Genius of Character: 3 Ordinary Choices that Showed the Brilliance of Richard Feynman

National Geographic recently announced a second season to their docudrama series, Genius. Following Geoffrey Rush's portrayal of a violin-stroking Albert Einstein, this new season will explore the life and iconic art of Pablo Picasso. The producers are mining a rich vein. From temperamental visionaries like Steve Jobs and Friedrich Nietzsche, to the three current English screen adaptations of Sherlock Holmes, our culture has an insatiable interest in geniuses. Flamboyant geniuses, especially. The more unapproachable they are in intellect ­– part showman, part exotic life form – the more we are dazzled and gratified.

In the 20th century, no scientist filled this role with as much contagious delight as Nobel-Prize-winning physicist, Richard Feynman.

If one of the most famous names in physics unknown to you, it's unfortunate but understandable; his contributions to the field took place beyond the scope of the school curriculum. He doesn't represent a cultural achievement like Marie Curie, nor is he tied to a familiar theory like Darwin or Newton.

So despite his popular influence and high regard among scientists, Feynman remains a niche figure, left to inspire undergrads, lifestyle bloggers and the odd bongo reference on The Big Bang Theory.

Nobel Laureate Seeks Employment – Ideally with Dames or Detonators

He shouldn't be such a closely guarded public secret. His accomplishments read like the résumé of a Dos Equis spokesman:

• As a youth, astonishing neighbours with his ability to diagnose broken radios just by thinking about them, one of many cognitive exploits that sent him on a path to MIT and Princeton.
• Working in Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project as part of a hand-picked dream team of nuclear physicists, alongside Robert Oppenheimer, Niels Bohr and Hans Bethe, among others.
• Sharing a beautiful and heart-rending love story with his first wife, Arline, struck with terminal illness and leaving him widowed still a few years shy of his 30th birthday (dramatized in the 1996 film Infinity, starring Matthew Broderick and Patricia Arquette); later, dating air hostesses, sketching topless dancers and generally exerting his social magnetism wherever he travelled.
• Cracking safes for kicks on military bases, and rankling coworkers, waitresses and fraternity brothers with impish pranks.
• Epitomizing the beloved professor; channeling his enthusiasm and charm in delivering standing-room only lectures on subjects as diverse as quantum electrodynamics to why the rim of a coffee mug warms up or cools down.
• Playing the frigideira at Carnaval in a ragtag samba band; accompanying a ballet on his bongos, incognito; learning to draw in mid-life and attaining a one-man art exhibit under the alias, Ofey.
• Serving on a panel to investigate the cause the space shuttle Challenger disaster, then elegantly demonstrating what led to the explosion using only a piece of rubber, a C-clamp and a cup of ice water.

Even considering these achievements, perhaps what was most remarkable about Richard Phillips Feynman was his keen awareness of how his mind worked – and why it worked better than most. In matters of the mind, he was the rare genius who could retrace all the steps back from Ph.D. proficiency to layman confusion. He was intelligible. If his physics needed the interpretation of 24-year-old Freeman Dyson to earn him the Nobel Prize, his mental processes needed no such midwife.

That's why his memoirs are still widely read nearly 30 years after his death from cancer in 1988 at age 69. His brilliance in science combined with his clear ability to appreciate his own aptitudes is eye-opening, even when the physics extends beyond our understanding.

We soon learn – and he is candid on this topic – that part of his reputation came from clever tricks that gave him obvious delight. This began early: getting gradually faster at doing difficult homework problems until the last people who asked to copy assignments thought he was a prodigy; or, intercepting radio broadcasts before other neighbourhood children so he could later join them and play clairvoyant.

But showmanship simply accounts for the polish, not the marble. Feynman's outlier curiosity and a desire to play with life around him were greater contributors to his first-rate intellect. Instead of a birthright, his habits of mind were deliberately fostered. So over time, a string of uncommon choices, "deviations from the beaten track," compounded until they could be recognized as what Warren Buffett's biographer, Roger Lowenstein, described in his subject as "genius of character." Put another way: common sense practiced to uncommon levels.

Reading requires us to undergo the hours of concentration necessary for an idea to soak in thoroughly. For immersion in a concept like genius of character, few books are as rich in minerals as the memoirs of Richard Feynman. You finish each chapter believing that an extraordinary life is a process of gradual deviation, one which widens slowly by a series of simple choices. And each choice is within our power to perform – that is, if we are wise enough collect these habits of thought and pay careful attention for when they may be useful. (As philosopher Daniel Dennett mentions, "Acquiring tools and using them wisely are distinct skills.")

Feynman was criticized by a few contemporaries for being a generator of anecdotes. Nonetheless, we are beneficiaries of their entertaining lessons. Here are three such anecdotes that show the types of genius decisions that separated Richard Feynman from the ordinary citizen-scientist.

