← Freakonomics Radio
Freakonomics Radio
The Curious Mr. Feynman (Update)
01:03:18
From the Manhattan Project to the Challenger investigation, the physicist Richard Feynman loved to shoot down what he called “lousy ideas.” Today, the world is awash in lousy ideas — so maybe it’s time to get some more Feynman in our lives? (Part one of a three-part series originally published in 2024.)
Loading summary
Transcript123 lines
- [00:00]
Stephen Dubner
Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by LinkedIn ads. Ever invested in something that didn't live up to the hype? Marketers know that feeling. They optimize for the numbers that look great like impressions, but then they don't see revenue. LinkedIn has a word for bullspend. Instead. You can get the highest ROAS of major ad networks with LinkedIn. Cut the bullspend, advertise on LinkedIn, spend $250 and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com freakonomics and terms apply. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by talkaboutpd.com let's talk about Peyronie's disease, or PD. It's not widely talked about and some men may feel reluctant to bring it up, but it's more common than you would think. PD can happen when scar tissue builds up under the skin of the penis, causing a curve with a bump during an erection that for some men may lead to pain during intimacy and impact mental health. A trusted urology specialist can help diagnose and walk you through your options, including non surgical treatment. Visit talkaboutpd.com. The physicist Richard Feynman once explained where fire comes from and the light and
- [01:23]
Richard Feynman
heat that's coming out, that's the light and heat of the sun that went in. So it sort of stored sun that's coming out when you burn a log.
- [01:33]
Stephen Dubner
The wildfires that hit Los Angeles last year burned down the house where Feynman and his family lived in Altadena. It was near the Caltech campus where he had taught for decades. Fire also destroyed Zorthian Ranch up in the hills where Feynman loved to spend time. Those losses are regrettable, but they were just property. Feynman left a mark on the world that runs much deeper than mere property. In 2024 we made a three part series called Curious Brilliant Vanishing. Mr. Feynman and I thought now might be a good time to replay that series for you today. Part 1 the Curious Mr. Feynman I hope you enjoy.
- [02:23]
Michelle Feynman
So a little scrap of paper and my dad's writing. He had a weird way of working where he would just write on like if he ran out of paper or something, he would grab a Kleenex box or write on the corners of junk mail or wherever there was clear space.
- [02:45]
Stephen Dubner
That is Michelle Feynman. Her father is the late Richard Feynman, a theoretical physicist who taught for decades at Caltech, the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. And that's where we are today, in a climate controlled underground archive going through her father's files, Feynman led an unusual and unusually eventful life. While he was still in graduate school, he was recruited to join the Manhattan Project, the US Military's secret program to build an atomic bomb. Toward the end of his life, he was asked to join a presidential commission to investigate the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle. NASA had launched the Challenger from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a cold January day in 1986. It was in the air only 73 seconds before it exploded on live TV. All seven crew members were killed, including a schoolteacher named Christa McAuliffe.
- [03:43]
Michelle Feynman
I remember being in history and we didn't take our test, and they said that a terrible thing had happened. And then I came home and my parents, who rarely had the television on, were in front of the television. They seemed pretty distraught by the whole thing. And then I guess he got a call inviting him to be part of the commission.
- [04:16]
Stephen Dubner
This commission was ordered by President Ronald Reagan. Feynman's wife, Gwyneth, urged her husband to accept the invitation. He was disinclined physics. He loved solving theoretical mysteries. He loved. It was the politics he hated. Feynman was now 67 years old, and he'd been sick for a while with cancer. Sometimes he was surprised he was still alive and grateful. But the idea of spending months in Washington seemed worse than death. President Reagan had asked former Secretary of State William Rogers to run the commission. Whatever you do, Reagan told him, don't embarrass NASA. As for Richard Feynman, embarrassment wasn't something that he really worried about.
- [05:03]
Michelle Feynman
I think it was really ultimately my mom who said, okay, let's be honest. If you don't do it, they'll all be doing the same thing. And if he did it, there would be this one other person sort of buzzing around and trying to really find out what happened.
- [05:24]
Stephen Dubner
Feynman thought about it for a while. Finally, he accepted. Here's how he put it to his okay, I am going to commit suicide for six months. But once he took the assignment, he attacked it, visiting engineers across the country to learn everything he could about how the space shuttle worked. Feynman wasn't a rocket scientist, but he had helped build the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, and he had won a Nobel Prize for his work in quantum electrodynamics. Among his physicist peers, he was thought of as a wizard. Freeman Dyson said that Feynman had the most original mind of his generation. He was also perhaps the world's most famous living scientist. So, yes, Richard Feynman was a Logical choice to serve on this presidential commission, but he was also a risky choice.
- [06:19]
Michelle Feynman
I do know that there was somebody on the commission that he didn't like, or he thought the person didn't like him. And there were disagreements.
- [06:27]
Stephen Dubner
Feynman grew concerned that this investigation would be more of a show trial, political propaganda meant to save face. The US Was still fighting a Cold war with Russia, and the American space program was a key asset. Most of the 12 members of the commission were political or military appointees. Feynman worried that Chairman Rogers would try to sideline him, maybe even withhold information. But having spent a lifetime teaching physics at Caltech, Feynman had no shortage of former students now working for NASA and at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, which is at Caltech, just down the road from Feynman's archives, where we are today.
- [07:11]
Michelle Feynman
So I'm wondering what this is like. Who gave him this piece of paper and then he made notes on it. Space shuttle operations entail a significant degree of risk. And then that's circled. And then what do you think? Oh, what do you think the magnitude of the risk is?
- [07:32]
Stephen Dubner
The magnitude of the risk, Feynman learned, varied greatly, depending on who you asked. NASA management had put the risk of a shuttle disaster at around 1 in 100,000. Feynman thought this was absurd. It implied, as he later wrote, that you could put a shuttle up every day for 300 years expecting to lose only one. The engineers at NASA, the people responsible for actually building and knowing the thing, they put the risk of a disaster at 1 in 100. The engineers, for all their technical ability, they knew this was still a dangerous enterprise. Feynman wrote, what is the cause of management's fantastic faith in the machinery?
- [08:24]
Michelle Feynman
This section describes possible shuttle accidents leading to catastrophic failure. And then he's got some notes in the margins.
