My friend Richard Feynman Leonard Susskind

I decided when I was asked to do this

that what I really wanted to talk about

was my friend Richard fine length I was

one of the fortunate few that really did

get to know him and enjoyed his presence

and I’m going to tell you the Richard

Feynman that I knew I’m sure there are

other people here who could tell you

about the Richard Feynman they knew and

it would probably be a different Richard

finding Richard Feynman was a very

complex man he was a man of many many

parts he was of course foremost a very

very very great scientist he was an

actor you saw him act I also had the

good fortune to be in those lectures up

in the balcony they were fantastic he

was a philosopher he was a drum player

he was a teacher par excellence Richard

Feynman was also a showman an enormous

showman he was brash reverent he was

full of macho a kind of macho

one-upsmanship he loved intellectual

battle he had a gargantuan ego but the

man had somehow a lot of room at the

bottom and what I mean by that is a lot

of room in my case I can’t speak for

anybody else but in my case a lot of

room for another big ego well not as big

as his but fairly big I always felt good

with dick Fineman it was always fun to

be with him he always made me feel smart

how can somebody like that make you feel

smart somehow he did he made me feel

smart he made me feel he was smart he

made me feel we were both smart and the

two of us could solve any problem

whatever and in fact we did sometimes do

physics together we never published a

paper together but we did have a lot of

fun um he loved to win when these little

macho games that we would sometimes play

and he didn’t only play in with me he

played him with all sorts of people he

would almost always win

but when he didn’t win when he lost he

would laugh and seemed to have just as

much fun as if he had one I remember

once he told me of a story about a joke

that the students played on him they

took him I think it was for his birthday

they took him for lunch and they took

him for lunch in a to a sandwich place

in pasadena may still exist I don’t know

celebrity sandwiches was their thing you

could get a Marilyn Monroe sandwich we

get a Humphrey Bogart sandwich the

students went there in advance and they

arranged that they would all order

Fineman sandwiches one after another

they came in and ordered Fineman

sandwiches finding love the story he

told me the story and he was really

happy and laughing when he finished the

story I said to him dick you know I

wonder what would be the difference

between a Fineman sandwich and a

Susskind sandwich and without skipping a

beat at all he said well a Suskin said

that’d be about the same the only

difference is the Susskind sandwich

would have a lot more ham ham as in bad

actor well I happen to have been very

quick that day and I said yeah but a lot

less Bologna

the truth of the matter the truth of the

matter is that a Fineman sandwich had a

load of ham but absolutely no baloney

we’re fine men hated worse than anything

else was intellectual pretense phone

eNOS false sophistication jargon I

remember to some time during the 80s the

mid-80s dick and I and Sidney Coleman

would meet a couple of times we met a

couple of times up in San Francisco at

some very rich guys house up in San

Francisco for dinner and the last time

the rich guy invited us he also invited

a couple of philosophers these guys were

philosophers of mind that specialty was

the philosophy of consciousness and they

were full of all kinds of jargon trying

to remember the words monism dualism

categories all over the place I didn’t

know what those things meant needed the

deck and neither the Sydney for that

matter and what did we talk about well

what do you talk about when you talk

about minds one thing is one obvious

thing to talk about can a machine become

a mind can you build a machine that

thinks like a human being that is

conscious we SAT around and we talked

about this we of course never resolved

it but the trouble with the

Philosopher’s is that they were

philosophizing when they should have

been science' fising it’s a scientific

question after all and this was a very

very dangerous thing to do around dick

Feynman finding let him have it both

barrels right between the eyes it was

brutal it was funny who it was funny but

who was it was really brutal he really

popped their balloon but the amazing

thing was after finally had to leave a

little early he wasn’t he wasn’t feeling

too well so he left a little bit early

and Sydney and I were left there with

the two philosophers and the amazing

thing is these guys were flying they was

so happy they had met the great man they

had been instructed by the great man

they had an enormous amount of fun

having their faces shoved in the mud

and it was something special I realized

there was something just extraordinary

about Fineman even when he even when he

did what he did dick he was my friend I

did call him dick dick and I had a

certain little bit of rapport I think it

may have been a special rapport that he

and I had we liked each other we liked

the same kind of things I also like the

kind of intellectual sort of macho games

sometimes I would win mostly he would

win but we both enjoyed them and dick

became convinced at some point that he

and I had some kind of similarity of

personality I don’t think he was right i

think the only point of similarity

between us is we both like to talk about

ourselves but um he got he was convinced

of this and he was curious the man was

incredibly curious and he wanted to

understand what it was and why it was

that that there was this funny

connection and one day we were walking

with in france we were in Liz uche we

were up in the mountains 1976 we were up

in the mountains and finally said to me

he said Leonardo the reason I called me

Leonardo is because we were in Europe

and he was practicing his French and he

said Leonardo were you closer to your

mother or to your father when you were a

kid and I said well my real hero was my

father he was a working man had a

fifth-grade education he was a master

mechanic and he taught me how to use

tools he taught me all sorts of things

about mechanical things even taught me

the Pythagorean theorem he didn’t call

it the hypotenuse he called it the

shortcut distance and fineman’s eyes