Messages from Beyond (Reason)

In a lesson he shared on multiple stages, Feynman told how he was typing away in his fraternity house at MIT when all of a sudden he had a clear feeling that his elderly grandmother had died. Immediately after, the phone rang.

"Hey, Pete! Telephone..."

It was for someone else. His grandmother, for all evidence, was still alive.

_______________________

Before skipping ahead, take a minute to think how you would act. You have been struck by a powerful premonition, more convincing than your usual hunches or worries. Your mind calls up story scraps about intercepted signals from other realms, or extra-sensory bonds between twins. Nothing to rule out for now.

After the false alarm phone call, I'm guessing most of us soon would be back typing our philosophy papers, perhaps a little spooked if anything. If later held to account about the event – and how likely would that be, really? – we probably would have already rationalized away the earlier strength of our certainty. It wasn't that strong a feeling. It was just innocent fun. And for a reflection that requires harsh humility, how would you reason if the call did announce your grandmother's passing (or aunt, or elderly person, or any other news about your grandmother)?

_______________________

What young Richard Feynman did next was simple and remarkable: he made a deliberate decision to commit the event to memory.

Why? For one, to be ready with a counterpoint when someone else had story about the reverse outcome – "what we have to do is to accumulate a large number of these [non-events] in order to fight the few cases when it could happen" – and he seemed untrusting that the storyteller would refrain from miraculous conclusions. For another reason, he was beginning to model the type of integrity that would become a cornerstone of his academic philosophy:

"If you've made up your mind to test a theory, or you want to explain some idea, you should always decide to publish it whichever way it comes out. If we only publish results of a certain kind, we can make the argument look good. We must publish both kinds of results."

Charles Darwin also appreciated why we need to celebrate with a hero's welcome the irritating evidence that threatens our flattering theories; if not, it soon slips out by the back door:

"I had, also, during many years, followed a golden rule, namely, that whenever a published fact, a new observation or thought came across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at once: for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory than favourable ones."

Have you felt the shame and personal sense of responsibility for jinxing a shutout or a no-hitter? After invoking the taboo word, whose first reaction is the time they said 'shutout' with 10 minutes left in a 2-0 game and their jinx did nothing?

Unless trained in scientific rigour, our default setting is to be like the man Cicero described in On the Nature of the Gods. To offer proof for the gods' existence, the man pointed to the pictures donated by grateful sailors whose prayers for rescue had been answered amidst fierce storms; these artful offerings were their debts fulfilled – and there were many!

But by honouring counter-evidence and acting ruthless towards our self-flattering theories, we, like Richard Feynman, can be more like Diagoras of Melos. He was wise enough to respond to his friend: But of course there are no tributes from those similarly imperiled sailors who made vows to the gods and then perished by the waves.

"...And You Are the Easiest Person to Fool"

Okay, what's so impressive about reflecting on a passing hunch? Not much if you can't translate it into better decision making. "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool." These exercises of mind are preparation for an unforeseeable yet inevitable event: when the urge to fool oneself is too tempting. For Feynman, the most extreme trial of his intellectual discipline would occur less than a decade later.

When his first wife Arline was initially diagnosed with tuberculosis, Feynman bought her a small flip clock. It stopped seven years later the minute she passed away on June 16, 1945. How do we know? The time on the clock matched the time on the death certificate. He had just endured a mad scramble from Los Alamos to Albuquerque that included three flat tires and a hitchhiking stint, but he made it to the hospital just in time to see his "D'Arline" off. (Read his heartbreaking letter to Arline written a year after her passing.)

Imagine the self-pity. At a time when anyone would have forgiven him for surrendering to the special significance of the stopped clock, he didn't take the bait. Instead, he stiffened his neck and headed in the opposite way of the sentimental explanation and towards the less flattering, mundane truths of his earlier observations. Truth be told, this clock was delicate and finicky; it had stopped several times before and had required his mechanical intervention to get it back up and working. Besides that, the nurse had jostled it in order to get a reading for the time of death. That might be enough to do the trick. And what callous soul was even watching the clock in the crucial moments?

Sometimes clocks just stop.

Shell Shuck

With Europe already fighting in the Second World War but the United States not yet pulled in, young men of enlistment age had plenty of reason to reflect on bravery – especially their own.

Richard Feynman measured his own stock of courage through a different means: by staring down a plate of shellfish.

At the Army Signal Corps office, he volunteered his talented mind for the war preparation efforts, but his offer was turned down. The army's counteroffer was boot camp. Not entirely persuaded, Feynman chose to play the waiting game and keep an eye on the situation in case things changed. So instead of enlisting, he found himself in an informal interview process with the cool scientists at Bell Labs of New York.

