Chapter 1: What curious places did Richard Feynman explore in his final years?
Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner. We have been replaying our series on the physicist Richard Feynman. This is the third and final episode. I hope you've been enjoying it. We will be back next week with a brand new episode of Freakonomics Radio. As always, thanks for listening.
The Auguries of Innocence by William Blake. To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wildflower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour.
There's just times that I wish Feynman was here. Many, many times. I'm sorry, but this happens when I think of him, and I can't predict when it's going to happen. So give me a moment, because I'm not good at controlling the upwelling. It does happen, and I miss the man.
Ralph Layton is a retired school teacher who lives just north of Berkeley, California, with his wife, Phoebe. From their front porch, you can see the San Francisco skyline, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Pacific Ocean. When Layton was a teenager, he started hanging out with a man who had become a lifetime friend and inspiration, Richard Feynman.
Feynman and Ralph Layton's father both taught physics at Caltech, the California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena, California. But Ralph Layton and Richard Feynman didn't bond over physics. They bonded over their love of playing the bongos.
We would drum often at his place, but sometimes at my place. And then after that, you know, then he'd just talk. And then sometimes we'd drum again, and then he'd talk.
This talking is what Leighton helped turn into two books that made Feynman famous toward the end of his life. The first one was called Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, Adventures of a Curious Character.
If he would ever say, oh, did I ever tell you about the time I blah, blah, blah? I would always say, oh, no, I never heard it because I wanted to hear the story again.
The second book was called What Do You Care What Other People Think? Further Adventures of a Curious Character.
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Chapter 2: How did Ralph Layton and Feynman bond over music?
Was Feynman, a theoretical physicist and hardcore rationalist, also a hippie? Ralph Layton again.
I would say a hippie sympathizer for sure. We'd take walks and he'd purposely walk barefoot because he wanted to keep his feet street worthy. He liked informality. So he was definitely hippie-esque, hippie sympathizer very much.
So, Esalen just has the combination of being on the edge of the continent and also being on the edge of consciousness and, you know, open to infinities of other dimensions, you know, nature of reality, all these concepts. You open your mind and you see what's out there and what's possible, but trying to be careful not to fool yourself.
There's something going on with Feynman and the edge of the continent. I mean, he grew up on far Rockaway and he's got two beaches there. He's got the ocean side and he's got the lagoon side. And then you get to California, you know, you're staring into infinity. You know, you're at the edge. So I think Feynman liked being at the edge.
boundaries between land and water, the boundary between consciousness and unconsciousness, the boundary between understanding something and not quite understanding something. And I think he knew that you find out the most interesting things when you're poking around the edges.
All that poking around had proved fruitful for Richard Feynman. In 1965, he won a Nobel Prize for his work in quantum electrodynamics, which helped deepen our foundational understanding of how light and matter interact. Earlier in his career, he'd helped create the first nuclear weapons as part of the Manhattan Project. He'd even made contributions to biology.
His work intersected with the widespread embrace and application of scientific thinking over the course of the 20th century. But this also included a variety of practices that Feynman thought of as junk science, things like faith healing and mind reading, even some practices within psychology and psychiatry.
But Feynman also believed in challenging assumptions, even his own, with data, if possible, or at least intense observation. First, I started out by investigating various ideas of mysticism and mystic experiences, he wrote. I went into isolation tanks and got many hours of hallucinations. Then I went to Esalen, which is a hotbed of this kind of thought.
So Feynman began going to Esalen as something of a skeptic, but he had always been interested in just how flexible and versatile the human mind can be if you just let it. When he started going to Esalen, Feynman was already well known and he was asked to give lectures. So it was a warm welcome. As he later wrote, it's a wonderful place. You should go visit there.
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Chapter 3: How did Feynman contribute to the investigation of the Challenger disaster?
And he said that I would have been a very narrow, you know, computational kind of physics guy, but I knew her in high school, and she introduced me to art, to philosophy, to all the humanities. She opened up my heart. She was bright as could be. She was my peer. But knowing other things. He said that's what did it. And he deeply loved her. And then he told me, of course, a tragic story.