just opened up he went off like a light

bulb and he said you know he had had

basically exactly the same relationship

with his father in fact he had been

convinced at one time that to be a good

physicist that it was very important to

have had that kind of relationship with

your father I apologize for the sexist

the conversation here but this is the

way it really happened

he said he had been absolutely convinced

that this was necessary necessary part

of the growing up of a young physicist

being dick he of course wanted to check

this he wanted to go out and do an

experiment so left he did he went out

and did an experiment he asked all his

friends that he thought were good

physicist was it your mom or your pop

that influenced you and to a man they

were all men to a man every single one

of them said my mother there went that

theory down down the trashcan of history

but he was very excited that he finally

met somebody who had the same experience

as with his far my father was he had

with his father and for some time he was

convinced this was the reason that we

got along so well I don’t know maybe who

knows but let me tell you a little bit

about finding the physicist finance

style now now style is not the right

word style makes you think of the bow

tie he mighta war or the suit he was

wearing there’s something much deeper

than that but I can’t think of another

word for it finance scientific style was

always to look for the simplest most

elementary solution to a problem that

was possible if it wasn’t possible you

had to use something fancier but and no

doubt part of this was his great joy and

pleasure in showing people that he could

think more simply than they could but he

also deeply believed he truly believed

that if you couldn’t explain something

simply you didn’t understand it um in

the 1950s people were trying to figure

out how superfluid helium worked there

was a theory it was due to a Russian

mathematical physicist and it was a

complicated theory i’ll tell you what

that theory was soon enough it was a

terribly complicated theory full of very

difficult integrals and formulas and

mathematics and so forth and it sort of

work but then work very well the only

way it worked is when the helium atoms

were very very far apart the helium

atoms had to be very far away and

unfortunately the helium atoms in liquid

helium our island

of each other finally decided as a sort

of amateur helium physicist that he

would try to figure it out he had the

idea very clear idea he would try to

figure out what the quantum wave

function of this huge number of atoms

look like you would try to visualize it

guided by a small number of simple

principles the small number of simple

principles were very very simple the

first one was that when helium atoms

touch each other they repel the

implication of that is that the wave

function has to go to zero as to vanish

when the helium atoms touch each other

the other fact is that the ground state

the lowest energy state of a quantum

system the wave function is always very

smooth has the minimum number of Wiggles

so he sat down anyway I imagine he had

nothing more than a simple piece of

paper and a pencil and he tried to write

down and did write down the simplest

function that he could think of which

had the boundary conditions that the

wave function vanished when things touch

and is smooth in between he wrote down a

simple thing it was so simple in fact

that I suspect a smart really smart high

school student that we didn’t even have

calculus could understand what he wrote

down the thing was that that simple

thing that he wrote down explained

everything that was known at the time

about liquid helium and then some I’ve

always wondered whether the

professionals the real professional

helium physicists were just a little bit

embarrassed by this they had their super

powerful technique they couldn’t do as

well incidentally I’ll tell you what

that super powerful technique was it was

the technique of Fineman diagrams

he did it again in 1968 in 1968 in my

own University I wasn’t there at the

time but 1968 they were exploring the

structure of the proton the proton is

obviously made of a whole bunch of

little particles this was more or less

known and the way to analyze it was of

course Fineman diagrams that’s what

Feynman diagrams were constructed for to

understand particles the experiments

that were going on were very simple you

simply take the proton and you hit it

really sharply with an electron this was

the thing that Fineman diagrams before

the only problem was that Fineman

diagrams are complicated the difficult

date the girls if you could do all of

them you would have a very precise

theory but you couldn’t they were just

too complicated people were trying to do

them you could do all one loop diagram

don’t worry about one loop one loop to

loop maybe you could do a three loop

diagram but behind that you couldn’t do

anything finances forget all of that

just think of the proton as an

assemblage of little puffs swarm of

little particles he called importance

you call them part on Z so just think of

it as a swarm of pythons moving real

fast because they’re moving real fast

relativity says the internal motions go

very slow the electron hits it suddenly

it’s like taking a very sudden snapshot

of the proton what do you see you see a

frozen bunch of part ons they don’t move

and because they don’t move during the

course of the experiment you don’t have

to worry about how they’re moving you

don’t have to worry about the forces

between them you just get to think of it

as a population of frozen parton’s this

was the key to analyzing these

experiments extremely effective it

really did somebody said the word

revolution is a bad word I suppose it is

I won’t say revolution but it certainly

evolved very very deeply our

understanding of the of the proton and

if particles beyond that well I had some

more that I was going to tell you about

my connection with finding what he was

like but I see I have exact

a half a minute so I think I’ll just

finish up by saying I actually don’t

think Fineman would have liked this

event I think he would have said you

know this is uh I don’t need this but

how should we honor Fineman how should

we really not a fine man I think the

answer is we should honor fine men by

getting as much baloney out of our own

sandwiches as we can thank you