- [08:33]
Stephen Dubner
In Washington, the commission began to interview witnesses. Feynman didn't think Chairman Rogers was trying very hard to get to the true cause of the explosion. So Feynman began asking questions, sharp, unrelenting questions, questions about the science. During a break, Chairman Rogers was overheard in the men's room complaining to the astronaut Neil Armstrong, who also sat on the commission. He said, feynman is becoming a real pain in the ass. Feynman, known in these archival documents as rpf, felt the investigation was becoming a whitewash.
- [09:11]
Michelle Feynman
Right. RPF calls Graham again. Do something. Feel frustrated and miserable.
- [09:17]
Stephen Dubner
Serving on the commission had been as dreadful an experience as Feynman had feared. But he kept digging. By now, he had come to believe that The Challenger exploded because of the failure of what are called O rings, small circular seals designed to prevent fluid or air from leaking during a mechanical process. The solid rocket boosters on the Challenger contained O rings that were meant to expand and contract as needed. They were made from a synthetic rubber called Viton. It had been suggested to Feynman that the O rings might fail under certain weather conditions.
- [09:53]
Michelle Feynman
Tina calls RPF after working on his car in D.C. winter cold and notes that O rings are not very flexible in cold weather. Could that have been a factor since it was very cold on the day of the launch? RPF sounds like a good possibility.
- [10:05]
Stephen Dubner
The day of the launch had been cold. Cold enough that some of the engineers were worried, but not cold enough for NASA to scrap the launch. They had already had to do that a couple times. Looking back, it appears that on this day, NASA leadership was in the grips of what is called go fever. So go they did. It was a bitter cold, but sparkling
- [10:30]
Ralph Leighton
clear morning at Cape Canaveral.
- [10:32]
Stephen Dubner
There was a sense of relief that the much delayed flight was finally underway.
- [10:37]
Richard Feynman
Looks like a couple of the solid rocket boosters blew away from the side of the shuttle in an explosion.
- [10:47]
Stephen Dubner
We have a report from the flight dynamics officer that the vehicle has exploded.
- [10:51]
Ralph Leighton
We are looking at checking with the recovery forces to see what can be
- [10:56]
Richard Feynman
done at this point.
- [11:01]
Stephen Dubner
Richard Feynman was a patriot. He loved NASA. He loved adventure and exploration. He even loved risk taking, as long as the risk had been properly calculated. What he hated was any attempt to paper over the truth. As a scientist, all he wanted was to find out true things. Here are some other things he hated. Hypocrisy, BS and the use of unscientific thinking to make important decisions. And that's where he felt the Rogers Commission had landed. Ever since working on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, Feynman had known that scientists and generals don't always mix well. So he now decided to pull a stunt. This was very much in character for Feynman. He had a brand of intelligence that could tip into the obnoxious. At Los Alamos, he became famous for cracking safes. As a kid, he had discovered that the radio quiz show he listened to with his family played earlier on a different station. So he would listen to the early version in his bedroom and then magically know all the answers when they listened together downstairs. But this stunt on a presidential commission investigating a national tragedy would be in public on television. Let's get back to those notes in the archive.
- [12:25]
Michelle Feynman
Next morning, Feynman in Sutantai Gets into taxi, take me to a hardware store. But we're in downtown Washington, sir. The Capitol is over there, the White House over there. There's no hardware store around here, but. But driver remembers one a few miles away and takes RPF to it. They wait until it opens at 8:30 C. Clamps seem to be too big, but RPF buys one anyway. Also buys screwdriver and wrench to get model apart.
- [12:49]
Stephen Dubner
His idea was simple. He would dunk a model of the shuttle's O ring assembly in a glass of ice water, let it get down to the temperature it had been when the Challenger was launched from Cape Canaveral, and then see how the O rings responded. It was the kind of thing a good science teacher might show his students to demonstrate what is called thermal hysteresis in public.
- [13:11]
Michelle Feynman
Hearing no ice water, RPF asks for some and there is a big delay. Page thought RPF wanted ice water for everyone. Several good opportunities are missed. Finally, ice water comes.
- [13:23]
Stephen Dubner
Commission member Richard Feynman, after examining the
- [13:26]
Richard Feynman
O ring, had a surprise. Oh, I took this stuff that I got out of your seal and I put it in ice water. And I discover that when you put some pressure on it for a while and then undo it, it maintains. 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 problems.
- [14:02]
Stephen Dubner
I believe that has some significance for our problem. Feynman's TV stunt with the O rings and the ice water became the defining moment of the Challenger inquiry.
- [14:13]
Michelle Feynman
And it's just like just such a mic drop, you know, it's done with so much understated showmanship. It's just great. It's just great.
- [14:27]
Stephen Dubner
It would later be revealed that NASA had known about the O ring problem but had downplayed the risks. The Rogers Commission, in its published report, went easy on NASA, as President Reagan had asked. But the report did include an appendix written by Richard Feynman. He didn't go easy on NASA. Here's his final For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations. For nature cannot be fooled. For Richard Feynman, nature was everything. He saw the natural universe as the greatest puzzle ever created. Understanding and explaining it was what drove him to be a scientist. He'd been that way as a kid in Far Rockaway, Queens, on the ocean's edge of New York City. It's true that he was gifted mathematically, but his real superpowers were curiosity and playfulness. He wanted to know how everything worked. Bubbles, rainbows, ocean waves and brain waves, consciousness and dreaming. He wondered about the inner workings of an atom and the outer edges of the known universe. He had a long parade of deep obsessions. Mayan hieroglyphics, the behavior of ants playing the bongos. For a serious scientist, bongo playing went against type. For him, it was perfectly on brand. Feynman let himself get deeply interested in the things that interested him, and he was happy to ignore the rest. And once he was interested, there was no question Feynman was afraid to ask. But he didn't suffer fools, and he thought there were a lot of fools in the world, people who knew the name of things without understanding how the thing worked. As Feynman liked to say, whether he meant to or not. Richard Feynman created a sort of blueprint for how to lead a life of honest inquiry. Bill Gates once called Feynman the best teacher I never had. And over the years, I've come to realize the same may be true for me. I've always loved reading Feynman, reading about him. Some of the questions I ask when I interview people for this show are stolen from Feynman. Steve Levitt, my Freakonomics friend and co author, is also a Feynman nut. And if you look at Levitt's economic research, you see a lot of Feynman beneath the surface, the way he'll come at a problem with a childlike curiosity and intensity and a willingness to build an understanding from the ground up. Feynman appreciated that the world is complex and that it's better to know for sure that one small thing is true rather than make grand claims that can't be verified. And there's one more thing to love about Richard Feynman. He was always willing to speak truth to power. We saw this during the Challenger investigation. We saw it back at Los Alamos, when the much more experienced physicists who were running the project realized that the aggressive kid with the queen's accent was always shouting down what he called lousy ideas. And he was usually right. It strikes me that there are a lot of lousy ideas floating around these days, but there aren't many people who are both willing and able to shout them down. And by able, I mean taking apart a bad argument with the rigor of a scientist and the patience of a teacher. It's the role filled by what we used to call public intellectuals. But to be clear, Feynman would have hated that label. He didn't really think of himself as an intellectual. And as much as he loved adventure and storytelling, he didn't have much use for public attention. Feynman was, of course, not a perfect person. He's been called out for behavior that was selfish, sometimes cruel, especially toward women. Still, I've been surprised to find just how much Feynman has faded from public view. I know that a lot of time has passed and that our culture has changed, but sometimes when I'm giving a talk, I'll mention something that Feynman said or did, and I get a lot of blank stares, and not just from young people. So I got to thinking, maybe it's time to do something about this. Maybe it's time to get some more Feynman in our lives, including mine. Because one thing I've learned from Feynman is that it is a wonderful thing to be interested in the things that interest you. And if you want to know, I'm probably not much more interested in theoretical physics than you are. But it turns out I am eternally interested in Richard Feynman. So today on Freakonomics Radio, we begin a series that we've been excited about for a long time. We will hear from Feynman family and friends.
