Feynman, pedagogy, and the two cultures

I’ve been reading lately about the Manhattan Project and related topics, a subject which I knew little about, and is completely fascinating, For example I learned that former major league catcher Moe Berg was sent by the OSS — the precursor of the CIA — to Switzerland near the end of World War II to assassinate Werner Heisenberg, should Berg, who was a polymath, conclude that Heisenberg was anywhere close to successfully leading the German atomic bomb project. This was originally conceptualized as a suicide mission — Berg was to shoot Heisenberg at a public lecture, and then swallow a cyanide pill rather than be captured — but shortly after the lecture Berg had a second opportunity to kill the great physicist, after a party that both attended, that would have allowed Berg to escape undetected. Berg decided, correctly it turned out, that the German bomb project was nowhere near completion (in fact it barely even got off the ground, another fascinating rabbit hole), so he didn’t carry out the assassination.

Anyway, Erik’s grave post about Richard Feynman yesterday inspires me to make a couple of points about pedagogy, scientism, and the humanities and social sciences. Feynman, who was in his mid-20s at the time, was the youngest group leader at Los Alamos, mainly because he seems to have been a true mathematical genius, which was an immensely valuable talent in that context (Feynman became a theoretical physicist rather than a mathematician because he was essentially practically minded, and found physics to be the best outlet for his mathematical gifts).

Andrew Gelman reminds me that he and a colleague formulated the concept of a Feynman story, in the context of discussing why certain great physicists are considered either charming or insufferable:

Feynman: Another guy who seemed pretty unlikable. Phil and I use the term “Feynman story” for any anecdote that someone tells that is structured so that the teller comes off as a genius and everyone else in the story comes off as an idiot. Again, lots of people, from Ulam to Freeman Dyson on down, seemed to think Feynman was a great guy. But I think it’s pretty clear that a lot of other people didn’t think he was so great. So Feynman seems like a standard case of a guy who was nice to some people and a jerk to others.

Einstein: Everyone seems to describe him as pretty remote, perhaps outside the whole “nice guy / jerk” spectrum entirely.

Gell-Mann (or, as we’d say in the U.S., “Gelman”): Nobody seemed to like him so much. He doesn’t actually come off as a bad guy in any way, just someone who, for whatever reason, isn’t so lovable.

Fermi, Bohr, Bethe: In contrast, everyone seemed to love these guys.

Hawking: What can you say about a guy with this kind of disability?

Oppenheimer: A tragic figure etc etc. I don’t think anyone called him likable.

Teller: Even less likable, apparently.

That’s about it. (Sorry, I’m not very well-read when it comes to physics gossip. I don’t know, for example, if any Nobel-Prize-winning physicists have tried to run down any of their colleagues in a parking lot.)

Paul Erdos is another one: He always seems to be described as charmingly eccentric, but from all the descriptions I’ve read, he sounds just horrible! Perhaps the key is to come into these interactions with appropriate expectations, then everything will be OK.

Feynman, as Erik notes, was extremely good at self-promotion, in ways that were often socially beneficial, since it allowed his genuine pedagogical gifts to become widely known, i..e, his famous lectures for undergraduates.

Here’s a more accessible story about Feynman’s pedagogy. When his daughter was in elementary school, Feynman was annoyed by how her science textbook taught her was friction was. Friction, the book explained, was the physical force that causes the rubber on the sole of your shoe to wear out over time. Feynman points out that this description is only teaching children a word — and one that is imbued with somewhat magical qualities. Instead, he argued, children should be told that with a microscope you can see that an apparently smooth sidewalk is actually made up of tiny little hooks that attach to tiny little irregularities in the sole of your shoe, which tear away tiny particles of the sole when you walk. That’s a real life concrete example of friction at work, as opposed to merely an abstract verbal concept.

This reminds me of the English physicist Rutherford’s dictum to his students that if they couldn’t explain a concept in physics to a barmaid, they didn’t truly understand it themselves.

The flip side of this is that Feynman, who had a true genius for mathematics, physics, and the pedagogy of the natural sciences, was basically an idiot when it came to other forms of learning. He could see no value in the humanities and social sciences, which is reflected by this:

In 1939, Feynman received a bachelor’s degree^[36] and was named a Putnam Fellow.^[37] He attained a perfect score on the graduate school entrance exams to Princeton University in physics—an unprecedented feat—and an outstanding score in mathematics, but did poorly on the history and English portions. 

Feynman couldn’t see the value of something like sociology because intellectually he was prone to extreme scientism — to the view that forms of knowledge that can’t be pursued exclusively via the methods of the natural sciences aren’t real knowledge. The ironic paradox here is that someone who has any grasp of the sociology of knowledge would immediately recognize that this idea — a very common one in our contemporary intellectual culture — is false, and in a very socially pernicious way, as can be seen in contemporary attempts to defund the humanities and social sciences.

But that’s a subject for another post, as are many other things related, directly or obliquely, to the Manhattan Project.