The Fantastic Mr Feynman

Richard Feynman was one of the most extraordinary scientists

of the 20th century.

As a brilliant physicist,

he pioneered an entirely new area of his subject.

He's discovered a new law of nature, only a very few people did that.

The most numerically precise physical theory ever invented.

Yet, he scorned the Nobel Prize he received for this work.

I've already got the prize.

The prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out.

The kick in the discovery.

Feynman's brilliance helped shape history.

As a young man, he helped to build the atom bomb,

ending the Second World War.

And yet, throughout his life, Feynman rejected authority

and refused to conform,

preferring instead to follow his passions -

from bongo playing to biology,

from poetry to painting,

from computing to cracking safes.

Feynman's fascination with the world knew no bounds.

And in his dying days,

as a maverick investigator on the Challenger shuttle disaster,

he confronted the Washington establishment

to reveal the truth about what went wrong.

This stuff that I got out of your seal,

and I put it in ice water.

Above all, Feynman's infectious enthusiasm for life

captivated millions of readers and viewers.

Feynman's been a showman pretty much his whole life.

Any room he walked into, everyone is looking at him.

He was the centre of attention.

Electrons behave exactly the same in this respect as protons.

That is, they're both screwy, but in exactly the same way.

Here, in his own words and those of the people who knew him best,

this is the story of the most captivating communicator

in the history of science.

But you got to stop and think about the complexity,

the INCONCEIVABLE nature of nature!

When my mother was pregnant first,

my father said, "If he's a boy,

"I want him to be a scientist."

Richard Phillips Feynman was born on the 11th May 1918,

during the Depression,

to working-class parents living in the outskirts of New York.

Even when I was a small boy,

Poppa used to sit me on his lap

and read to me from the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

And he would read, say, about dinosaurs.

It would say something like,

"This thing is 25 feet high

"and the head is six feet across."

And so, he'd stop always and say, "Let's see what that means.

"That would mean that if he stood in our front yard,

"he would be high enough to put his head through the window.

"But not quite, cos the head is a little bit too wide."

It was very exciting and interesting to think

that there were animals of such magnitude,

and that they all died out

and at that time, nobody knew why.

So that's the way I was educated by my father.

By the age of ten, Richard had his own science laboratory at home,

where he tinkered with old radios

and experimented with physics.

He hired me, for four cents a week,

as his lab assistant,

to amaze his friends.

You know, there was a spark gap

with voltage against it...

..and if you put your finger in,

you get a shock.

It was my job, as part of my four cents,

to put my finger in this spark gap for his friends' amusement.

Their father, Melville Feynman,

worked for a company which made uniforms.

This exposure to the military led to a strong rejection of authority,

a value he instilled in his son.

One of the things that my father taught me was a disrespect.

He'd open a picture, a New York Times, maybe it was a General,

and he'd say, "Now, look at these humans," he'd say.

"Here's one human standing here and all these others are bowing.

"Now, what is the difference? Why are they all bowing to him?

"Only because of his name and his position.

"Because of his uniform.

"Not because of something he especially did."

At the age of 17, Feynman won a maths competition in New York

and it became clear this was a subject

in which he was greatly gifted.

In 1935, he was awarded a place

at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT.

But away from home for the first time,

he was going to miss more than just his family.

She was very beautiful,

Arline Greenbaum,

the most beautiful girl on the beach.

She had great dimples and long hair down to here, when she unbraided it.

Oh, we loved her!

They were not officially engaged, she was only 15.

She was sweet.

We all loved her, she loved all of us.

From MIT, Feynman moved to Princeton,

achieving full marks in the maths and physics entrance exam -

an unprecedented feat.

But back home, things weren't as perfect.

The family went away for a spring vacation

with Arline.

We went swimming

and my father saw this lump on Arline's neck

and said to her, "What is that?"

And she didn't know, but she went to a doctor

and it was the tuberculosis.

We were all heartbroken.

It was before there was any medicine for it.

And although she was sick and dying, he married her,

because he wanted to take care of her.

It was very hard on my mother,

because she was afraid he would catch tuberculosis.

But...

..my mother wasn't given a choice.

The couple braced themselves for life in the shadow of TB.

But another menace was about to disrupt their time together.

Just months before Richard and Arline were married,

America was drawn into the Second World War,

following the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Feynman was asked if he wanted to join a top-secret project

based in a Government laboratory at Los Alamos, in New Mexico.

Code-named Manhattan,

its objective was to build an atom bomb.

The fear was that Germany

would invent such a terrifying new weapon first

and use it to win the war.

There was nothing that I knew that indicated

that if we could do it, they couldn't do it

and therefore, it was very important to try to cooperate.