He said he met her when she was 16. She was shortly diagnosed with TB. They got married anyway. And he said, we grew up together. He said, now people have this idea that you have to grow up before you get married. But we got married and we grew up together. One thing that I will say about him is that he did not believe in an afterlife.
And when Arlene died and she would come to him in dreams, he would tell her, go away, go away. And another friend of ours who was there for the LSD time, she felt so sad that he felt that way. And Richard wrote me a letter afterwards saying he's so sorry that he made my friend cry because
because she felt so sad that he did not believe in any kind of ongoing spirituality or any kind of ongoing life with Arlene, even though she had left her body.
I think one reason that he enjoyed being with us is because we were psychological, and I don't mean clinical or analytical, but because we were insight-oriented. And I think that moved him, especially with regard to things like being able to talk about his grief with Arlene.
We went down to visit him just before his second surgery.
It was simply that he wasn't feeling well, so we thought, you know, bring them out to Mohammed.
In fact, we stopped along the way, and we cut fronds from the palm trees growing along the highway, for which the police stopped us, but we ended up being able to make off with the fronds.
I remember standing in the elevator, just keeping a really straight face while we're in this elevator full of people.
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Chapter 4: What unique experiences did Feynman have at the Esalen Institute?
If we said we're going to eliminate music and poetry and you'll get by on the train schedule, that's all you really need. It'd be a big loss. We wouldn't stand for it. And yet we tolerate not learning more about science in a way that's meaningful to us. We read headlines and the question is, is it a breakthrough that's going to end cancer or not? Don't bother me if you haven't got that.
I think we're going through a period where there's less trust placed in people who are experts at anything, not just science. There are a lot of us who seem to feel if you claim to know so much, you're setting yourself up as better than me. Rather than saying, let me hear what you have to say and see if I can learn from you, it's don't tell me what to do. I'm free to believe anything I want.
So what would Richard Feynman make of how science is practiced and communicated today? Yeah, I think that he would have wanted to have scientists speak out about things that they actually know about.
And, you know, his classic example, kind of an exemplar for so many people, was when he participated in the board that was investigating the Challenger disaster.
That is Charles C. Mann, a science historian who interviewed and wrote about Feynman. He did this publicly because he had immediately gone down and reduced it to, you know, what is going on? This thing gets cold, it breaks. And that was pretty much it for the whole thing. And there's an example of a scientist really being helpful on an issue of public policy and understanding.
And you find constantly pundits and political figures speaking in loud, confident voices about subjects which they know absolutely nothing about. And it kind of drives me crazy because I do have in my heart this example of Feynman, who is this enormously smart, inquisitive, knowledgeable guy who is exactly the opposite.
You know, contrast that to Feynman's insistence on the limitations of our knowledge. 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 absolutely sure of anything.
I don't feel frightened by not knowing things. by being lost in a mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn't frighten me. It's a strange feeling that nothing is fixed. I know that makes some people uncomfortable. It's like, no, give me the answer now. I want to know the formula. Give me the formula.
Well, if you can get the attitude that it's okay that things are not fixed and it's fun to discover new material, the world's more interesting than you thought.
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Chapter 5: What was Feynman's relationship with the concept of scientific inquiry?
I usually would teach math because that's where the demand is, but they let me teach a geography class. And so Feynman says, oh yeah, what do you know about geography? And I said, oh, I know every country in the world. I listen to the shortwave radio. I can tell you, oh yeah, you know every country in the world. Whatever happened to Tanutuva?
Now, to me, Tanutuva sounded a little too made up, and I almost was tempted to say to him, surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman. I was very skeptical, but we went to his Encyclopedia Britannica, which he loved and could recite for you the jacket categories, almost like a wrapper. And in the back was an atlas.
And there we saw the Tuva or Tuvinskaya Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, Tuva A.S.S.R., whose capital was K-Y-Z-Y-L, and that did it. As he said, any place that's got a capital spelled K-Y-Z-Y-L has just got to be interesting. And at the time, we had no idea how interesting it would be. The stamps were great. We wanted to know, can you still see scenes like on those stamps today?
