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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Back when I was in school, I took an organic chemistry class, and my professor for that class was named Richard Feynman. He started on day one by telling us that he was not the Richard Feynman, that his name was spelled differently, and there was another difference, he had no Nobel Prizes to his name. Well, I had never heard of the Richard Feynman, whoever he was. I gathered from a chemistry professor that the Richard Feynman was a physicist and had a Nobel Prize. I thought, "Okay, fine," but I never thought about him much since.

Until in the last couple of weeks, two things happened. One, I finally saw the movie Oppenheimer, and Richard Feynman was portrayed in the film because he worked on developing the atomic bomb with Oppenheimer at Los Alamos. Two, our friend Stephen Dubner, host of Freakonomics Radio, popped up to see if I wanted him to come on the show to discuss his latest Freakonomics series about Richard Fineman. Now, Dubner usually explores the relationship between our ordinary lives and economics. Our behavioral psychology around money, you might say. Why has he been doing his podcast lately on a physicist who died more than 35 years ago?

The answer very simply put is that the Richard Feinman wasn't just a scientist but also a voraciously curious human being who was very into puzzles and drumming and lots of other things and also taught sometimes at the Esalen Institute in California where people explore different kinds of consciousness and humanistic psychology. The bottom line, Dubner is very, very into him. I thought between Stephen Dubner and the Richard Feynman, how could this not be interesting? Hi, Stephen, always good to have you. Welcome back to the non-Freakonomics part of WNYC.

Stephen Dubner: Hi, Brian. Thank you so much for having me.

Brian Lehrer: We even have so sound bites of the Richard Feynman, which we'll get to. Assuming most of the listeners know as little as I did about the Richard Feynman, maybe we should start with his basic claim to fame, like what he won the Nobel Prize for. Can you do that?

Stephen Dubner: Sure. First of all, the fact that even you didn't really know much about Feynman at this late date was the animating reason for the series. Feynman, I guess the major events of his life in the public sphere were, as you mentioned, working on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos. He was one of the youngest people there, already proved quite valuable. Toward the end of his life, he really made a splash by serving as a hostile participant on a presidential commission exploring the Challenger space shuttle disaster.

He was the one who wanted to find out what really happened instead of producing a whitewashing, pat NASA on the back, and say, "Nice try fellows. Let's get it right next time inquiry." Which is where it was headed. In the middle, earlier on, he won a Nobel Prize for his working quantum electrodynamics. Look, I don't know an awful lot about theoretical physics either. Most of us don't.

What Feynman did though was approach physics in a way that I think all of us can identify with, which is to say, as a kid growing up in Far Rockaway, Queens, on the edge of the earth where ocean meets land and where a lot of things meet each other, he was transfixed by nature in every form, light, sound, ocean, water, solids, gases, et cetera, et cetera. He had a father who was not a scientist but was a wonderful teacher.

His father happened to be a uniform salesman and taught him one of the most important lessons early in his life, which is when you see a person in a uniform, don't assume they're extra special or smart, they just happen to be in a position of authority. Feynman was a wildly curious and smart and playful and weird human who also happened to be one of the best physicists who ever lived and so won this Nobel Prize.

People who really know physics, and we spoke with a lot of them for this series, say that if the Nobel Committee was in the habit of awarding multiple prizes, which they've only done a handful of times in history. Feynman did work, he could have won three or four or five Nobel prizes. He was a remarkable scientist. What really got me wanting to do a series about him was the fact that, if you had to boil it down, he had courage.

He thought for himself. He hated when people would pretend to know more than they did about anything. He knew, as a scientist, how hard it is to prove even a small thing true. When people spoke about large things, which of course we hear all the time now in our politics and our institutions, that back up, work hard, learn something small that's true, and then take it from there. To me, he's a role model, and he's someone who most of us don't know about or certainly think about much anymore. I wanted to bring him back.

Brian Lehrer: In one of your episodes, you just list some of his varied interests, which you say include bubbles, rainbows, ocean waves, brainwaves, consciousness, things as small as atoms and as big as the universe, the behavior of ants and playing the bongos. Now, Stephen, given that list, I would say, I thought of which one does not belong.