Germany was the centre,

the intellectual centre of theoretical physics.

They knew the power of this - that if Germany got this first,

we have to make sure that they don't rule the world.

I felt I should do in order to protect civilisation, if you want.

Feynman became a member of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos.

Here, he joined some of the world's finest physicists,

pooling their combined brainpower to try to create the bomb.

Oppenheimer was in charge of the scientific or engineering side.

And he was quite a heavyweight.

Fermi, Niels Bohr...

You know, the big names of extremely high level.

Despite being surrounded by extraordinary physicists,

the challenge of developing an atom bomb so quickly

was an enormous undertaking.

One fundamental problem

was the sheer volume of calculations required.

Without computers, it had to be done manually,

slowing progress enormously.

That was, until Feynman arrived.

He found a way to get calculations going in parallel.

Still manually, still each person doing one operation at a time,

but working in parallel and then,

having the parts of the calculation come back together later,

so that three problems in nine months got turned around

to nine big problems done in three months.

'I put on the blackboard a challenge, "Can we do it?", to the boys.

'They all start, "Yes, we'll work double shifts, we'll work overtime,"

'"We'll try it!"

'As a result, we did problems nearly ten times as fast.'

He somehow got this team of human computers

to work at an inhuman pace

and got things to roll.

And that was when his scientific seniors,

the big shots of science at that time,

first became aware of this fellow.

Despite being a key member

of the most secret Government project of the war,

Feynman's streak of maverick mischief was never far away.

'So I used to pick the locks all the time

'and point out that it was very easy to do,

'and every time we had a meeting of the whole...everybody together,

'I'd get up and I'd say that we have important secrets

'and we shouldn't keep them in such thing. We need better locks!'

Between safecracking and doing physics calculations,

the pace of life at Los Alamos was relentless.

But for Feynman, it was a welcome distraction.

In a sanatorium nearby,

his wife Arline was confined to her bed,

slowly dying of her disease.

At that time,

dry climates were believed to be good for tuberculosis.

So although he was at high altitude,

she was at a lower altitude, in a hospital.

I remember the day she died.

She was 25.

He was 27.

He was broken-hearted.

Then, in the aftermath of his grief,

Feynman was forced to confront the reality

of what he had helped create.

'They gave out dark glasses that you could watch it with.

'20 miles away,

'you are not going to see a damn thing through dark glasses.

'Well, I figured the only thing that could really hurt your eyes,

'bright light never can hurt your eyes, is ultraviolet light that does.

'So I got behind a truck windshield,

'so the ultraviolet can't go through glass, so that would be safe

'and so, I could see the damn thing.

'I'm about the only guy in the world

'that actually looked at the damn thing in the first Trinity test.'

Three weeks later, America prepared to detonate a second atom bomb.

This time, it wasn't a test.

He had been...

..expected to go as the scientist,

with the first flight.

But the bomb was so successful,

they decided they didn't need a scientist, so he did not go.

Otherwise, he would have been in that plane.

The bomb exploded above the Japanese city of Hiroshima,

on the 6th August 1945.

It killed more than 80,000 people.

Three days later, a second bomb was detonated - at Nagasaki.

There was a very considerable elation and excitement.

And there was kind of parties and people got drunk and...

..it would make a tremendously interesting contrast

of what was going on in Los Alamos

at the same time as what was going on in Hiroshima.

Feynman was deeply disturbed by the knowledge

he had contributed to the deaths of so many.

He had had this great triumph on the technical level at Los Alamos,

and then, of course, a terrible let down afterwards...

..having run this tremendous race, and then, at the end of it,

concluding that it wasn't, in fact...

..worthwhile.

In the months after this double trauma -

first, losing his wife,

then, realising the destruction he'd helped unleash,

Feynman was thrown into darkness.

Maybe from just the bomb itself,

and maybe for some other psychological reasons,

I had just lost my wife,

I was really in a kind of depressive condition.

In the autumn of 1945,

Feynman was invited to become a professor

in the Physics Department at Cornell University.

But he was still shaken by the events of the summer.

They expected me to be wonderful to offer me a job like this,

and I wasn't wonderful.

I though to myself, "I haven't done anything important.

"And I'm never going to do anything important."

But I used to enjoy physics and mathematical things

and because I used to play with it, it was never very important.

But I used to do things for the fun of it.

So I decided, I'm going to do things only for the fun of it.

While Feynman was rediscovering the fun in physics,

science was in crisis.

For many years, new discoveries about how atoms behave

had been throwing physics into turmoil.

Old assumptions about the world were being proved wrong.

