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