Richard Feynman doesn't do anything
The physicist Richard Feynman on deep work and refusing demands
Rick Rubin has a series on his podcast Tetragrammaton where he simulates a conversation between himself and a well known figure.
When I first heard this interview I thought he’d generated an AI voice trained on real interviews with physicist Richard Feynman, since Feynman passed decades earlier. But I soon realized he’d taken audio from a recorded interview with Feynman and added in his own questions and comments to flow in a natural conversational tone.
I have a physics background, and Richard Feynman’s work had a big impact on me. He was very grounded, and very driven by his own quest for understanding. He had an irreverence and a distaste for authority figures. His father instilled in him a skepticism about figures like the Pope (who his father hated), who wore a specific uniform and had a title, and people bowed to him.
Feynman talks about how he protects his time for creative work. He insists on taking extended periods of deep work, in order to assemble a fragile “house of cards” made of many interlocking ideas. In order to work out the physics theory, he says, he has to have the freedom to think uninterrupted. And in order to do that, he takes the position that he doesn’t do anything. He’s “actively irresponsible”:
I have invented a myth for myself, that I’m irresponsible. I’m actively irresponsible I tell everybody. I don’t do anything. If anybody asks me to be on a committee to take care of admissions, “no I’m irresponsible, I don’t give a damn about the students.” Of course I give a damn about the students, but I know that somebody else will do it. And I take the view, “let George do it.” A view which you’re not supposed to take okay? Because then that’s not right. But I do that because I like to do physics, and I want to see if I can still do it. And so I’m selfish okay? I want to do my physics!
When I heard this part of the interview I perked up. Instead of succumbing to the pressure from the administration at his university to take on tasks, he chose to do what interested him and excited him the most. Feynman made it clear to people he worked with that he wouldn’t respond to demands on his time.
Feynman describes how he took this position when was working with his mentor Hans Bethe. He told Bethe, he was just going to work on things that were fun. He noticed something interesting about a spinning top, seemingly a very random thing to be doing. He started playing around with the equations of motion for the top, and he worked out how the wobble of the top would precess around at a different frequency from the spin. He was exploring. When Bethe asked him what the use of all this was, Feynman told him there was no use to it. He was curious about it and that was enough for him.
Feynman was doing physics for the joy of physics again. After a gruelling few years working at Los Alamos on the atomic bomb, he returned to his innate curiosity. And from the point of view of the administration at Caltech, Feynman was just wasting time.
His work on the spinning top led him to investigate the spin of the electron, which his hero Paul Dirac had worked on. Shortly thereafter, he worked out the theory of quantum electrodynamics (QED), for which he later won the Nobel Prize. Feynman’s irreverent joy of discovery led him to the most accurate physical theory ever discovered.
In a different context, someone with Feynman’s irresponsible attitude could certainly have been pathologized. He might have been disciplined. He might have been forced to toe the line of the administration. He might have been branded as “PDA”. He might have been medicated. Science would have lost out on a major advance if Feynman had fawned and obeyed the Caltech administration. His refusal of demands was connected to a much deeper instinct, a joy of discovery. The Nobel Prize meant nothing to him at all. Honors and titles were an imaginary distraction, like the robes of the Pope.