This new problematic area of physics was christened Quantum Mechanics.

Quantum Mechanics, in a lot of ways,

was the most profound psychological shock

that physicists have ever had in all of history.

Newton was not right.

You can know everything there is to know about the world

and yet, you cannot predict with perfect accuracy

what will happen next.

Quantum Mechanics had revealed the problems

of accurately predicting how atoms

and their electromagnetic forces would behave.

And because these are the fundamental building blocks

of nature, it threw everything else into doubt too.

Everything that happens around you, other than gravity,

all the immediately experienceable parts of the world,

are electromagnetism at work.

When two atoms get together to form a molecule,

that's electromagnetism, so all of chemistry is electromagnetism.

And if that means all of chemistry is electromagnetism,

then, guess what?

All of biology is electromagnetism.

Literally, everything around us is a manifestation of electromagnetism

one way or another.

A new field, called Quantum Electro-Dynamics, or QED, emerged

to try to make sense of electromagnetism

and sub-atomic matter.

Sometimes QED seemed to work,

but other times, its predictions were way off.

It was all crazy, it didn't make any sense. It gave you infinity.

Infinity is not an answer. Nothing is infinity.

We don't measure in the lab infinity, you get a finite answer.

You can't have your basic fundamental theory of physics

give you infinity.

These predictions of infinity

were stumping the smartest physicists on the planet.

Even the father of QED, Paul Dirac, was foxed.

When I was a kid, I read Dirac's book,

and he had these problems that nobody knew how to solve

which he described there.

I couldn't understand the book very well

because I really wasn't up to it.

But there, in the last paragraph at the end of the book, it said,

"Some new ideas are here needed."

And so, there I was, some new ideas were needed.

OK, so I started to think of new ideas.

Perhaps typically,

Feynman's inspiration for his new ideas was unconventional.

When I was eating lunch,

some kid threw up a plate in the cafeteria

which has a blue medallion on the plate,

the Cornell sign in the cafeteria.

And as he threw up the plate and it came down,

it wobbled and the blue thing went around like this.

And I wondered what the relation was between the two.

See, I was just playing.

No importance at all.

So I played around with the equations

of motion of rotating things.

And I kept continuing to play with it.

And this rotation lead me to a similar problem

of the rotational of the spin of the electron

according to Dirac's equations.

And that just lead me back

into quantum electro-dynamics

Everything just poured out.

It was just like letting a cork

out of a bottle.

Inspired by the spinning plate,

Feynman realised that the fact the equations resulted in infinity

didn't mean they were wrong.

The problem just needed to be looked at from a new perspective.

It turns out that that kind of challenge was perfectly suited

for someone like Richard Feynman,

who, surprisingly maybe, didn't like to speculate.

He wasn't the kind of modern physicist that we celebrate

who's always coming up with a new theory of the multi-verse

or forces of nature or whatever.

He really liked to work in the context

of things that were supposed to be understood

and just understand them better than anybody else.

To work around the infinites in QED,

Feynman came up with a truly revolutionary idea.

It was such a strange solution not even his sister,

by then, a physicist herself,

recognised it as serious work.

Richard said to me, "Would you go in the room and get my papers?

"I want to start working and my papers are in there."

So I went in the room, and I looked...

there was no mathematics, it was these silly little diagrams,

and I came out and said,

"Richard, I can't find your papers,

"it's just these kind

"of silly diagrams."

He says, "That is my work!"

The simple little diagrams Feynman had invented

were a brilliant way to sidestep the complicated calculations

required for QED.

They were a sort of shortcut,

allowing him to avoid the infinities

and make meaningful predictions about the world.

He saw that there was actually a sort of pictorial way

of thinking about these pictures, these equations.

You could associate a little cartoon,

a little Feynman diagram, as we now call them,

to every one of these terms in the equation.

Other people would have to work for months

and he would get it in an afternoon.

And eventually, that's what got his ideas noticed,

because he's getting the right answer

and he's doing it much simpler,

even though no-one understood what he was doing.

It turns out to be so useful that now we're applying it

to completely different fields that aren't particle physics at all.

When we look at the evolution of galaxies

and large scale structure in the universe,

we're finding that Feynman diagrams

are a helpful way of calculating those quantities as well.

Quantum Electrodynamics,

which is the theory that Feynman put the finishing touches on,

is the most numerically precise physical theory ever invented.

In recognition of this work, in 1965,

Feynman was awarded a Nobel Prize for Physics.

He shared it with two other physicists,

Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga,

who were also working on the same problem.

Was it worth a Nobel Prize?

I don't know.

I don't know anything about the Nobel Prize.