One afternoon, a couple of the guys took him out for a seafood lunch. For Feynman, who couldn't alone handle the sight of fish, oysters were understandably more repulsive. Yet possibly to win the favour of the oyster-loving scientists, he forced himself to try one. This turned into a personal referendum on courage: "I've gotta be brave. I've gotta eat an oyster."

His memoirs are not ambiguous: "It was absolutely terrible."

This is where most stories end, if they even begin. Having tested the exotic unknown, any of us would be forgiven for turning down seconds. We played along, stepped out of our comfort zone and suppressed our personal preferences for the sake of the tribe. Hell, we should feel pretty damn proud! Bravery established to allowable standards, we were now free to move on to shore up new virtues (like authenticity) by never eating something more-phlegm-than-fish again.

Annoyingly, the conclusions drawn from this lone mollusc were not enough to satisfy Feynman's standard of evidence. Where his mind travelled next was another deviation from the common napkin spitter.

"That doesn't really prove you're a man. You didn't know how terrible it would be. It was easy enough when it was uncertain."

Was it really that brave to try the unknown if there was a fair chance the outcome would be enjoyable (which with a group of enthusiastic diners seemed plausible)? Wouldn't it be braver to stare down certain disgust, yet proceed anyway? And wouldn't repeated bravery instill more confidence than a lone, possibly fluke outcome?

With the sulfuric flavour of Oyster Number One still testing his gag reflex…

With the outside chance his first tasting had been unrepresentative of the seafood delicacy...

...he reached for another oyster.

Admittedly, it was even tougher to swallow.

We don't know who else around the table might have suffered stoically, but Feynman ended up winning the summer placement. He had practiced safeguarding certain standards – not when it was easy, but when it was nauseating. Even better, this happened outside of the lab, suggesting the action was related to character instead of context. After all, why practice charity only at church, or listening only in the classroom? Nature, he would say, doesn't know of these distinctions.

Feynman's scepticism, especially when directed inwardly, was one of his defining traits. He was described as "...a researcher who will neither abandon the quest [for truth, amid a welter of uncertainty,] nor lose sight of his doubts." It's why for any serious thinker he is so valuable to study in depth. (See his 1974 Caltech commencement address, or his 1963 lecture series on doubt and uncertainty.) Whether questioning the seductive words of mind readers, politicians and government bureaucrats; or challenging the orthodoxy of school textbooks and graduate programs; he honours the scientific method because he knows firsthand the years of dues and ruthless discipline required in pursuit of truth.

Flipping the script, our final anecdote concerns the opposite predicament: depriving himself of something he very much wanted.

A Rio Dilemma

Starting in the early 1950s, Feynman began taking teaching sabbaticals from Cornell that brought him and his newly learned Portuguese skills to Rio de Janeiro. His days in the land of samba and Carnaval were ideally balanced. In the mornings he would lecture at the Brazilian Center for Research in Physics, and afterwards he could take full advantage of the bachelor lifestyle afforded him by a high-rise hotel room on the beach at Copacabana, a view of the ocean and a rotating cadre of Pan Am stewardesses just a short, "sheepish" trip down in the elevator.

He sensed a surprising boredom among these globe-hoppers. At first to satisfy social obligations, he began joining the pilots and stewardesses in the bar. Their nightly habit soon became his. Quickly this evolved into multiple drinks, many nights a week.

Then one day, mid-afternoon, he found himself passing a beachside bar: "I suddenly got this treMENdous, strong feeling: "That's just what I want; that'll fit just right. I'd just love to have a drink right now.""

But once through the doors, he experienced a different type of startle, one that would enforce some clarity. Surveying the scene, he found his impulse seemed out of place. It was still early in the day. There was no one else around. The whole joint was quiet, so the social argument for drinking didn't hold. He was the only one with this killer craving.

More concerning was the intensity of the craving. Where did that come from? And what would it do to him?

By autumn of 1955 he would suspect a link between peacetime boredom and drinking:

"In peace, man can develop best the enormous possibilities he seems to have. But maybe future men will find that peace, too, can be good and bad. Perhaps peaceful men will drink out of boredom. Then perhaps drink will become the great problem which seems to keep man from getting all he thinks he should out of his abilities."

As though aware of the value of goods he was gambling with, he became frightened to the point of action. He never had a drink through the remaining four decades of his life.

"Prescriptions for Guaranteed Misery"

While each decision we face comes with its own set of consequences, some choices are more foolish than others. Those especially to be avoided offer little in the way of upside, but at their worst have the ability to cancel out the achievements of even the greatest men and women. Note: avoid at all costs. Late-night host Johnny Carson recognized that drugs and alcohol belong in this category. In a graduation speech he gave to the Harvard School of Los Angeles, later expanded on by Berkshire vice chairman Charles Munger, he included it in his top three recommendations for guaranteed misery.