- [19:30]
Ralph Leighton
So many crazy things really did happen to him.
- [19:34]
Stephen Dubner
We'll hear from physicists.
- [19:36]
Dr. Helen Chersky
He was a brilliant theoretical physicist, but what really made him stand out was his humanity.
- [19:41]
Stephen Dubner
And we'll hear from Feynman himself.
- [19:44]
Richard Feynman
So I turned out to be a tremendous genius. To them, I was a God coming down from the sky.
- [19:51]
Stephen Dubner
I'm glad you are joining us today as we set off in search of the curious, brilliant, vanishing Mr. Feynman.
- [20:09]
Ralph Leighton
This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with your host, Stephen Dubner.
- [20:27]
Stephen Dubner
Part one, the curious Mr. Feynman. Chapter one knowing the name of Something okay, so let's start, Ralph. Just say your name and what you do.
- [20:42]
Ralph Leighton
I'm Ralph Layton, and I'm not sure what I do. I guess the most consistent thing is that I was a teacher in the Pasadena School District for about a dozen years. And then when I fell in with Richard Feynman and hearing his stories and getting them out to the world, that helped me branch out and do other things.
- [21:06]
Stephen Dubner
Ralph Layton is now in his 70s. He was in his teens when he started hanging out with Feynman, who was a colleague of his father's. Ralph would become a sidekick to Feynman. He rode shotgun on adventures and misadventures. He became Feynman's writing partner and perhaps most important, his drumming partner.
- [21:26]
Ralph Leighton
Drumming was key. Without drumming, I don't think I would have had more than a passing relationship, maybe when Feynman was over at our house, because my father was a professor of physics at Caltech, as Feynman was, and they did work on some projects together, most notably what are called the Big Red Books, the Feynman Lectures on Physics. You'll see three names on the COVID for authors Feynman, Layton and Sands. That Layton was my father, that would have been about it. But since Feynman heard me and my friend Tom Rudeshauser outside on the patio, drumming on little teak tables from Taiwan, he was drawn out to join us. And we specifically left one for him to pick up. Should he have gone for the bait? And he went for the bait. And that led to a wonderful relationship. Feynman and I would get together for drumming, it seemed like every week. And then stories would pop out,
- [22:31]
Richard Feynman
these
- [22:32]
Stephen Dubner
stories that Feynman would tell about his family, about working on the Manhattan Project, about teaching and doing physics. They would become the basis of two books that he talked and Ralph Layton wrote down. The first One, published in 1985, was called Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman. The second was published in 1988, the same year Feynman died. It was called what do you care what other people think? The books were bestsellers.
- [22:59]
Ralph Leighton
He got a lot of this storytelling aspect from his mother. And Joan would say that when he and his mom got going back and forth with a repartee, that Joan was literally rolling on the floor laughing.
- [23:16]
Stephen Dubner
Joan was Richard Feynman's sister, nine years
- [23:19]
Ralph Leighton
his junior, whom he was a real mentor to and encouraged her to go into science, despite their mother saying, oh, women's brains are different. They can't go into science, blah, blah, blah.
- [23:30]
Stephen Dubner
Joan Feynman also became a physicist, an astrophysicist, known for her study of auroras, which her brother first taught her about when they were kids.
- [23:40]
Ralph Leighton
And Feynman's mother was quite a great balance to his father, who, being a real fan of science and all that, was at the same time, kind of. I don't know how to say, kind of intense and embarrassing at times to the rest of the family in his intensity. Like, he was a strict vegetarian, and that's kind of early days to be a strict vegetarian. And they'd come out at a restaurant, you know, the whole family's there, and they would serve him the dish, and he'd say, I know you Cooked that in a frying pan that had, you know, some bacon fat in it. And Richard's kind of, you know, sliding under the table out of embarrassment.
- [24:23]
Stephen Dubner
Richard Feynman was born in 1918. His parents were named Lucille and Melville. His family was Jewish, but he didn't have much connection to religion or even to a tribal affiliation. His father was a uniform salesman. He liked to tell Richard that people who wear uniforms are the same as everyone else, but the uniform tricks people into thinking otherwise. The Depression hit the family hard and they moved around a good bit. They wound up in a crowded house in Queens. That house became Richard's playground, laboratory, and place of business. He was the neighborhood kid that people would call to fix their radios. He was interested in how things worked. Not just physical things, but also language and the human psyche. For instance, why would people say they knew something when they didn't really know it? Here is Feynman telling a story about his father. This is from a BBC documentary by Christopher Sykes.
- [25:23]
Richard Feynman
He would take me for walks in the woods and would tell me various things about interesting things that were going on in the woods. Looking at a bird, he says, do you know what that bird is? It's a brown throated thrush, but in Portuguese it's a honta ra pedro. In Italian, accoutera pigita, he says, in Chinese it's a chung on top. In Japanese, etc. He says, now that you know all the languages, you want to know what the name of that bird is. And when you're finished with all that, he says, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You only know about humans in different places and what they call the bird. He knew the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.
