A Little Bit of Physics

Book Review

Some Time with Feynman (2003), London: Allen Lane

    Two of my favourite science writers are the late Richard Feynman and his one-time junior colleague Leonard Mlodinow. I discovered the books of the latter through reading the memoir of his academic and professional career spent with the genius professor and Nobel Laureate. This book is called simply Some Time With Feynman (Allen Lane, 2003). Dr Mlodinow was a member at that time of the faculty of the California Institute of Technology (the famous Cal Tech) before he moved on to Hollywood to become a writer for the acclaimed series Star Trek: The Next Generation. He is also the author of the book Euclid’s Window, a popular history of geometry and its role in physics. I hope to review this book in these pages sometime later.

Again one of the exciting things about the book reviewed here is the personality of Richard P. Feynman which shines through in its brilliance, humility, honesty, contrariness (at times), and sheer lack of sycophancy.  He is frank to the point of not sparing the truth which is so often harsh on its hearers (especially if they are truth-avoiders) and possesses a sheer sense of fun in both his professional and private lives. In this memoir, we meet the young Mlodinow who is obviously awe-struck as a neophyte faculty man having just earned his Ph. D. in physics from Berkeley. He simply worships the great and eccentric Feynman. He tells us that he learned much from the canny Professor – not alone about physics, science in general, but also about life itself. He tells us that from Feynman he “discovered a new approach to life.” (p. xiii) As a young student he had always found the Nobel Laureate's physics books “chatty” and “amusing.” (p.10)

Leonard Mlodinow was privileged to experience Feynman’s love of his subject and his sheer love of discovery which were always childlike (passim). Feynman’s approach to physics and to life impressed the young physicist because he had “seen too many adults work too many hours at jobs they did not like to amass things they only thought they needed, and then, decades later, regret their “wasted” years…” (p. 13) There is a lot of good common sense and not a little wisdom in this observation.

Mlodinow is excellent on the rivalry between the two great physicists Murray Gell-Mann and Richard P Feynman, both of whom showed a grudging respect for the other, but who followed different lines of enquiry in their chosen field of Theoretical Physics. I learned much from Mlodinow as regards Feynman’s philosophy of science and his general approach to life:

“Feynman used to say that there were two kinds of Physicists, the Babylonians and the Greeks. He was referring to the opposing philosophies of those ancient civilizations. The Babylonians made western civilization’s first great strides in understanding numbers and equations, and in geometry. Yet it was the later Greeks – in particular Thales, Pythagoras, and Euclid – whom we credit with inventing Mathematics. This is because the Babylonians cared only whether or not a method of calculation worked – that is, adequately described a real physical situation – and not whether it was exact, or fit (sic) into any greater logical system. Thales and his Greek followers, on the other hand, invented the idea of theorem and proof – and required that for a statement to be considered true, it had to be an exact logical consequence of a system of explicitly stated axioms or assumptions. To put it simply, the Babylonians focused on phenomena, the Greeks on the underlying order.” (pp. 24-25)

Feynman considered himself a Babylonian and Murray Gell-Mann a Greek. However, the "Greek" and the "Babylonian" while they were often at loggerheads in arguments, had a grudging respect for each other.

This memoir is great for anyone who,  like the present reviewer, has a passing interest in scientific matters, a more specific interest in philosophy qua philosophy, and a more general interest in what we might term the perennial philosophy of life itself and how one might better live it.  Within the pages of this short book, we get an insight into how physicists look at a theory of knowledge (or what philosophers call epistemology).  What follows are some random points concerning that issue that I noted as I read this short memoir.

1. Both share a humility of approach that is Socrates-like.  They first declare their ignorance and proceed from there to discover by experience or experiment what is new for them. From there, they attempt to see what general conclusions they can logically draw from that information. Classically, St Augustine called this a “docta ignorantia” or a “learned ignorance!” I’m not so sure either of these scientists would like to keep company with St Augustine, but I’m sure they’d be comfortable bedfellows with Socrates.

2. Mlodinow describes Feynman’s office and personality thus: “The blackboards were covered with mathematics – mostly with Feynman diagrams like those he had invented in his youth. There was a desk, a couch, a coffee table, and a couple of bookshelves. Nothing seemed opulent. Nothing indicated that he was one of the most famous and respected scientists of the twentieth century.” (Some Time With Feynman, p. 40)

    3. The fraught question of Positivism: Positivism refers to the world of cold observation. It goes back at least as far as Francis Bacon and the British Empiricist School of the 17th and 18th centuries – in other words, what we see concretely is what exists and nothing else – it’s the world of observable data. Thereby this movement sought to sideline theology and metaphysics as meaningless. However, Modern Physics is indeed interesting in this regard insofar as we’re not at all too sure as to the “real” existence of what we “observe.” That’s because we have gone ever and ever more deeply into the micro-world of the atom.

For example, the Nobel Laureate Murray Gell-Mann proposed the existence of “sub-nuclear particles” called “quarks” - a word he borrowed from our own James Joyce (Murray is a polymath and polyglot). Of course, no one has ever “seen” an electron, proton or neutron with the naked eye, much less a “quark” which is even smaller again and a constituent sub-entity within the protons and neutrons. We conclude they are there because of other pieces of evidence we “see” through electron microscopes and other such devices beyond my knowledge. Then, of course, we have the quandary which is, for the most part, insuperable, that is, that we change what we observe by the very act of observing it – our modern equipment displaces a lot of what it seeks to observe – so we cannot “really” observe it in “actuality” or “in the raw” as it were. 