I don't understand what it's all about or what's worth what

and if the people in the Swedish Academy decide

that X, Y or Z wins the Nobel Prize, then so be it!

I think it was entirely right and proper.

It was one of the best-earned Nobel Prizes

there ever was, I would say.

I don't see that it makes any point that someone in the Swedish Academy

decides that this work is noble enough to receive a prize.

I've already got the prize.

The prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out.

The kick in the discovery.

The observation other people use it.

Those are the real things!

The honours are unreal to me.

I don't believe in honours.

It bothers me. Honours bothers me!

Honours is epaulettes. Honours is uniforms.

My Poppa brought me up this way. I can't stand it. It hurts me.

In 1959, on a trip to Europe,

Feynman met Yorkshire woman Gweneth Howarth.

A year later, they were married.

Back in California, now Professor of Physics at Caltech,

Richard and Gweneth started a family.

I got a kick, when I was a boy, of my father telling me things,

so I tried to tell my son things that were interesting about the world.

He was an excellent father.

Always up to explaining things or do things.

We would go on walks after dinner, my father and I,

and talk about things and...and it was, you know,

it was wonderful and delightful.

I asked him about things and he tried to explain them.

Physics and math and history and politics and science fiction

and life, the universe and everything.

I'm very lucky that I got to do that two or three times a week.

Say, "Let's go for a walk." Sure!

Growing up with Richard Feynman as your dad was never dull,

particularly if you were his teenage daughter.

My parents ordered a car, a van that we could all go camping in,

and they had it painted,

which was so...so odd,

because they weren't like this at all.

My father may have been immune to embarrassment,

but I certainly was not!

And they had, you know, the diagrams painted on it.

So most people thought they were Indian designs,

but I remember once we'd just gone to McDonalds

and we were in the parking lot and walking out to the car,

and someone asked us, "Why is your van covered in Feynman diagrams?"

And Mother says, "Because we're the Feynmans!"

Feynman's reputation as a communicator of science

was spreading around the world.

In the early 1960s,

he began presenting lectures for the public, which were televised.

APPLAUSE

I'm going to discuss how we would look for a new law.

In general, we look for a new law by the following process.

First, we guess it.

LAUGHTER

Don't laugh. That's really true.

Then we compute the consequences of the guess.

If it disagrees with the experiment...

..it's wrong.

In that simple statement is the key to science.

It doesn't make a difference how beautiful your guess is.

It doesn't make a difference how smart you are,

who made the guess, or what his name is.

If it disagrees with the experiment, it's wrong.

That's all there is to it.

LAUGHTER

Caltech invited him to re-write the physics curriculum

for undergraduates. His new course,

spanning the entire history of physics,

became known as 'The Feynman Lectures.'

All these lectures had a certain amount of excitement...

and an element of what you might call

solid showbiz demonstration.

I'm sure you're all familiar with the joke

about the fact that the average family in the United States

seems to have two-and-a-half children.

It doesn't mean that there's a half a child in any family, whatever,

the children come in lumps!

LAUGHTER

He was very visual. He told jokes.

He had a unique way of explaining things

and sometimes that was a slight problem

because he was so engaging, you'd walk out of a lecture thinking,

"Well, that all made complete sense."

But, of course, five minutes later, you couldn't really remember all the connections.

You were just swept along by Feynman's personality,

by his humour, by his analogies.

Graduate students started idolising him,

but by the 1960s his course here at Caltech was very famous.

Outside science, Feynman's interests were also flourishing.

He'd become an accomplished bongo player.

And he developed a love of painting and drawing,

based on a close friendship

with renowned Californian artist, Jirayr Zorthian.

"Jirayr", he said. "You don't know a thing about physics,

"and I don't know a thing about art.

"And yet we both admire Leonardo Da Vinci.

"What do you say, we become two Leonardo da Vincis?

He said, "One Sunday I will give you a day of physics

"and the following Sunday, you give me a day of art.

When he started, he was absolutely an amateur.

Just very, very...crude.

He drew a picture of me when I was,

when I was young and very fidgety,

and, and it just has, you know he just has my, my head,

some hair, and then, and then like my hands up here,

so clearly I was kind of like, "Oh, I don't really want to do this."

It's pure with his, um, that he can see the gesture.

I think he maybe got a kick out of working with his hands,

but particularly the pen and doing features of people.

In the end, he became a very accomplished draftsman.

So enthusiastic an art student was Feynman,

that he took to spending time in Giannoni's, a strip bar in Pasadena.

Here, he divided his attention between sketching the girls

and solving physics equations.

Other physicists couldn't understand it.

And say, "You know, Feynman is supposed to be a physicist

"and he is a brilliant, brilliant physicist

"and we need his input very often in Caltech.