- [26:06]
Charles Mann
You can see his ideas about what it meant to know something in the beginning of his lectures on QED quantum electrodynamics that were turned into a book. At the beginning he gives a little bit of history, and then at the end of it, he says, is this history true? No, he says, this is a little story that physicists tell ourselves. I have no idea what the actual history is, but this is the kind of little thing that we have in our minds. And now let's get to the real stuff.
- [26:34]
Stephen Dubner
Science that is. Charles Mann, a science journalist and the author of several excellent books about science. For one book called the Second Creation, about the history of modern physics, Mann and his co author, Robert Kreese interviewed Richard Feynman extensively in the mid-1980s.
- [26:52]
Charles Mann
He was in the forefront of the efforts to construct the Standard Model, which is one of the great accomplishments of science and one of the great accomplishments of the human mind, as far as I'm concerned.
- [27:00]
Stephen Dubner
And the Standard Model is what?
- [27:03]
Charles Mann
That's the picture of all the particles and forces in the universe, except for gravity. And it provides answers to all the sort of ordinary questions of science. You know, why is the sky blue? And why does the sun shine? And it's encompassed within this single mathematical structure that Feynman was a key contributor to. I think he was amused by the idea that journalists would want to talk to him. I said, we wanted to write a history of the construction of the Standard Model. And he said, well, okay, but you realize that only one part of it is really solid. And, you know, we were immediately into the physics. I think he was delighted to talk about the physics, but he was extremely uncomfortable with the biographical parts of it. And the reason is that the physics, he felt like you could document that. This is actually what's going on. These papers show what we thought was happening. This was wrong. This was right. Whereas when you're talking about memory, he kept saying, this is my memory, right? This is not actually what happened. He was super skeptical about the worth of journalism. He was willing to answer our questions, but he was very much willing to see this as a total waste of time. I had the sense that we had to have the best game possible to keep him interested, because otherwise we'd get thrown out of his office at any time.
- [28:40]
Stephen Dubner
Richard Feynman had become the kind of scientist that inspired other people to do science.
- [28:47]
John Preskill
I'm John Preskill. I'm a professor of theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology. I am the Richard P. Feynman professor of Theoretical Physics. I grew up in the Chicago area. My interest in science, like, for a lot of people in my generation, I was, you know, a kid in the early 60s, and I was fascinated by the space program. But actually, Feynman had an influence on me. When I was very young, there was a book fair at my elementary school, and I was drawn to a large volume with the title the World of Science. And I just ate this book up. It had a chapter on each of various fields of science, and they were all interesting. There was neuroscience, and there was math, and there was astrophysics. But the thing I found most fascinating was the chapter on theoretical physics. And it started with the story of a small boy who has a red wagon with a ball in it. And he notices that when he pulls the wagon forward, the. The ball rolls to the back. And when he stops Pulling it, the ball rolls forward.
- [30:12]
Richard Feynman
My father had taught me to notice things. And one day when I was playing with what we call an express wagon, which is a little wagon which has a railing around it for children to play with that they can pull around, it had a ball in it. I remember this. It had a ball in it. And I pulled the wagon, and I noticed something about the way the ball moved. So I went to my father and I said, say, Pop, I noticed something. When I pull the wagon, the ball rolls to the back of the wagon. It rushes to the back of the wagon. And when I'm pulling along and I suddenly stop, the ball rolls to the front of the wagon. I said, why is that? And he said that. He says, nobody knows. He said, 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.
- [31:11]
John Preskill
Okay? So years later, I dug up the book and discovered that all of the chapters were based on interviews with Caltech faculty where Feynman was a professor. And that certainly had an influence on me choosing a scientific career and becoming a physicist. And so 21 years later, I joined Feynman on the Caltech faculty. So go figure.
- [31:41]
Ralph Leighton
Ralph Leighton, my father, would describe when someone would come to Feynman with their theory and, you know, some highfalutin theory. And Feynman would say, okay, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. I. I don't understand anything. Just a minute. Remind me, please, you know, what's the anode and the cathode? Which one is which? And he asked these questions, which a lot of people would be reluctant to ask because it sounds like a stupid question, you know. So anyway, the professor, trying to explain his theory would start from the ground up, because Feynman would take him back to the first, you know, simple, simple, simple, and then build and build and build. And then at some point, the professor would say, oh, I see, I see, I see. I see what I gotta do, you know. In other words, he'd find the hole in his theory. He kind of could feel the physics and see how it's going to come out and then construct the pathway of how to get there. But then he would say to the students, I'm really sorry. I want to give you by example how to feel the physics, but I can't really teach you how to feel the physics.
- [32:56]
Dr. Helen Chersky
He was a brilliant Theoretical physicist. But what really made him stand out was his humanity. That's the reason that he was such a good popularizer of science, because he understood that this is not just about the numbers, that there is beauty in it. I'm Dr. Helen Chersky, and I'm a physicist who studies the ocean at University College London. If you look back at the books of his that were most popular and the lectures that were most popular, like, of course, you can do the technical stuff. You know, he's very, very good at explaining and synthesizing knowledge, but what he's really doing is making it human. And, you know, there's that very famous quote, the discussion with an artist.
- [33:37]
Richard Feynman
I have a friend who's an artist, and he's sometimes taken a view which I don't agree with very well. He'll hold up a flower and say, look how beautiful it is. And I'll agree. And he says, you see, as I, as an artist can see how beautiful this is, but you as a scientist, oh, take this all apart and it becomes dull thing. And I think that he's kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too.
- [34:04]
Charles Mann
I believe, although I may not be
- [34:05]
Richard Feynman
quite as refined aesthetically as he is, that I can appreciate the beauty of his flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean, it's not just beauty at this dimension of 1cm. There's also beauty at a smaller dimension, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors and the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it. To science, knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds, I don't understand how it subtracts.