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Brian Lehrer: Do the bongos fit in in a certain way with a scientific interest, or is it just a random thing, anybody might be into music, and he was into music?

Stephen Dubner: That's a really good question. I would say some of both. He lived a life, I would say, of joy or attempting to find joy. As I mentioned, he was really playful. Now, his life was marked by a lot of sadness and tragedy. The Manhattan Project, as we all know, especially if people have seen Oppenheimer lately, it was this amazingly complex project coupled by the fact that at the end when the success was found, all of a sudden the original intention of all these scientists, many of whom, let's not forget, were refugees from Nazi Germany and elsewhere, many of whom were Jewish, and then Feynman, who was Jewish as well.

Their whole intention was to build a bomb to combat the German bomb effort under Werner Heisenberg. Now, all of a sudden, [chuckles] Germany had surrendered, and the bomb gets dropped two of them on Japan. This left Feynman and many others in a existential funk for a variety of reasons. The biggest one really being that he believed that once nuclear weapons existed, that humankind was done. He looked at how humans behaved, how ignorant we can be, how stubborn we can be, how we fight, and he thought, "There's no way we're not going to obliterate each other."

Plus, which he was married young, his childhood or high school sweetheart, they were very, very, very, very close. They were very much in love. She helped him grow a lot in ways outside of science. She got tuberculosis and died while he was at Los Alamo. She was in a sanitarium near there that Robert Oppenheimer actually found for her to move out there for. He thought life was over. He spent a few years after the war at Cornell, not very happily.

Then he moved to California, and in California, he had a new life. He started over, hit reset. California agreed with him. From then on, he decided, "I am going to live a life of pursuing joy, pursuing science, which for him was joy," and being deeply, deeply true to himself. That's what he did. That's why I really feel he was a model.

Brian Lehrer: We'll get to the California portion of his life in a minute. Listeners, if you're just joining us, my guest maybe you recognize the voice, Stephen Dubner host of Freakonomics Radio. He just finished a three-part series on the late physicist, Nobel Prize winner, Richard Feynman. In the movie Oppenheimer, the Feynman character played by Jack Quaid has a pretty minor role, though we do actually see him playing the bongos.

Stephen Dubner: That's true.

Brian Lehrer: Including, I think, very poignantly right after the successful atomic bomb test there on screen, is this guy playing the drums. It was eerie, and I didn't even register it really as Feynman. It just came and went on the screen until I started listening to your series. Tell us more about what Richard Feynman's role at Los Alamos was.

Stephen Dubner: Feynman was-- Let's see, I'll back up a little bit. Grew up Far Rockaway, Queens that I mentioned. Very brilliant, very experimental. He was always blowing up things and fixing things. When he was a kid, he had a service fixing radios for people in the neighborhood. Went to college at-- Where the heck did he go? [chuckles] This series is a couple of weeks out of my mind. Did he go to MIT? I guess he went to MIT undergrad, fought about staying there for PhD, but then he went to physics instead. Being Jewish certainly had something to say with where he went.

He wanted to go to Columbia, wanted to stay in New York City, but the Jewish quote at Columbia was too strong for him. MIT Princeton, then at Princeton, everywhere he went, he establishes himself as not just one of the smartest people around but smart in a different way, smart in a clever way, smart in a way that he didn't really give a darn what other people thought of the way that he approached a problem. He loved, as you said, solving problems, solving puzzles and so on. At Princeton, even as a grad student, he got a reputation for being not just clever and playful, et cetera, but very, very brilliant and a great computer.

He was fantastic at computational tasks of all kinds. In the days before computer computers, this was very valuable. He was brought out to Los Amos to describe what he did on the bomb. It's easy to overstate it. What I will say is that in the beginning, when he was this young person that was recruited to come out as a bright mind, in the beginning, what he would do is often, and I think this may have been presented in Oppenheimer a bit, I can't recall.

