Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track (3 of 5 free samples)

---

COPYRIGHT
Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track by Richard P. Feynman. Copyright 2005 by Michelle Feynman and Carl Feynman.
All Rights Reserved. Sharing not permitted.

---

Previous | Next

INTRODUCTION: GENIUS TO YOU, FATHER TO ME (CONT'D)

These memories and more came flooding back not too long ago. I remember reading a few of my fatherÂ's letters in 1990, shortly after my motherÂ's death. One that particularly struck me was a letter to a former secretary in which he lamented that he was not a grandfather yet, that his kids were slow. I figured out I was in high school--in eleventh grade--when he wrote that. As I laughed, it occurred to me that his letters might make for interesting reading one day.

It would take fourteen years, but in May of 2004, I started doing just that when copies of the Feynman Papers from the Caltech Archives were shipped out to me. Twelve filing cabinet drawers and thousands of sheets of paper took quite a while to go through. Most were technical in nature: notes for lectures and classes, correspondence with colleagues regarding developments in physics, attending conferences, and so forth. About a third of the documents were non-technical, and almost all of those were in the form of letters. Boxes long stored in my basement yielded even more: newspaper clippings, photographs, family snapshots, and many letters more personal in nature.

Perhaps because most of my fatherÂ's books were derived from spoken materials--be it lectures or stories--which were then edited, and because he constantly complained that he could not speak "grammatically correct," I did not know what to expect from his written work. As I delved into his correspondence, however, I was completely captivated. In these letters he is articulate, insightful, considerate, humble, nurturing, funny, and charming.

That he wrote so many letters, both to scientists and to ordinary people, surprised me. According to Helen Tuck, his secretary of almost thirty years, he was in the habit of answering his own mail when she came onboard at Caltech in the mid-1960s. His desk was usually piled with stacks of both opened and unopened mail, and he would answer correspondence when he felt like it, which, according to Helen, was not all that often. She eventually persuaded him to let her sort through the mail and then they would answer the letters together, an idea he loved. She gradually learned which letters would interest him and elicit a response.

A few of his friends were surprised when I described what I had found, as my father had a reputation in the physics community for not writing letters. Why had he spent so much time corresponding with the general public and not with his fellow scientists? When I raised this question with one of my fatherÂ's colleagues at Caltech, he offered the possible explanation that my father was a very kind man. Although that was true, I believe the answer lies beyond that, and it has to do with my fatherÂ's great love for teaching.

In an article on education he wrote for CaltechÂ's Engineering and Science he stated: "The problem is clear language. The desire is to have the idea clearly communicated to the other person." He was speaking of mathematics textbooks at the time, but I think this statement in part explains why he was such an effective and prodigious communicator. These letters are testimony to his skill and desire to be plainly understood--and, of course, to his passion and curiosity about the world. Again, his own words, this time from a letter to a young student seeking his advice, explain it best: "You cannot develop a personality with physics alone, the rest of life must be worked in."

Because he was selective about which letters he answered, I feel this collection represents the best of all that came his way, as well as his most considered responses. I was even startled and touched to find an apology to that high school algebra teacher who had given him such a hard time.

I have decided to present these letters in a roughly chronological order, making a few exceptions in the interest of clarity and continuity. I have kept letters together with their replies. The earliest letter, written to his mother, dates back to 1939. Letters he wrote to his first wife, Arline, give us a glimpse into what his life was like while working on the atomic bomb--and paint a portrait of a sweet and tender young romance. I have grouped together a series concerning membership in the National Academy of Sciences, as well as a flurry of letters written on the occasion of his Nobel Prize, as here subject takes priority. The rest of the book is organized to allow one to fully appreciate the arc of his life.

Previous | Next