- [34:51]
Stephen Wolfram
Oh, I think he had what one might call childlike curiosity, which I think most children have. The question is, do they lose it before they get to adulthood? And I think that he was a strong enough willed person who wanted to think in his own way for himself, that he kept that childlike curiosity. Okay, well, let's see. I'm Stephen Wolfram, and I do science and technology, and I've done that for many years. I happen to organize the theoretical physics seminars at Caltech for a while and would invite all sorts of people. And Feynman would come and he would try and have this competition with me for who could find the fatal flaw first, which was actually, in the end, there were some terrible Moments there where it was an embarrassing thing, although some interesting science got done as a result. I think Dick Feynman was. He liked being on his own doing his thing. He was not interested really in organizing other people to do things. He liked to have intellectual fun. He would find a problem he thought was interesting, the next hill in physics, and he would go and try and take it. If somebody said, you've got to strategically achieve this or that, he would say, I just don't want to do that. I'm just doing the things I like to do. I suppose one person who I knew, who strangely Feynman, had certain similarities with his Steve Jobs. They both had this. Let's get to the essence of the thing. They were both very much of a what's the real point? What is the core idea? How do we get down to that without having all this ancillary stuff that is just getting in the way of us understanding what's going on? When one goes through school, one is often just told, this is true, this is true, this is true. Well, why is it true? For him, at least when I knew him, he would always say, but why? Can we figure out why that's true? Is it even true? The thing that was important about his way of thinking, he didn't end up making many mistakes. And the reason is because everything was built on bedrock. In the end, he just wanted to get down to the bedrock and understand why it would be true for himself. And I would say that he was not a prolific reader of other things he was much more interested in. Let me figure it out for myself. And part of the reason for that was, one, because he found that a much more secure way to think, and two, because what he liked was figuring stuff out. He wasn't really that interested in being a scholar and studying the detailed history and literature of something.
- [37:29]
John Preskill
To be honest with you, sometimes I think he took this too far.
- [37:33]
Stephen Dubner
John Preskill.
- [37:35]
John Preskill
It's not the best advice, necessarily, for all students. Put all the books away and figure it out yourself. Well, there's something to that. Of course, if you really do think it through for yourself and solve it yourself, then you arrive at a deeper appreciation than if you just read about it. That's true. But all those other guys and gals who've been writing all these papers and books, they're not so dumb, and they know some things that maybe you should know, too. Sometimes I felt, you know, he put a little too much emphasis on you got to work it out yourself. But that was very much part of his credo. You know, by the time I knew Feynman, I came to Caltech in 1983 and he died four and a half years later. And I don't think he was the Feynman of legend. He was still extraordinary in terms of, you know, the depth of curiosity, and he still had the charisma and of course, a great storyteller. But maybe he wasn't as great a physicist as he might have been.
- [38:39]
Stephen Dubner
And who was that Feynman of legend? The legend really began in New Mexico.
- [38:46]
Charles Mann
The overwhelming feeling at Los Alamos was we have to fight the Nazis.
- [38:54]
Stephen Dubner
We will be right back with more of the curious Mr. Feynman, I'm Stephen Dubner and this is Freakonomics Radio. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Mint Mobile. If you're tired of spending hundreds on crazy high wireless bills, bogus fees and free perks that cost you more in the long run, then a premium wireless plan from mint mobile for 15 bucks a month might be right for you. Bring your own phone and number, activate one with ESIM in minutes and start saving immediately. No long term contracts, no hassle. All plans come with high speed data and unlimited talk and text delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. Stop overpaying for wireless just because that's how it's always been. Mint exists purely to fix that. Shop plans@mintmobile.com freak that's mintmobile.com freak upfront payment of $45 for three three month five GB plan required equivalent to $15 per month new customer offer for first three months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details.
- [40:12]
Dan Cummins
Doing hard things doesn't always look dramatic. Sometimes it's an early workout, a long hike, or a full day outside where quitting feels easier than pushing through real life hard things. That's exactly what Nuun Hydration is made for. It's real deal activated hydration built to help keep people moving through the moments that ask a little more from them. Nuun hydration tablets deliver clean ingredients and optimized electrolytes that hydrate better than water alone, especially when you're sweating, moving or pushing through a long day. Drop one into a bottle and it dissolves quickly, tastes great, and comes in a simple no mess tube you can take anywhere and at less than $1 per serving, it's easy to make part of your routine. Noon is made for people who show up, value growth and find joy in the effort. It helps support clear focus, steady energy and the mindset to take on whatever comes Next Shop noon hydration@noonlife.com that's n u-n life.com and fuel your next hard thing.
- [41:07]
Stephen Dubner
Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Lowe's. Summer means more cookouts, and Lowe's Memorial Day event makes it easier for less. Save $80 on a Char Broil Performance Series 4 Burner Grill now just $199 and keep the food coming. Get up to 45% off select major appliances to keep everything running smoothly. Shop Summer must haves for less. The best lineup is at Lowe's, valid through May 27, while supplies last. Selections vary by location. See associate or lowe's.com for details. Chapter 2 Lousy ideas growing up in New York City, Richard Feynman was an excellent student in math and science. English and history, not so much. He wanted to go to Columbia University, but they had a quota restricting the number of Jewish students, and he was denied. He was accepted at mit, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At first he majored in math, then electrical engineering, and then settled on physics. After mit, he applied to Princeton for graduate school. They too, had a Jewish quota, but Feynman was admitted after getting a perfect score on the entrance exam at Princeton. He quickly became known as an energetic an iconoclastic thinker, a little too free spirited for his tweedy elders, but undeniably brilliant. And so it was that in 1941, just two years into Feynman's graduate studies, he was recruited to join the Manhattan Project. This was the secret US Government program to build an atomic bomb before Nazi Germany could build theirs. The US didn't know the exact status of the German bomb project, but they did know it was run by Werner Heisenberg, who is one of the most brilliant physicists alive. Feynman began working on nuclear physics, first at Princeton, and then he joined the huge lab in Los Alamos, New Mexico, that was run by J. Robert Oppenheimer, or Oppy, as his colleagues called him. Among these colleagues were Enrico Fermi, Niels Bohr, Hans Bethe, each of whom would go on to win a Nobel Prize in physics, and each of whom had fled Europe because of Nazi or fascist persecution. Richard Feynman, the kid from Queens, was much younger than all of them and much less seasoned. But that did not stop him from contributing.
- [43:46]
Richard Feynman
It was very democratic. It wasn't the kind of hierarchy of where you had to know your place. Your point was everybody's place was to say anything they wanted to anybody else. I never knew who I was talking to. I would always worry about the physics. If the idea looked lousy. I said it'd look lousy if it looked good. I said it looked good. 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.
- [44:10]
Stephen Dubner
Much has been written about the Manhattan Project. The recent film Oppenheimer gave it a whole new life. Richard Feynman's daughter Michelle, whom we met earlier, is in her 50s now and she still lives in Pasadena. She is a primary keeper of her father's legacy and once edited a book of his letters.