"We need him to talk to us about physics.

But what does he do?

He goes off and spends all his time with go-go girls,

bongo drummers and artists.

He wastes so much time.

'I don't see what they give him.'

'But I think that Feynman got a lot out of these people

'and it enriched his life.'

In the 1960s, Feynman took a sabbatical year.

But instead of heading for a different physics department

the other side of the country, he simply crossed the Caltech campus

to study an area which had long fascinated him - viruses.

During this time, he also became fascinated

by the social structure of ants

and enthralled by the potential applications of nanotechnology.

In the long term of what he wanted to do this year and next year,

he would think about...

figuring out some secret of the universe,

but in terms of day-to-day or hour-to-hour

he was always guided by, what seemed interesting and fun

and just sort of an intuition for the right thing to work on.

In the early 1980s, his son Carl's budding career

in the emerging field of super computers proved irresistible.

He signed up for a summer job at Carl's start-up company in Boston.

'We were a bunch of MIT students starting a company.'

So, the first day we start the company,

literally, I get this knock on the door, I open the door.

And he showed up and he said, "Feynman reporting for duty, what should I do?"

Salutes.

I think, "Uh oh, I haven't figured out what I'll do with this guy!"

I mean, I've got a Nobel Prize winning great physicist...

So, I've had a quick meeting

and trying to come up with some project that was worthy of Feynman.

So, some people said, "We want you to think about applications

"of our parallel computing."

The application of parallel processing to quantum croma-dynamics.

He said, "No, come on, that's, that's nonsense, you know."

"What do you really want me to do?

And, I said, "Well, actually, you know

"we don't really have any pencils or paper..."

He said, "Right, I'll go out and buy some!"

So, his first duty was to go out and buy the stationery for the company.

All the paper clips and pencils and so on.

That was his first assignment.

'Thinking Machines', as the company was called,

would go on to become a major player

in the world of Parallel Super-computing,

with Feynman applying his methods of shortening calculations,

developed in the 1940s, to the new digital age.

And as always, working with Feynman

was filled with welcome distractions.

We both liked spaghetti, because it was easy to cook,

and I ask him why it was that when you broke a piece of spaghetti

it often broke into three pieces, instead of two?

You should try it, it really does.

So, of course, he came up with a theory of it immediately,

but instead of being satisfied with it

he constructed an experiment to see if the theory was true,

which involved slowly moving the spaghetti off the end of the table

and breaking it at different lengths.

And then, that theory was wrong and he came up with another theory

and then each theory would lead to another experiment.

By the time the evening was over, we had broken spaghetti

all over the place and we STILL didn't know why

spaghetti broke in three places.

This playful curiosity coupled with the anti-authoritarian values,

instilled by his father, frequently led Feynman down a mischievous path.

He's just so funny and irreverent.

You have to kind of look at that picture a few minutes and think...

"Oh my gosh, he's really, you know!

"Making nice little horns!"

Important people. You know. "Oh yes, I think now would be a great time."

He didn't need the external validation

of having everybody respecting him all the time,

because he respected himself, he knew he was an extraordinary person.

And if he came off as kind of a doofus

to some guy that he doesn't know, it's OK.

Because he knows inside that he's a man of substance.

In 1984, Feynman collaborated with his friend, Ralph Leighton

on a humorous book of anecdotes from his life.

'I opened the safes which contained all the secrets to the atomic bomb.'

It was kind of accidental how the books caught on.

The publisher released the first one,

Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman, in January of 1985.

And the edition was like 2,000 copies or some low number.

And in January.

I was thinking, January, the whole holiday season is over,

who's going to buy a book in January?

But people did buy it.

And Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman quickly became a best seller.

It remains to this day,

one of the biggest-selling science books of all time.

I do remember coming down one evening and seeing him

just, you know, giggling

and clearly enjoying the book that he was reading.

And I sort of looked, you know, "What are you reading?"

And he held up the book so I could see that it was his own,

Surely You're Joking. And he said, "Ah, such a character."

Freely admitting that, yes, he was laughing at his own history.

The book vividly captured Feynman's world view,

the sense of curiosity and fun guiding him through life.

It was an approach he communicated to an even bigger audience through

a series of BBC documentaries, broadcast around the world.

I have a friend who's an artist and he's sometimes taken a view,

which I don't agree with very well.

You hold up a flower and say, "Look how beautiful it is." And I'll agree.

And he says, I, as an artist, can see how beautiful this is,

but you, as a scientist,

take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing.

And I think that he's kind of nutty.

First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people

and to me too.

