Genius by James Gleick Read Free Book Online Page A

day a boy said to Richard, “See that bird? What kind of bird is that?”
I said, “I haven’t the slightest idea what kind of bird it is.”
     He says, “It’s a brown-throated thrush. Your father doesn’t teach you anything!”
     But it was the opposite. He had already taught me: “See that bird?” he says. “It’s a Spencer’s warbler.” (I knew he didn’t know the real name.) “Well, in Italian, it’s a Chutto Lapittida . In Portuguese, it’s a Bom da Peida . In Chinese, it’s a Chung-long-tah , and in Japanese, it’s a Katano Tekeda . You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You’ll only know about humans in different places and what they call the bird. So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing —that’s what counts.”
    The second story also carried a moral about the difference between the name and the thing named. Richard asks his father why, when he pulls his red wagon forward, a ball rolls to the back.
“That,” he says, “nobody knows. The general principle is that things that are moving try to keep on moving, and things that are standing still tend to stand still, unless you push on them hard.” And he says, “This tendency is called inertia, but nobody knows why it’s true.” Now that’s a deep understanding.

    Deeper than Melville could have known: few scientists or educators recognized that even a complete Newtonian understanding of force and inertia leaves the why unanswered. The universe does not have to be that way. It is hard enough to explain inertia to a child; to recognize that the ball actually moves forward slightly with respect to the ground while moving backward sharply with respect to the wagon; to see the role of friction in transferring the force; to see that every body perseveres in its state of being at rest or of moving uniformly straight forward, except insofar as it is compelled to change its state by forces impressed upon it. It is hard enough to convey all that without adding an almost scholastically subtle lesson about the nature of explanation. Newton’s laws do explain why balls roll to the back of wagons, why baseballs travel in wind-bent parabolas, and even why crystals pick up radio waves, up to a point. Later Feynman became acutely conscious of the limits of such explanations. He agonized over the difficulty of truly explaining how a magnet picks up an iron bar or how the earth imparts the force called gravity to a projectile. The Feynman who developed an agnosticism about such concepts as inertia had a stranger physics in mind as well, the physics being born in Europe while father and son talked about wagons. Quantum mechanics imposed a new sort of doubt on science, and Feynman expressed that doubt often, in many different ways. Do not ask how it can be like that. That, nobody knows.
    Even when he was young, absorbing such wisdom, Feynman sometimes glimpsed the limits of his father’s understanding of science. As he was going to bed one night, he asked his father what algebra was.
    “It’s a way of doing problems that you can’t do in arithmetic,” his father said.
    “Like what?”
    “Like a house and a garage rents for $15,000. How much does the garage rent for?”

    Richard could see the trouble with that. And when he started high school, he came home upset by the apparent triviality of Algebra 1. He went into his sister’s room and asked, “Joanie, if 2 x is equal to 4 and x is an unknown number, can you tell me what x is?” Of course she could, and Richard wanted to know why he should have to learn anything so obvious in high school. The same year, he could see just as easily what x must be if 2 x was 32. The school quickly switched him into Algebra 2, taught by Miss Moore, a plump woman with an exquisite sense of discipline. Her class ran as a roundelay of problem solving, the students making a