Munger explains the deceptive origins of an addiction spiral:

"While susceptibility varies, addiction can happen to any of us through a subtle process where the bonds of degradation are too light to be felt until they are too strong to be broken. And yet, I have yet to meet anyone, in over six decades of life, whose life was worsened by fear and avoidance of such a deceptive pathway to destruction."

Would a more chemically dependent Richard Feynman have been as sharp as one given to temperance? Would the extended hours in the bar, hangovers and reduced willpower have kept him from helping to crack the Dirac equation, or to become a proper family man? It's impossible to know with certainty.

Feynman's moment of shock in the empty bar gave his mind the distance and detachment it needed to extrapolate his life curve years into the future if he carried on with his social drinking. He also attributes this epiphany for why he later avoided psychedelic drugs despite his curiosity of their effects.

"I suppose I really wasn't in any danger, because I found it very easy to stop. But that strong feeling that I didn't understand frightened me. You see, I get such fun out of thinking that I don't want to destroy this most pleasant machine that makes life such a big kick."

Many instances of addiction are licked with minimal fanfare. Some are grown out of and some simply never materialize. (Feynman admits an initial string of losses likely dissuaded him from ever becoming a recreational gambler.) We're more likely to hear about recoveries that come on the heels of a wicked bender or one undignified incident too many. Sudden sobriety so rational and lasting – that stands out.

Ordinary Choices that Add Up

Genius of character is the gradual outcome of many simple, disciplined decisions taken at critical moments. Patience, rationality, kindness, ownership – like drops in a bucket, none is overly impressive on its own. The hitch is that the responsibility rests with us to recognize these turning points and single them out for significance. (Think about how trivial the frat house premonition and oyster-eating incidents would seem at the time.) Our model for good judgment can be the divine ruler who identifies the hero in rags, otherwise faceless among the dirty crowd. An active approach is critical since hindsight, by nature, arrives too late.

Richard Feynman's writings are dense with these instructive anecdotes. Reading his letters and autobiographical sketches leaves you temporarily smarter and more curious about life around you. But the duration of the effect can be lengthened, if one puts in the work. For the most part, Feynman's habits of mind are ones we can adopt as our own.

We might not have his speed at solving integrals, or the ability to lecture on quantum behaviour, but we can wonder on some of the same subjects he did voluntarily:

• Why does the stream narrow as water exits a garden hose?
• What's happening in your mind as you drift into sleep?
• Might the design of a locking mechanism hint at its solution?

These interests are democratic enough.

It's true that in his journey to distinction Feynman had advantages we can't all count on for ourselves. For instance, he had a father who put everything he taught his son into context, and who prioritized curiosity and understanding over rote knowledge. He had the chance to take his grad studies in the early stages when field-altering changes were upending Newtonian physics. And late in his years, he had privileged access needed for cracking the mystery behind the biggest American news event of 1986.

Were these unique advantages the cause of this celebrity? Unlikely. Again, we should ask to whom are we comparing these successes? Reconsider things from the viewpoint of Diagoras "the Atheist" of Melos: What about the thousands of other students with this same advantage of birth and parentage? Where are the bestseller memoirs and blog posts about those well-nurtured grad students who didn't become Nobel laureates and celebrated bon vivants? This population, we can be assured, is countless.

Consolations for the Unworthy

As we try to graft some of the character and curiosity from Richard Feynman into our own minds, we might at times feel overwhelmed or alone in our inadequacy. Don't be. Feynman admits his intellect was one-sided and limited, but highly focused in a particular direction.

Even philosopher kings need these reminders. Marcus Aurelius may have been among the wisest and most virtuous rulers of the western world, yet he had to spur himself to overcome the limits of his natural abilities:

"They cannot admire you for intellect. Granted – but there are many other qualities of which you cannot say, 'but that is not the way I am made.' So display those virtues which are wholly in your power – integrity, dignity, hard work, self-denial, contentment, frugality, kindness, independence, simplicity, discretion, magnanimity. Do you not see how many virtues you can already display without any excuse of lack of talent or aptitude? ... You could have got rid of all [excuses] long ago, and only be charged – if charge there is – with being rather slow and dull of comprehension. And yet even this can be worked on – unless you ignore or welcome your stupidity."

It might be impossible to cut out stupidity entirely – it insists on remaining nearby – but we can try to visit less often.

Recommended Reading

Why not start today? If you're left feeling more curious than before, chase that feeling through one of the five most accessible gateways to the mind of Professor Feynman:

• "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character
• "What Do You Care What Other People Think?": Further Adventures of a Curious Character
• The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist
• Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher
• Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track: The Letters of Richard P. Feynman

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