He was often the guy who would sit in the back of the room when these senior physicists from all over the world, this dream team, were coming up with ideas for how to move this project forward. Feynman, from the back of the room, would be, this guy would say, "Ah, that's a lousy idea. It'll never work." He could sound like a crank, and he could be arrogant.

As it turns out, the elder statesman, including Oppenheimer and Hans Bethe and Enrico Fermi, et cetera, realized that this guy actually knew what he was talking about, and so they began to loop him in more and more. He essentially headed up a big part of the computational project, which went into determining, look, I'm not going to pretend to be a nuclear physicist or to know anything about actually building an atomic bomb, but he turned out to be a key part of the team in that regard.

Brian Lehrer: Listener writes, "Please don't forget Feynman's sense of humor and how he kept his students in stitches." Another one on the bongos writes, "Music is math. It fits perfectly with science, especially physics." Here's a clip from your podcast of Richard Feynman in real life, not an actor playing him, basically praising Oppenheimer for the way he ran things at Los Alamos.

?Speaker 1: They were very democratic. It wasn't the hierarchy of where you had to know your place. Your point was everybody's place was to say anything they wanted to anybody else.

Richard Feynman: I never knew who I was talking to. I would always worry about the physics. If the idea looked lousy, I said it looked lousy. If it looked good, I said it looked good. A simple proposition. I've always lived that way. It's nice, it's pleasant if you can do it. I'm lucky. I'm lucky in my life that I can do that.

Brian Lehrer: Can you talk about that clip, Stephen? Whatever we think of the invention of the atomic bomb or how the US used it, democratic versus undemocratic is probably not the scale we measure scientific research on. At least I didn't think so.

Stephen Dubner: Oh, that's interesting you don't think so? I do. I do think that science is meant to be very democratic in that the best ideas win. I will say this, that is not a very popular notion anymore. I will say there are downsides. I've spent a lot of time not in physics seminars but in economic seminars. My friend Steve Levitt is an economist at the University of Chicago. He's my co-author on the Freakonomics books.

I spent a lot of time over the first 5 or 10 years of working with Levitt in these seminars where if you would come in, especially as a young presenting, maybe a newly minted Ph.D. talking about your job market paper, you would give this paper and then be torn to shreds by the elders in that room who did not care about reputation, didn't care about how cute something was. All they wanted to know is, did it work?

In that regard, Feynman very much fit in. I think as he got older and more senior and more acclaimed, he was very egalitarian. He loved teaching, but he also liked to win. He liked to win in arguments. There's a piece in our series with, I believe it's Steven Wolfram, the computational scientist, talking about how when he was a student at Caltech, where Feynman taught for 30-some years, they would have these workshops and bring in visiting scholars.

He said that Feynman would come up to him and say, "Hey, Wolfram let's you and I compete to see who can find the fatal flaw in this person's presentation first." It could be cruel, but according to Feynman and according to a lot of scientists, including a lot of physicists and economists, if you want to call them scientists, Feynman would not, Feynman had very little patience for the social sciences I have to say.

He thought it was not empirical at all. He might've liked economics a little bit more than psychology and so on. He really believed that an idea was only as good as the proof that would follow it. His main argument throughout his life was, it's really hard to truly know when X causes Y, or if something else is causing Y, or if X causes something else. His big thing was, and this is something his father taught him, he said, "The world is full of people who know the name of something. They know how to talk about it, and they fool themselves into thinking they actually understand the thing." He said, "That is a fatal mistake. It's a fatal lack of critical thinking."

Again, this goes back to why I wanted to make this series. I feel, Brian, that we are living in an era where critical thinking doesn't really have prominence right now. I think we all fall prey to the fast and the noisy and the quippy and the angry. I wish there were more people like Feynman who could serve as, let's call it public intellectuals. Now, Feynman would hate to be called that because he didn't think of himself as an intellectual. He didn't really like engaging with the public. I think this goes back to what I mentioned earlier, courage to work really hard to understand what's true and what's not true, and then have the courage to talk about that is valuable.