Then we have Heisenberg's great "Uncertainty Principle" which is apropos here. (The uncertainty principle is one of the most famous ideas in physics. It tells us that there is a “fuzziness” in nature, a fundamental limit to what we can know about the behaviour of quantum particles and, therefore, the smallest scales of nature. Of these scales, the most we can hope for is to calculate probabilities for where things are and how they will behave. Unlike Isaac Newton's clockwork universe, where everything follows clear-cut laws on how to move and prediction is easy if you know the starting conditions, the uncertainty principle enshrines a level of fuzziness into quantum theory.)  Therefore, positivism has to be transcended as we move into spheres of ever more sophisticated abstractions. It’s almost as if metaphysics is getting its own back by forcing us to theorize and philosophize what can’t be truly observed. Does something exist if we cannot observe it? Modern physics would suggest that such is the case.  Anyway, this is all my thinking into and expatiation on what Mlodinov tells us in this well-written memoir.

4. There is a need for two approaches to science according to Mlodinow and Feynman namely the Greek Method (Method of tight theorem and proof based on accepted axioms) and the Babylonian Method (Pragmatic approach: something is true if it works in all possible situations, when it adequately describes a real situation or problem). Modern science needs both approaches.

5. “A lot of discoveries are like that, new ways of looking at old things, or old concepts… So I guess I learned something about the psychology of discovery.” (Feynman quoted by Mlodinow, p. 38) Here Feynman has a lot in common with the “Lateral Thinking” approach advocated by Edward de Bono.

6. “The scientist analyzes something like a detective does… We are trying to figure out what nature is like from the clues given by experiments. We have the clues and we try to figure it out…” (Feynman, quoted by M., p. 42)

7. Here is Feynman on the physicist’s approach to thinking: “A scientist’s work is normal activities of humans carried out to a fault, in a much-exaggerated form. Ordinary people don’t do it as often, or, as I do, think about the same problem every day… Scientists, therefore, do something with an intensity that is out of the ordinary.” (Feynman quoted by M., pp. 43-44)

8. For both Feynman and Mlodinow, science is a love affair and the mistress is the problem that they are currently working on (passim). Passion and obsession are two other words that both use frequently in their pursuit of science.

9. Feynman was a total non-conformist in every way – surely a quality of a very original thinker. In other words, such men and women are very courageous as they have to “plough their own lonely furrow.” That takes courage indeed!

10. Both are/were persistent in their research/work. They did not give up! One could also call this being stubborn or even obsessive.

11. It is most important that a scientist finds the right problem for him or her to work on!

12. They both took/take great leaps of imagination, i.e., they think/thought outside the box!

13. You need to be able to believe in yourself, to follow your intuition with conviction and self-belief!

Demythologizing and Demystifying

These are two words that have long appealed to me. Some people, especially experts in their own fields, often like to baffle and befuddle others; to weave myths and spells in an attempt to convince others how much they, the experts, know and consequently how little we “the uninitiated” or “the unwashed” ignorant masses really know. I remember in UCD many years ago a certain “learned” mathematician, a professor no less, who shall remain anonymous, sought constantly to baffle, befuddle, befog, confound and mystify his hearers. He was teaching us complex analysis or fundamental analysis which is the foundational theoretical base of calculus. I remember absolutely nothing of his course except how stupid I felt myself to be. I could not understand how I had managed to get through the first two years of my degree course in maths without considerable effort (though I had to work very hard at mathematics as I was not necessarily a natural mathematician but I had managed to achieve honours at higher level in my Leaving Cert.) and now with this particular man, I was confused, confounded, baffled, befuddled and mystified. Then one day, a good friend who was studying both Irish and Maths with me, one Lorcán Breatnach, informed me that Professor X was a deliberate “mystifier.” I have since become adept at identifying this not-so-rare species.

One of the rewards of reading such a book as Some Time with Feynman is that it demystifies and demythologises the area of Theoretical Physics. We soon realise that we are all ordinary mortals and no one of us has privileged access to the truth or truths. As readers of these pages will attest, I prefer the plural to the overused and much-abused singular use of the term “truth.”

Dr Leonard Mlodinow, neophyte member of the Faculty of Physics at Cal Tech also learns the above outlined lesson. Let us listen to his words here as they are timely as regards how we look upon knowledge and especially the “privileged” possessors of that knowledge: 

People picture scientists in white coats. Physicists, at least, don’t wear them, but in a way, I subscribed to the same basic misconception: that scientists were somehow different from other people. I read about their theories in the tight logical development that comes only long after the fact. I knew nothing of their insecurities, their false starts, their confusion, their days in bed with bellyache. Even as a graduate student I never got to know any faculty members as people … everyone is just stumbling through the fog…” (p.45)

I love this last metaphor for our search for truths in whatever shape or form we find them. We are all truly stumbling around in a fog attempting to find our way. Well done, Dr Mlodinow – or Tim Quinlan - or whoever we are - welcome to the human race – poor fallible puny beings are we who set ourselves upon a pedestal, if not of divine power, certainly of scientific knowledge. After all, knowledge is probably the real power in the world, or rather the real avenue to exercising it, at any rate.  In a way the whole gamut of enterprises – I refer here to the whole gamut of subjects taught in all the universities on our little planet - to find these so-called “truths” is a compendium of games engaged in by human beings to make a better life for themselves and their kith and kin and in the final analysis to pass the time well and in so doing have a little fun without harming life in any of its myriad forms. We must seek to make our jobs our passion if at all possible. As Feynman remarked to the young Mlodinow about science as a career, “Remember, it’s supposed to be fun!” (p. 119) In other words, there’s never any room for “mythologizers” and “mystifiers,” for those who seek constantly to baffle, befuddle, befog, confound and mystify rather than enlighten, inform, clarify and point out all the possible ways of solving this or that problem on the human journey through life. In short, if you stumble across this book in your local bookshop buy it and you will have an intellectually rewarding and personally enriching read.