- [44:29]
Michelle Feynman
I've read the letter that he sent to somebody from his fraternity, and he doesn't say it was sort of a recruitment ish, like it wanted to be a recruitment letter, but there was so much that he couldn't say. But if you sort of read between the lines, you could see his enthusiasm and his passion for the project. It was sort of like, I can't tell you why, but this thing is so important that sort of speaks to his love of country and his patriotism. I think he thought, you know, obviously the Nazis were abhorrent and let's do everything we can to stop them. Whether he thought, I'm lucky to have been born on this side of the ocean, I don't know.
- [45:18]
Stephen Dubner
Today we think of the Manhattan Project as a major triumph in the US effort to defeat Germany and its allies, including Japan. And it was a military triumph, but it was also a triumph for physics. Here are, in order of appearance, Stephen Wolfram, Charles Mann and John Preskill.
- [45:37]
Stephen Wolfram
I think he felt about the Manhattan Project. He was very impressed with Robert Oppenheimer and his leadership of that project. I think he was proud, actually, to have been involved in something which he saw, I think, as being a. Well, it was certainly the big achievement of physics. It was the thing that, as far as the US Government was concerned, put physics on the map. The whole development of particle physics and all those kinds of things I certainly view as having been kind of a long thank you from the US Government to the physics community for the Manhattan Project.
- [46:10]
Charles Mann
He, like most physicists of his generation and today, was basically a patriotic American. The way he thought about it is that the government might think that investing in physics would help the country defend itself somehow, as it had with the bomb. Physicists thought that the government investing in physics was one of the things that made the country worth defending, that this was a public good, you know, knowledge for everyone, and the government should be doing this.
- [46:44]
John Preskill
And as far as the practical impact of that. I think there has been a lot of practical impact in particular from the study of quantum devices. Look at the transistor, look at integrated circuits. That has completely transformed our lives. That comes from our understanding of quantum physics applied to materials. You know, we have lasers, we have medical technologies like magnetic resonance imaging. All these things have had big societal impact. I like to look at things from the point of view of long term impact. And if we're doing things as physicists today, if we're making discoveries and doing explorations where the impact on society in a practical sense may still be decades away, that's fine with me. Others have a shorter term focus. Most companies do. You know, in the tech industry, 10 years is infinity, but in the physics community, 40 years isn't such a long time.
- [47:57]
Stephen Dubner
The Los Alamos experience had a profound effect on Richard Feynman, as it did on everyone involved. The scientific achievement was one thing. The reality of using the bomb was another. By the time the bomb was ready, Germany had already been defeated. And so Japan became the target. Hiroshima and then Nagasaki. Here is Feynman describing the Trinity test in the New Mexico desert. This was the first successful detonation of an atomic bomb. And it happened just a few weeks before the US bombed Japan.
- [48:33]
Richard Feynman
After the thing went off, there was tremendous excitement at Los Alamos. Everybody had parties, we all ran around. I sat on the end of a jeep and beat drums and so on, except for one man that I remember. His name was Bob Wilson, who got me into it in the first place. He's sitting there moping. What are you moping about? He says, this terrible thing we made. I said, but you started, you got us into it. You see, what happened to me, what happened to the rest of us is we started for a good reason. But then we're working very hard to do something and to accomplish it is a pleasure. It's excitement. And you don't stop to think any. You know, you just stop. After you thought at the beginning, you stop thinking. So he was the only one who was still thinking about it at that particular moment.
- [49:13]
Stephen Dubner
Here are Charles Mann and Helen Chersky.
- [49:16]
Charles Mann
What he spoke about was. And what other physicists that we talked to was this feeling that this source of private delight working out, you know, the world of physics had suddenly been thrust onto the world stage in the form of a bomb that had killed tens of thousands of people. Imagine if you were a novelist and, you know, you're writing this novel privately and it's published. And then like Mark Chapman holding the Catcher in the Rye. Somebody uses your novel to do something that's really horrible.
- [49:56]
Dr. Helen Chersky
That's the great problem of humanity, isn't it? You know, a tool is just a tool. And it's the human that uses it that decides how it gets used. I think in the past, there was a lot of focus on, you know, you just did your job. You were this kind of cog in the machine, and that was okay. You could be a really good cog. Back then, there was probably more trust in governments and in systems than there is now. But, you know, a country acting as a team to get something done is kind of a very powerful thing to live inside.
- [50:26]
Charles Mann
And there is this thing that, you know, I think bothered Feynman. I know it bothered Hans Bethe. Cause he talked to me about it, which is the overwhelming feeling at Los Alamos was, the Nazis are terrible. They're killing Jews. Many of the physicists were, in fact, refugees, Jewish refugees from Germany. And they all had friends, you know, who were Jewish refugees. And they believed that Heisenberg, correctly, they believed that Heisenberg was leading an effort to do this. We have to get there first. We have to fight the Nazis. Then the Nazis lose. And everybody kept going, never thinking about, wait a minute, why are we doing this? And Beythes said, maybe we would have come to the conclusion that we should keep going. But we never thought about it. That really bothered him. The physicists regarded themselves as, we are doing this to fight the Nazis. And then it's used in the Japanese. And then the second thing, Bethe said this. They dropped it on Nagasaki the second time. Did they really need to do that? Would they have surrendered? And he said, the horrible thing is, we didn't even think about it. We never asked. They're like good soldiers. And the culture of physics is to be independent inquiry. And so to go along sheep like in a decision where your work is used for a bomb, that was awful.
- [51:52]
Stephen Dubner
The bomb was not the only thing that cast a shadow over Richard Feynman's time at Los Alamos. Just before joining the project, he had married Arlene Greenbaum, his high school sweetheart. Arlene was enthusiastic about art and literature the way Feynman was enthusiastic about math and science. In their eyes, this made them a perfect match. And they were very much in love. But there was a problem. Here's Ralph Layton.
- [52:21]
Ralph Leighton
She had tuberculosis, which was highly contagious. And his own parents and sister even were saying, you know, break up your marriage plans. You can't do this. You have a career ahead of you. All this, and he went against all of that.
- [52:37]
Stephen Dubner
When Feynman moved to Los Alamos, he found a sanatorium for Arlene in Albuquerque, about 100 miles away. Actually, it was Robert Oppenheimer who found the sanatorium. Feynman visited Arlene when he could, and they wrote letters. Because of the secrecy of the Manhattan Project, inbound and outbound mail went through a sensor. Feynman invented a code language for his letters to Arlene, in part to mess with the censors. He was known around Los Alamos for playing pranks and picking locks, including the locks on the desk drawers of the military men who oversaw the scientists.
