Austen×Feynman

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   You're with Reborn Radio. Coming up: Jane Austen sits down with Richard Feynman for LATE SHOW. The subject — On the question an interviewer never thought to ask them.
2. 00:10
   Jane Austenshare moment

   I have been thinking, Professor Feynman, about the questions we are never asked. In my own experience, interviewers—if one may call the inquisitive acquaintance an interviewer—invariably wished to know whom I would marry, or why I had not married, or whether Mr. Darcy was drawn from life.
3. 00:28
   Richard Feynmanshare moment

   Ha! Yeah, I got the same kind of thing. 'What's it like to win the Nobel Prize?' 'Do you really play the bongos?' 'Is it true you worked on the atomic bomb?' Like that's the only interesting thing about a person!
4. 00:42
   Jane Austenshare moment

   Precisely. And yet there is always some other question lurking beneath—something that would reveal far more, if only someone possessed the wit to ask it.
5. 00:52
   Richard Feynmanshare moment

   Okay, so what's yours? What should they have asked you?
6. 00:55
   Jane Austenshare moment

   They might have asked what I found when I sat down to revise a manuscript for the second, or third, or fourth time. What I discovered about my own blindnesses. First Impressions became Pride and Prejudice, you know, but no one ever asked what I learned in that transformation.
7. 01:11
   Richard Feynmanshare moment

   Oh, that's good! That's the real stuff. Because you're not the same person when you come back to something, right? You see what you couldn't see before.
8. 01:18
   Jane Austenshare moment

   Just so. I found that I had been too pleased with my own cleverness in the first version. Too much concerned with Elizabeth's wit and not enough with her capacity for error. She had to be wrong—genuinely wrong, not merely charmingly mistaken.
9. 01:32
   Richard Feynmanshare moment

   That's like checking your own calculation and finding out you dropped a minus sign! Except you did it on purpose.
10. 01:38
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I did it with great reluctance, I assure you. It is never pleasant to discover that one's heroine must be humbled. But the story required it.
11. 01:47
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    See, I love this! Because it's not about the plot, it's about how you think. What's your method, you know?
12. 01:53
    Jane Austenshare moment

    And what question ought they to have asked you, Professor? I cannot imagine you were ever at a loss for questions yourself.
13. 02:00
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    No, no, I ask plenty! But what nobody ever asked me—and I wish they had—was which problem I failed to solve. Everybody wants to hear about quantum electrodynamics, the path integrals, the diagrams. Fine. But what about the problems I couldn't crack?
14. 02:16
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Failure is unfashionable. Success may be discussed in mixed company; failure is reserved for one's private correspondence.
15. 02:25
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    But that's where the interesting stuff is! I spent years trying to understand turbulence—you know, why fluids move the way they do when they get all crazy and mixed up. Never got it. Not really. And that bugs me more than anything I did figure out.
16. 02:38
    Jane Austenshare moment

    You are describing something quite beyond my sphere, but I apprehend the sentiment. There are characters I could never bring to life as I wished. Mary Bennet, for instance, remains a sketch.
17. 02:50
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Who's Mary again?
18. 02:51
    Jane Austenshare moment

    The middle sister. The plain one who reads sermons and plays the pianoforte badly. I knew what she represented—the dangers of pedantry without understanding—but I could not make her breathe.
19. 03:02
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Okay, but why not? What was missing?
20. 03:05
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Sympathy, perhaps. Or patience. She irritated me, and so I made her irritating, but I never troubled to discover why she had become so. A failure of curiosity on my part.
21. 03:16
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    That's honest. I like that. Most people won't admit when they just didn't care enough to figure something out.
22. 03:22
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I did care. But not enough to let it slow the story I wished to tell. Which amounts to the same thing, I grant you.
23. 03:29
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    So here's what I want to know. When you went back to those revisions—when you found your own mistakes—did it make you trust yourself less? Or more?
24. 03:38
    Jane Austenshare moment

    What an excellent question. More, I think. Because I learned that I could recognize my own errors, given time and distance. That my judgment, though fallible, was at least capable of improvement.
25. 03:50
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Yes! That's it exactly! When I find a mistake in my own work, I'm not upset—I'm excited! It means I'm better now than I was then. I can see things I couldn't see before.
26. 04:00
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Though I confess it did not feel like excitement at the time. It felt rather more like embarrassment.
27. 04:06
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Sure, sure, at first. But then you fix it and it's better! The thing is, if you're not finding mistakes, you're probably not looking hard enough.
28. 04:14
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Or you have ceased to grow. Which is death to a writer, I should think. And to a scientist?
29. 04:20
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Same thing. If you think you've got it all figured out, you're done. You might as well retire.
30. 04:25
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I wonder whether we have arrived at the question we ourselves should have been asked: not what we succeeded in doing, but what we learned from what we could not do, or did badly.
31. 04:35
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Yeah! Or even simpler: 'What did you get wrong?' That's the question. That's the one that tells you how somebody actually thinks.
32. 04:43
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Though I suspect most people would not answer it truthfully, if they were asked. It requires a degree of self-examination that is not universally practised.
33. 04:53
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Oh, absolutely. People don't like to look at their mistakes. But you can't learn anything if you don't! That's the whole game.
34. 05:00
    Jane Austenshare moment

    The whole game. Yes. In my novels, I try to show that moment of recognition—when a character sees clearly what they have refused to see. Mr. Knightley tells Emma she has been wrong. Elizabeth reads Mr. Darcy's letter. That is always the turning point.
35. 05:16
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    That's when they start being real! Because before that, they're fooling themselves.
36. 05:20
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Just as I was fooling myself with my first drafts, believing them better than they were. The recognition is painful. But it is the only path to improvement.
37. 05:32
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    You know what else nobody asked me? How many times I've explained something and realized halfway through that I didn't actually understand it.
38. 05:39
    Jane Austenshare moment

    How singular. One would think a professor would be expected to understand his subject.
39. 05:44
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    You'd think! But no, it happens all the time. I'm explaining quantum mechanics to a student, and suddenly I hear myself saying something, and I think, 'Wait, do I really believe that?' And then I have to stop and work it out.
40. 05:58
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I have had a similar experience in correspondence, when attempting to defend a character's actions. One discovers that one's reasoning is less sound than one supposed.
41. 06:09
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Exactly! Teaching is great for that. Or explaining anything to anybody. If you can't make it clear, you don't understand it yourself.
42. 06:16
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Which suggests that we ought to spend more time explaining ourselves, and less time assuming we have nothing further to learn.
43. 06:23
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Now you're talking! The best conversations are the ones where you figure something out you didn't know you didn't know.
44. 06:29
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I believe we may have just had one of those, Professor. Though whether anyone will think to ask us about it remains to be seen.
45. 06:36
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Ha! Well, if they don't ask, we should tell them anyway. That's what I always do.
46. 06:41
    Jane Austenshare moment

    How very American of you. In Hampshire, we wait to be asked.
47. 06:45
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    And in Brooklyn, we don't! But you know what? I think we got to the same place.
48. 06:50
    Jane Austenshare moment

    By rather different roads, perhaps. But yes. I believe we did.