I believe, although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically

as he is, that I can appreciate the beauty of the flower.

At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees.

I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside,

which also have a beauty.

I mean, it's not just beauty at this dimension of one centimetre,

there's also beauty at a smaller dimensions, the inner structure.

Also the processes.

The fact that the colours and the flower are evolved in order to

attract insects to pollinate it is interesting.

It means that insects can see the colour.

It adds a question,

does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms?

Why is it aesthetic?

All kinds of interesting questions, which a science knowledge only adds

to the excitement and mystery and the aura of a flower.

It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts.

Most people only have a few stories.

You and I might have three or four stories to tell.

Some people have ten, and Feynman had hundreds.

And Feynman was so mesmerizing.

I think Chris Sykes in his documentaries,

captured Feynman how he was.

He takes enormous pleasure in finding out about things

and exploring life and everything it has to offer.

More than that, he takes tremendous pleasure in telling you about it.

I think he was pleased with how it worked out,

that he was able to communicate with so many people,

sort of his view of the world and of nature and so on.

When I was a student at Caltech, I went up to Feynman's door

and knocked on it and a door opened and I explained

that my mother had watched his programme about him,

thought he was interesting, she had no science background,

and I said, "Do you think you could write to her

"because maybe I'll have a better chance of teaching her physics?"

And Feynman did write to her. He wrote a letter in which he said,

"Dear Mrs Chown. Ignore your son's attempts to teach you physics.

"Physics is not the most important thing. Love is."

So it kind of backfired.

I got the greatest living physicist at the time

telling my mother that physics isn't important.

That love was the important thing.

Through his films and books, Feynman had touched the lives of millions.

Yet there was something all this success

and recognition couldn't alter.

I did a lot of running and Feynman thought,

gee, that's a healthy thing to do, so he started running too.

And when you start running regularly, you lose weight.

And Feynman suddenly noticed that one side kind of bulged out.

They discovered a big mass in his abdomen.

He came home and reported,

"It's the size of a football. It's consumed one whole kidney."

And he says, "Well, I went to the medical library

"and I looked things up and I figure

"it's about a 30% chance it'll kill me."

So, you know, not the kind of thing you want to hear from your father.

But exactly the kind of thing he would say.

And...

He sort of quit working at that point, because, you know,

surgery and chemotherapy and so on, it's a full time job.

One day his secretary Helen Tuck called me up

to tell me that Dick had cancer and that he was going to the hospital

for an operation the following Friday.

It was a very dangerous operation

and it was not assured that he would survive it.

I promised not to tell anyone and he didn't know that I knew.

And I told him that somebody had found an apparent error

in a calculation that we had done and published together.

And so on Monday morning we met in my office

and he sat down and started working, and he was consumed by it.

All his energy and attention was devoted to solving this problem.

And we worked on it all day long.

And finally at six o'clock in the evening,

we decided the problem was intractable, it couldn't be solved,

we couldn't figure out what the answer was.

And we gave up and went home.

Two hours later, he called me at home to say he'd solved the problem.

He hadn't been able to give up, and stop working on it

and finally he'd found the solution.

He dictated the solution to me over the phone, told me what it was,

and he was exhilarated, absolutely walking on air.

Feynman would recover from this first operation for cancer.

But the disease would never completely go away,

and he would always be living under its shadow.

'We have main engine start. Four, three, two, one. And lift off.

'Lift off of the 25th space shuttle mission

'and it has cleared the tower.'

'Challenger go with roll programme.'

'Roger. Roll, Challenger.

'Good roll, programme.'

In January 1986, NASA launched its 25th space shuttle mission.

It symbolized a new era of space flight by adding a school teacher

called Christa McAuliffe to the crew.

'65 final. Thank you.'

'Challenger. Go with throttle up.'

I was in social studies and I think we were taking a test and

the teacher came in and said, "We've had a horrible accident."

'Flight controllers here looking very carefully at the situation.

'We have no down link.'

And then coming home, and my parents had already seen it,

which was unusual because they didn't really watch TV.

'Watch your data carefully.'

'Take hard copies of all of your displays.

'Make sure you protect any data source you have.'

The loss of their space shuttle and its crew of seven, live on TV,

shocked America. The country was thrown into mourning.

Our nation's loss is first a profound personal loss

to the family and the friends and the loved ones

of our shuttle astronauts.

But there was one question everyone wanted an answer to -

what had gone wrong?

A Presidential Commission was hastily put together to find out,

but it was comprised largely of space industry insiders

with close ties to NASA.

Someone independent with unimpeachable scientific credentials was needed.

I have a policy practically of never going near Washington.