- [53:14]
Ralph Leighton
I think I'm coming to realize now, only now, not when I knew him, that this thing about him being on top of the world and playing jokes and having fun and all this kind of stuff is a little bit like a stand up comedian who has a terrible tragedy in his life that he wants to keep in that box and not go near. And then he loses her within weeks of the bomb being tested. Imagine one, two, boom, boom, those losses or those transformations in your life. How are you going to recover from that?
- [53:57]
Richard Feynman
I had a very strong reaction after the war of a peculiar nature. It may be from just the bomb itself and it may be for some other psychological reasons. I had just lost my wife or something, but I remember being in New York with my mother in a restaurant right after, immediately and thinking about New York. And I knew how big the bomb in Hiroshima was, how big an area it covered, and so on. And I realized from where we were off 59th street, to drop one at 34th street, and then it would spread all the way out there and all these people would be killed and all the things would be killed. And that wasn't only one bomb available, but it was easy to continue to make them and therefore that things were sort of doomed. Because already it appeared to me very early, earlier than to others who were more optimistic that international relations and the way people were behaving was no different than it had ever been before. And that it was just going to go out the same way as any other thing. And I was sure it was going therefore to be used very soon. So I felt very uncomfortable and thought, really believed that it was silly. I would see people building a bridge and I would say, they don't understand. I really believe that it was senseless to make anything because it would all be destroyed very soon anyway.
- [55:17]
Stephen Dubner
The war was finally over. But Richard Feynman had moved from a physical desert to an emotional desert. So how would he escape that?
- [55:27]
Charles Mann
He did this for hours every day.
- [55:31]
Stephen Dubner
That's coming up. I'm Stephen Dubner and this is the curious Mr. Feynman on Freakonomics Radio. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Ozempic. Innovation happens through rethinking what's possible. And when it comes to glp, one's Ozempic pill does just that. Learn more About Ozempic Semaglutide Tablets 4 and 9mg by calling 1-833-OZEMPIC or visit ozempic.com to view the medication guide and ask your doctor what's possible with FDA approved Ozempic pill. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Progressive where drivers who save by switching save nearly $750 on average. Plus auto customers qualify for an average of 7 discounts. Get a quote now@progressive.com to see if you could save. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates national average 12 month savings of $744 by new customers surveyed who saved with Progressive between June 2022 and May 2023. Potential savings will vary. Discounts not available in all states and situations. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Hotels.com Some names really do say it all. Hotels.com is one of them. When travelers book a hotel, they want savings that work for them. And hotels.com makes it simple. With save your way members choose how to save. Take an instant discount now or bank as rewards to use on later stays. No tricks or pressure, just flexibility and real value. For straightforward savings on your next stay, trust the hotel experts. Visit hotels.com it's all in the name. Spinning plates here now was 27 year old Richard Feynman. His wife dead, the war over, his mind still spinning from the destructive capability of the bomb that he had helped create. He had now taken a job teaching physics at Cornell University. Here is Ralph Layton.
- [57:51]
Ralph Leighton
He went to Japan shortly after the war to help physics recover and he even went to the length of learning Japanese to a pretty decent level. You know, I think that was part of atoning. He became very interested in Japanese culture and Buddhism and would quote from a Buddhist priest who said, you know, to every man is given the keys to the gates of heaven. The same keys open the gates to hell.
- [58:24]
Stephen Dubner
And here's Charles Mann.
- [58:25]
Charles Mann
I think the general thought in physics is we built this bomb because the Nazis were building it and then we, without thinking about it at all dropped it on Japan. He was shocked by this, as were a lot of physicists. I don't think he was as sententious as you know, somebody like Oppenheimer, physics has known sin or something, but he was very distressed and he went to Cornell and just felt like, what is the point in studying, you know, beta decay?
- [58:54]
Ralph Leighton
He was very depressed after the war and he's starting off at Cornell and he can't get back to work. He thinks there's no point in building anything, everything is going to blow up. Russia's now got the bomb, and so he just couldn't get started working.
- [59:14]
Richard Feynman
So I was really in a kind of depressive condition. They expected me to be wonderful, to offer me a job like this, and I wasn't wonderful. And I thought to myself, I haven't done anything important. Well, I'm never going to do anything important. But I used to enjoy physics and mathematical things, and because I used to play with it, it was never very important. But I used to do things for the fun of it. So I decided I'm going to do things only for the fun of it. And only that afternoon when I was eating lunch, some kid threw up a plate in the cafeteria which has a blue medallion on the plate, the Cornell sign.
- [59:53]
Ralph Leighton
He noticed the medallion on the bottom of the plate seemed to turn around at a different rate than the plate wobbled. So he says to himself, huh, that looks like a fun little thing to work out. And he works it out, and then he takes it to his mentor, Hans Bethe, the one who got him to Cornell, having met him at Los Alamos. He said, hey, Hans, check this out. Look at this, look at this. And Hans says, well, what's it good for? And Feynman says, absolutely nothing. But isn't it amazing? Isn't it great?
- [60:23]
Charles Mann
And it reminded him there's all these things that you could find out about the world. And he didn't really care that this was, you know, this was just something that was an itch that he could scratch. And it was so pleasurable, I think, to him. And I think many scientists can identify with this. And in a small way for Germany, when something happens, you go, oh, that's what's going on.
- [60:43]
Ralph Leighton
And his Nobel Prize winning work actually came from the spin of the plate. And then it goes to spin of electrons and equations. He said it all came tumbling out from working out the wobble of a spinning plate.
- [60:59]
Richard Feynman
It has to do with curiosity. It has to do with people wondering what makes something do something. And then to discover that if you try to get answers that they're related to each other, the things that make the wind, make the waves and the motion of water is like the motion of air is like the motion of sand. The fact that things have common features turns out more and more universal. What we're looking for is how everything works and how everything is what makes everything work.
