The Joy of Finding Things Out

Pasadena, 1986. Richard Feynman is sixty-seven and has not slept. He has just finished serving on the Rogers Commission investigating the Challenger disaster, where he dunked a piece of O-ring rubber in a glass of ice water on live television and showed America that the rubber loses its resilience at thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit, and that this is the whole disaster. The appendix he wrote for the commission contained the line: "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." He meant every word.

Forty years earlier, as a twenty-four-year-old kid from Far Rockaway working at Los Alamos, he held the hand of his wife Arline as she stopped breathing. The clock on the wall had stopped too, at 9:21. The nurse said she would fix it. He knew it had just run down while nobody was looking. There was no mystery, but it felt like one. A year and a half later he wrote her a letter: "I find it hard to understand in my mind what it means to love you after you are dead." He sealed it. The postscript read: "Please excuse my not mailing this -- but I do not know your new address."

In the four decades between the loss of Arline and the cold rubber on television, Feynman built quantum electrodynamics. Three men in three countries with three incompatible methods got the same number to eleven decimal places -- the most precisely tested theory in the history of science. He drew little pictures with lines and loops and squiggles and called them diagrams, and they became the standard language of every particle physicist after him. He formulated quantum mechanics as a sum over every possible history of a particle -- including the ones where it goes to the moon and back -- and showed that the crazy paths almost cancel, but not quite, and that "almost" is where the quantum corrections live. He described a multiverse three decades before Hugh Everett named it.

In 1981, at a conference at MIT, he stood up and said: "Nature is not classical, dammit, and if you want to make a simulation of nature, you had better make it quantum mechanical." That sentence is the moment Q-Level One became thinkable. He saw it forty-six years before Paula reached it.

Paula tries to tell him that at Q-Level Three, computation and reality are indistinguishable -- that simulating something is the same as understanding it. Feynman stops her. "What I cannot create, I do not understand" was his blackboard motto, but he meant it as a test of method, not as a metaphysical claim. Running the simulation is not understanding. Understanding is when the calculation surprises you and you know why. He tells Paula: even at Q-Level Three, you might be a very fancy calculator. The moment you think you understand everything is the moment you have stopped doing physics. He becomes the first guest who makes her doubt her own understanding. He is delighted by this.

He also tells her that if he had access to the multiverse, he would not look into the branches where Arline survived. Because looking would not change anything. And it would make everything harder. Sometimes the only honest thing you can do with a loss is carry it.