And I called up various friends of mine

who were connected to the space programme one way or the other

and tried to ask them if they didn't see

whether I should go or somebody else could do it just as well.

His friends were, "Dick, you got to go

"cos you're the only guy who can cut through the bullshit!"

He asked me what I thought he should do

so I just asked him, "Do you think it's an important problem?"

And he said, yes he did.

I said, "Do you think you can make a difference?"

And he said, after a while, he said, "Well, yeah, probably can."

I didn't say another word.

And after a few minutes hesitation he said, "To hell with you, Hibbs,"

and hung up.

Feynman broke his policy and within days of the accident

he had joined the inquiry in Washington.

The investigation was led by William Rogers,

an ex-Secretary of State and the ultimate Washington insider.

His formal, bureaucratic approach was

the polar opposite of the freewheeling maverick professor.

Mr Rogers, he knew nothing about it.

I had been on accident boards before and I took the opportunity.

I said "Hey, I just did one of these investigations,

"would you like to see it?"

And I think reluctantly Rogers said

"Yeah, OK, you can show it to us,

"but we're not going to do it that way."

And so I went through this very logical step-by-step process

of how you investigate a space accident and Rogers said,

"No, we don't have the technical capability to do that."

And that's when Feynman butted in.

He said, "No, I like that. I think that's a smart way to go."

For Feynman and the chairman,

it was the beginning of a poor relationship,

but for the professor and the Air Force General,

it was the start of a close friendship.

And he just was the smartest guy in the world.

And he had a reputation for integrity, you know,

he was the most honest guy in the world.

He didn't accept something unless he really could prove it.

The two men began touring the US,

visiting NASA sites where the shuttle was made,

questioning the engineers and managers.

In the process of speaking to the engineers, he realised,

"Wow, some of them won't talk to me right now cos

"the managers are in the room," you know?

It wasn't simply a technical puzzle,

there was a human puzzle going on too.

Writing home to Michelle and Gweneth,

Feynman expressed his frustration and excitement

at his hunt for the truth.

'Dearest Gweneth and Michelle.

'This is the first time I have had time to write to you.

'I already smell certain rats that I will not forget because I just

'love the smell of rats, for it is the spore of exciting adventure.'

But there was a problem, NASA managers didn't want to reveal

the full extent of their knowledge.

The result was a smokescreen.

NASA wanted to control everything that they gave

to the Commission and actually withheld things.

They didn't lie,

but they certainly didn't go around blabbing the truth either.

What Feynman didn't know was that

General Kutyna had a secret source inside NASA.

Sally Ride was America's first woman in space

and another Commission member.

She privately told the general that NASA had long had doubts

about how the rubber O-rings,

the seals in the shuttle's solid rocket boosters,

worked in the cold.

The temperature on the morning of the launch had been below freezing.

The general needed to get this information to Feynman

without compromising his source.

The chance came after supper one evening at Kutyna's house.

The general restored classic cars.

I took him out in the garage to show him the car

and Feynman really isn't interested in cars.

So we walked around the car and I showed him the interior

and I showed him where the engine was.

And Feynman looked at my work bench

and he sees a couple of carburettors out there.

And he says, "Kutyna, what are those carburettors?"

And I said, "Oh, they're from the Opal and I keep one put together

"and then one I take apart and clean."

And then the thought came to me.

I needed to get the idea of cold and O-rings and leakage across.

I said, "You know, Professor, these doggone carburettors have O-rings

"and they leak when they're cold."

Feynman had his answer and he also had an inspired idea

about how to convey it to the world's press.

From that and the various things that you told me

about the need for resilience and the lack of resilience...

When the Commission next met, he began questioning

senior engineers about the effect of cold on the O-rings

on the morning of the launch.

Their replies were evasive,

denying that temperature could have had an effect.

Before the event, from information that was available

and the understanding that was available,

was it fully appreciated everywhere that this seal

would become unsatisfactory at some temperature?

And was there some sort of a suggestion of a temperature at which

the SR...the SRB I guess you call it...

-Yes, that's right.

-..Shouldn't be run?

It was the judgment that under the conditions that we would see

on launch day, given the configuration that we ran,

that the seal would function at that temperature.

That was the final judgment.

It was Feynman's chance.

He decided to use the power of a classic science demonstration.

During the hearings, they had that actual O-ring joint

and were passing it up the rows.

It goes to Feynman.

I'm sitting to his left and I hand it to him and he puts it down.

And then he goes into his pocket and pulls out the pliers and the

hose clamp and the screwdriver, and takes the joint apart.

Pulls out the piece of rubber O-ring, puts the clamp on it,

then I know what he's going to do.

He sees the ice water and he swears it was just kind of an accident.