- [61:27]
Charles Mann
This is probably a little glib, but he loved puzzles. He loved the idea that there's all this stuff for us to know. My father in law, whose name is Toichiro Kinoshida, and was an important physicist in his own right and one of the great experts on quantum electrodynamics, which is the theory of light and matter. It was Feynman's own specialty. So let me tell you a funny story that my father in law used to tell about Feynman to explain what Feynman was like. They're both at Cornell, and my father in law found in one of Feynman's papers an error. And Feynman's response was so characteristic. First, he immediately went to visit my father in law, Tom, as he was called, and apologized to him personally for committing the error. And he repeated this over and over again because from his point of view, it was a waste of Tom's time to fix his mistakes. So he profusely apologized. The second thing he did was said, let's work together on a paper. So they picked. It was kind of a technical calculation. I won't go into the details, but Feynman's idea for collaborating was they would take offices next to each other and they would each work on the problem for a period of time and then they would compare notes and see what their separate solutions were. My father in law was a fantastic calculator. He would just wade into these things. So he piled up paper, doing calculation after calculation calculation over in the next office, he heard Feynman. And Feynman, as you may have heard, was fascinated by drums and the bongos. He didn't want to play the bongos in the physics department because it would be distracting. So he got two pencils and he would tap them on the radiator. And he did this for hours every day like this. And he didn't know that the sound traveled through the radiator to the next office. And it drove my father in law crazy. Here he is doing these complicated calculations and here's this other guys sitting by the radiator. My father in law, I should say, is quite shy. And so the idea of telling him to shut up is not, you know, that's just not part of my father in law. But at the same time he's thinking like, what the heck, you know, for the entire month or whatever the time period was. And so at the end of the time, he goes over and he meets with Feynman. He comes with this, you know, huge wad of paper and says, I think I figured it out. And Feynman has one sheet of paper, and he had spent the entire time thinking about how to make the problem simple. And that's what he'd been doing when he'd been doing the bongos. And then he had solved the problem in 15 minutes.
- [64:08]
Stephen Dubner
Despite the radiator to bang on, despite the nice collaboration with a Japanese colleague, a small atonement, perhaps, despite the wobbling plates in the cafeteria, Feynman never felt at home at Cornell. He never even had a permanent residence there. Upstate New York could be cold and dreary. He started traveling to South America. He fell in love with Brazil. He played a lot of bongo in Brazil, but that is not where he would end up. Back in the archives at Caltech with Michelle Feynman, we come across a couple letters her father sent to Robert Oppenheimer. He was teaching at the University of California, Berkeley.
- [64:53]
Michelle Feynman
So now my dad is at Cornell, teaching at Cornell. Dear Oppie, it looks black from my proposed visit to California. Cornell is all loaded up with graduate students. There are many more than ever before, and we have all we can do to handle them. The department was therefore very reluctant to let me go for the spring semester, as I was needed to help handle the the load. There's another personal reason. My father has died, and I do not want to go too far away from my mother in New York, at least for a while. I was looking forward to visiting you at Berkeley, as you know. I'm sorry to have to disappoint both myself and you. I had been hoping to see many friends again, but that is the way things go. Sincerely, R.P. this is the following January, January 6, 1947. Dear Oppie, I wonder if after the disappointment we had last time, you would still consider having me for a visit during the fall semester this year. I'm trying to get a leave of absence from Cornell University for the fall term, and the situation looks pretty promising. If you would like me to come, will you please let me know and I will turn all my attention on getting a leave of absence.
- [66:10]
Stephen Dubner
It would take a couple more years to fully break free from Cornell, but it happened.
- [66:15]
Michelle Feynman
I think he was changing the tire in the snow for, you know, the last time, and then had this offer from Caltech and said, definitely I'm there.
- [66:31]
Stephen Dubner
And California, it turned out, was just the medicine Feynman needed. The Golden State seemed to put him in a golden state of mind. He would start a family.
- [66:42]
Ralph Leighton
Finally, my mom told him he was
- [66:44]
Richard Feynman
crazy and pointed out the crazy things he was doing.
- [66:47]
Stephen Dubner
He would revolutionize his field when Feynman
- [66:50]
John Preskill
came along with his diagrams. Now everybody could do the calculations and
- [66:54]
Stephen Dubner
he'd keep trying to open his mind even further. That's next time on the brilliant Mr. Feynman part two of our series. Until then, take care of yourself. And if you can, someone else too. Freakonomics Radio is produced by Renbud Radio. You can find our entire archive on any podcast app or@freakonomics.com where we also publish transcripts and show notes. This series was produced by Zach Lipinski. It was edited by Gabriel Roth and mixed by Greg Rippon and Eleanor Osborne. Special thanks to Richard Tye and and Elisa Piccio from the Caltech archives to Christopher Sykes and the BBC for the audio from their Feynman documentaries to ITV for audio from the world From Another Point of View to Nicholas Osorio and Music Mind in Pasadena for recording help to the Library and University Archives at the University of California, Santa Barbara for their recording of Feynman's Los Alamos from below. Lecture and special thanks to James Glick for writing Genius, his biography of Richard Feynman. It has been very helpful to us. Our staff also includes Augusta Chapman, Dalvin, Abu Aji, Ellen Frankman, Elsa Hernandez, Hilaria Montenacort, Jake Loomis, Jeremy Johnston, Mandy Gorenstein, Peter Madden and Teo Jacobs. Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by the Hitchhikers. All the other music you've been hearing was composed especially for this series by Luis Guerra. As always, thank you for listening. This is his writing.
- [68:25]
Michelle Feynman
I assume this is his writing. Yeah. He would send us letters, handwritten letters like this, and then he would say, you know, if you have problems, my person at Caltech, the one who reads all my all my work, can help you.
- [68:42]
Ralph Leighton
The Freakonomics Radio Network the Hidden side of Everything
- [68:49]
Stephen Dubner
Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Ozempic. Innovation happens through rethinking what's possible. And when it comes to GLP1s ozempic pill does just that. Learn more about Ozempic semaglutide tablets 4 and 9 milligrams by calling 1-833-OZEMPIC or visit ozempic.com to view the medication guide and ask your doctor what what's possible with FDA approved Ozempic pill? Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Vitamix. According to the LA Times the average American home contains 300,000 items, including a staggering number of appliances. All those gadgets just clutter. But there's one tool that delivers what a dozen others only promise. From pureeing to chopping, Vitamix blenders bring the power of an entire kitchen to your countertop, offering enduring performance and precision you can count on in a world full of clutter. Do more with less. Visit Vitamix.com and shop now. Do you love hair raising allegedly true stories about the paranormal? Then you should summon the podcast scared to death. It's the popular horror series with more than 60 million downloads to its name and is co hosted by me, Dan Cummins and me, Lindsay, co host and also Dan's wife.
- [70:09]
Dan Cummins
Each week on Scared to Death, we
- [70:11]
Stephen Dubner
share bone chilling tales from old books and creepy corners of the web, and even some submitted by our listeners, all designed to make you want to sleep with the lights on. Think you can handle the horror? Tune in to Scared to Death every Tuesday at the stroke of midnight to find out.