Brian Lehrer: To that point, we'll play one more soundbite from your series. We might call this moment, Mr. Feynman goes to the hardware store. This is after the Challenger disaster, the explosion in the '80s of one of the space shuttles that had what was supposed to be the first teacher in space. Christa McAuliffe on board, horrible tragedy. He's on the commission to figure out what really happened.

He buys a couple of tools to demonstrate in a very dry way how these parts called O-rings probably did not work as they were supposed to because it was too cold that day for the material they were made of. Maybe they shouldn't have launched the thing in that cold weather and known that. Listen to this clip, not just for the content but for Feynman's tone of voice.

Richard Feynman: Oh, I took this stuff that I got out of your seal, and I put it in ice water. I discovered that when you put some pressure on it for a while and then undo it, it doesn't stretch back, it stays the same dimension. In other words, for a few seconds at least and more seconds than that, there's no resilience in this particular material when it's at a temperature of 32 degrees. I believe that has some significance for our problem.

Brian Lehrer: You comment in the podcast on the tone of that moment and those particular words at the end, I believe this has some significance for our problem. Why was that?

Stephen Dubner: I think my favorite thing about Feynman is that A, he understood how hard it is to truly know anything. You hear how he wasn't triumphant in his proclamation there. He didn't say, "You knew the O-rings could be faulty. You did this and you did that." I believe this has some significance for our problem. He's really good at leading people to understand the truth for themselves. Even more than that, when there was uncertainty, he was not scared of uncertainty. He was really happy to live in that-- He came into this world like we all do, knowing almost nothing, having a relatively short time trying to figure out as much as we can.

The natural world is overwhelmingly complex and interesting and fascinating. He felt that we would always be in a state of uncertainty about the vast majority of things, and it's a crime to pretend that that's not the case. When you can learn a small thing and say it to be true, do that with courage and otherwise have a little humility and put your nose to the grindstone and try to find out as much as you can.

Brian Lehrer: He issued the stinging descent to the Challenger report, which he thought was a political whitewash to save NASA's image. Listener writes, "Do you discuss his attitudes and behavior toward women in the series, including students and colleagues?" There were protests of him, right?

Stephen Dubner: Yes. We do discuss that. He had a troublesome history, especially earlier in his life. His daughter Michelle Feynman, who's now, I guess probably mid-50s, she likes to make the argument that we're all deeply flawed as humans and that he did a lot of things that he wasn't proud of. She makes the argument that most of that was in the earlier part of his life when he was in this period of, like I mentioned, existential depression, being widowed and so on. Not that that excuses anything.

The weird part about it, however, is that he also bragged about his experiences with women in these books he wrote. Then some other advocates have argued that, well, maybe he exaggerated for the sake of sounding more worldly than he actually was. The fact is, and we have a variety of people addressing this in this series, we have Lisa Randall, a physicist from Harvard, Charles Mann, that he was an old-fashioned sexist in some ways. In other ways, he treated a variety of people, including many women, extremely well and was a great teacher. It's a complicated personal history. We do try to acknowledge and go through all that in the series, yes.

Brian Lehrer: Stephen Dubner, host of Freakonomics Radio, which we air Sunday nights at eight o'clock here on the station. He will also be appearing in person this afternoon at one o'clock at the event called the On Air Fest at the Wife Hotel 80 Wythe Avenue in Williamsburg. For any listeners who got so lit up by this conversation that you want to go see more right away, one o'clock this afternoon, do you want to just take our last 30 seconds and plug that? What can they expect at the Wythe?

Stephen Dubner: I don't know. I'm being interviewed about, I believe the state of podcasting. Freakonomics Radio, which began in the very rooms where I'm sitting right now, at WNYC 14 years ago. Yes, podcasting is ebbed and flowed, and I'm going to do it until I'm dead. Because to me, it's a fantastic art form, and it lets me do things like a series on Richard Feynman. What am I going to complain about, right?

Brian Lehrer: Right. One of the Feynman episodes, I should say, is going to air in our Sunday night, eight o'clock airing on the radio of your podcast. Stephen Dubner, always great to talk. Thank you very much.

Stephen Dubner: You too, Brian. Thanks a million.

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