He got this idea, "Wait a minute, I know I know how

"I can get data on how rubber is when it's cold."

He clamped a piece of rubber and put it in a beaker full of ice water.

I took this stuff that I got out of your seal and I put it in ice water.

And I discovered that when you put some pressure on it for a while

and then undo it, it maintains, it doesn't stretch back,

it stays the same dimension.

In other words, for a few seconds at least,

and more seconds than that, there's no resilience in this

particular material when it's at a temperature of 32 degrees.

I believe that has some significance for our problem.

The O-rings, which were supposed to create a seal

around the solid boosters, had got so cold they'd lost their ability

to flex and to fill the gap between the boosters.

And that's why the fuel had leaked and the shuttle had exploded.

Feynman had nailed, once and for all,

that the cold could have been the cause

of the shuttle's failure just 73 seconds after launch.

It really was a turning point in the investigation.

It couldn't be ignored.

In the summer of 1986, the Commission's report was submitted.

In its appendix, Feynman added a stark reminder

about the limits of science.

His last recommendation I think

really summed it up in one simple paragraph.

"For a successful technology,

"reality must take precedence over public relations,

"for nature cannot be fooled."

I remember, it was very hard on him.

He was just exhausted. He came over, he says,

"I came over to tell you that my cancer's come back again.

"Doesn't look too good."

So I don't know what we talked about and I don't know how

I got off on the subject.

I said, "I've been thinking about an invariant in turbulent flow."

He said, "What do you mean?"

I explained a little bit what it was all about.

The invariant, you know.

I said, "Well under these, such and such conditions."

And he says, "Let's see."

So I had a notebook there.

He took the notebook and he started, he wrote it all down step by step.

I think it took 13 steps to get to that.

He says, "Yes, that's true, it is an invariant."

Then he says, "You got me thinking about physics again.

"I can go home now."

Feynman went into hospital for the last time in February 1988.

His kidneys were failing and he decided

he didn't want to go through with dialysis to prolong his suffering.

I still sort of thought, "No, this isn't the way it is."

But he was able to handle a lot of physical difficulties

as long as his mind was sharp.

When a person is dying, their hands move a little.

And the nurse who was there says that he's not

trying to communicate, that's just natural.

And he raised his hands like this.

And he went like this, which, if you know it, is the symbol that

a magician gives when he's going to do a trick. OK?

And he went...

He was communicating, again, of his observations of the world.

The doctors were wrong, he could hear.

He could move if he tried hard enough.

And understand... He could hear and understand what was being said.

And those were his last words.

Richard Feynman died on the 15th February 1988

in hospital in Los Angeles at the age of just 69.

When I took my last walk with Richard Feynman, he was telling me

a bunch of funny stories, but I realised the message behind

the stories was that he was about to die of cancer and I got very sad.

And he noticed it and he asked me, "What's wrong?"

And I said, "I'm sad because I'm realising that you're about to die."

And he said, "Yeah, that bugs me sometimes too.

"But not as much as you'd think," he said, "because you realise

"that at some point in your life, you've told a lot of stories

"and those stories are going to stay around even after you're gone."

Today, over 25 years since his death,

Feynman's prophecy has more truth than he could ever have imagined.

Through an invention that hadn't been created when he died,

his stories do live on.

Because through their reimagining on the World Wide Web,

a new generation is discovering the delights of time with Feynman.

It's fantastic to just be able to Google Feynman, Richard Feynman,

you know, any kind of variation and there it is.

You have a lot of stuff out there.

I see my father referenced in popular culture a lot more now

than when he was alive.

I have a friend who's an artist and he's sometimes taken a view,

which I don't agree with very well.

You hold up a flower and say, "Look how beautiful it is." And I'll agree.

And he says, I, as an artist, can see how beautiful this is,

but you, as a scientist, take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing

and I think that he's kind of nutty.

You wonder what Feynman would have made of the internet.

And I think he would really, really like the idea

that he's spread all over the world in clips, short and long,

on the internet, for maybe all time. I think he'd like that.

You know, you just touch it like this...

FEYNMAN'S VOICE

..and you bring his voice right back, you know.

'"The whole universe is in a glass of wine."

'I don't think we'll ever know in what sense he meant that.

LAUGHTER

'For the poets don't like to be understood.'

I know what I'll remember him for.

For being a good brother and a good person.

He wasn't just the scientist, he wasn't just the artist,

he wasn't just the educator.

He was physics with a human face, you know.

He showed that in order to be a top-ranked physicist

you can still be a human being.

I think that's a very important legacy to people

who want to do science.

It's a human endeavour and he showed that.

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