynman’s stay and studies at MIT are treated in Chapter 3, where the details
of Feynman’s senior thesis on “Forces and stresses in molecules’ are also given;
G. Ray Allcock of the University of Liverpool gave me a tutorial on
Feynman’s thesis and the so-called Hellman—Feynman theorem which
emerged from it.
John Archibald Wheeler and Eugene Wigner shared with me their
recollections of Richard Feynman as a graduate student at Princeton, a topic
which I have treated in Chapter 4. Feynman himself retained very vivid
memories of his graduate studies and the writing of his dissertation at
Princeton, during the course of which he encountered Herbert Jehle, a
physicist recently arrived from Europe.
In Chapters 5 and 6 have been treated the Wheeler-Feynman action-at-a-
distance theory of electrodynamics (on which I received a tutorial from Fritz
Rohrlich), and the principle of least action in quantum mechanics, respect-
ively. The principle of least action had become a focal point of much of
Feynman’s scientific work, and its roots went back to the last year of his high
school when he learned about it from his physics teacher Abram Bader. For
much of the background information on these topics I have greatly benefited,
apart from conversations with Feynman himself, from John Wheeler.
Almost all of my information about Arline Greenbaum and Feynman’s
marriage to her, her stay at the Deborah Hospital near Princeton, New Jersey,
and the clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she died, comes from
Richard Feynman himself. Certain details were furnished by Elmer Heller,
Feynman’s class and fraternity friend in high school. The touching memories
of Feynman about his relationship with Arline are treated in Chapter 7.
In Chapter 8, dealing with Feynman’s stay and work at Los Alamos during
the building of the atomic bomb, Feynman himself has been the best source of
information, especially his talk ‘Los Alamos from below’, which was
subsequently published. I also learned a great deal about Feynman’s work,
relationships, and adventures at Los Alamos from Hans Bethe, Frederick
Reines, Theodore Welton, and Robert R. Wilson. I also wish to acknowledge a