And we had no idea about this throat singing that they did. Only when we got into our research, driving around Southern California and going to university libraries, we came across a book that said that in Tuva, they have a method of singing in which a single voice can produce two notes simultaneously. And we go, whoa. Little did we know that it was physics.
It was harmonics. They wanted to find out absolutely everything they could about this remote country in the middle of Asia. They even found a phrasebook that they could somehow write to get in touch with people in Tuva, and they did. Meanwhile, the whole problem was how could they get there? Typical of Feynman, he was...
offered the opportunity to go there, the Soviet Academy of Sciences said, look, we'll arrange for you to go to Tanyutuva if you'll agree to come and give some lectures in Moscow, physics lectures, which everybody obviously would want to hear. And Feynman refused to do this for two reasons.
One is he didn't want to, as he called it, cheat by using ways of getting to this place that ordinary people couldn't do. He didn't want to do it in what he saw as a cheating, privileged way just because he was famous and so on. And also he felt so strongly about human rights issues in Russia that he declined this idea of doing the lectures. Anyway, they kept trying to find out a way to go.
And the idea was we were all going to go together. And I think probably we would have made a film or something if we had. So it was when Ralph gave me the wake-up call and said, look, if we're ever going to do anything about Tuva... We must do it soon because Feynman's not going to live much longer.
So I went to LA and my wife and I shot this long interview with Feynman about Tuva on a home video camera. He could only manage about an hour at a time. He got so tired. When my wife Lottie and I were doing the video recording, one morning we turned up at Richard's house and he was still in bed.
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Chapter 6: What role did psychedelics play in Feynman's exploration of consciousness?
When I look back at the life of Richard Feynman, what I most admire him for are simply the things he stood for and what he stood against. He stood for the indelible power of curiosity. He stood for the need to work very hard to distinguish between truth and hunch.
And maybe because of what he learned from his father, the uniform salesman, he stood for ignoring the uniform, the epaulets, the titles. What mattered to him were first principles, not status. And what did Feynman stand against? He stood against people bowing to experts without reason. He stood against people positioning themselves as experts without justification.
His biggest fear may have been authoritarianism. An authoritarian represents everything Feynman disdained, and he has the power to stamp out everything Feynman loved. And what he loved most of all, I believe, is that every one of us is given the opportunity to try to understand the natural world and ourselves on a deep level, if we are so inclined. That was his thrill. That was his gift.
And for me, that's his legacy. I don't think I would have ever thought of starting a show like Freakonomics Radio more than a decade ago if it weren't for Richard Feynman. So for that, I thank him. And I thank you for listening.
On the day we visited the Esalen Institute with Ralph Layton and the Three Graces, we were pulling out of the parking lot at the end of the day when Ralph Layton came running after us, waving his phone. He wanted to send us one more recording.
This is Ralph Layton. I'm at Esalen on September 26th, 2023 with the Freakonomics radio crew. I'm out here at the edge of the world. And it makes me think of Richard Feynman being here, looking out on the ocean. And I'd like to read a poem that he wrote about that. He says, for instance, I stand at the seashore alone and start to think.
There are rushing waves, mountains of molecules, each minding its own business, trillions apart. yet forming white surf in unison. Ages on ages, before any eyes could see, year after year, thunderously pounding the shore as now. For whom? For what? On a dead planet with no life to entertain. Out of the cradle, onto dry land, Here it is, standing, atoms with consciousness, matter with curiosity.
Stands at the sea, wonders at wondering, I, a universe of atoms, an atom in the universe.
And thus concludes our series, The Curious, Brilliant, Vanishing Mr. Feynman. I hope you enjoyed it. Please spread the word about Freakonomics Radio. That's the single best way to support a podcast you like. One other thing to note, as part of this series, we released a bonus episode featuring our full interview with Debbie Harlow, Cheryl Haley, and Barbara Berg, the three graces.
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