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 a piece of gossip about themselves they let stand because the truth was worse.
2. 00:12
   Jane Austenshare moment

   Mr. Feynman, I understand you once allowed the world to believe you were quite the accomplished safecracker.
3. 00:19
   Richard Feynmanshare moment

   Oh boy, yeah! At Los Alamos, during the war. People thought I was some kind of genius at it—could crack any safe in the place. The stories got wilder and wilder.
4. 00:28
   Jane Austenshare moment

   And you permitted this fiction to circulate.
5. 00:31
   Richard Feynmanshare moment

   I did! For years. The truth was—well, the truth was most of the combinations were written down somewhere in the office, or they used the factory settings, or I'd watched somebody open it once. It wasn't clever at all, just people being careless. But if I told them that, they'd have to admit they'd been stupid about security.
6. 00:49
   Jane Austenshare moment

   How very gracious of you to protect their dignity at the expense of your own reputation.
7. 00:54
   Richard Feynmanshare moment

   That's the thing—it didn't hurt my reputation! Being a safecracker sounded fun. Being the guy who pointed out that everyone around him was an idiot about basic security during the Manhattan Project? That would've made me unbearable at parties.
8. 01:08
   Jane Austenshare moment

   I see. The myth was socially preferable to the truth.
9. 01:12
   Richard Feynmanshare moment

   Exactly! Wait—you said you did something like this too?
10. 01:15
    Jane Austenshare moment

    After a fashion. There was a period when certain persons believed I had declined an offer of marriage from a gentleman of considerable means in Hampshire. This was not, strictly speaking, accurate.
11. 01:28
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    You didn't decline him?
12. 01:29
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Oh, I declined him. The inaccuracy lay in the timeline. I accepted him one evening—my family was in some financial difficulty, you understand—and then, having lain awake the entire night in a state of progressive horror at what I had done, I retracted my acceptance the following morning.
13. 01:47
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    You said yes and then changed your mind overnight?
14. 01:50
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Twelve hours of excellent judgment separated by eight hours of spectacular cowardice. But the rumour that circulated suggested I had simply refused him outright, which made me appear principled rather than... vacillating.
15. 02:04
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Why not correct it? 'I made a mistake, I fixed it'—that's honest!
16. 02:08
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Mr. Feynman, a woman who accepts a proposal and reverses herself appears ridiculous. Worse, she appears to have trifled with a gentleman's affections, which is unconscionable. A woman who refuses steadily appears to have standards.
17. 02:22
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    But you did have standards! That's why you changed your mind!
18. 02:25
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Yes, but standards arrived at through panic and a sleepless night are significantly less impressive than standards maintained from the outset. The latter suggests character. The former suggests... regrettable judgment corrected only by morning light and a sympathetic sister.
19. 02:45
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Okay, but here's what I don't get—you wrote novels about people making exactly these kinds of mistakes! Emma's a whole book about somebody who gets everything wrong and has to fix it!
20. 02:55
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Emma is a novel. I am a person. Readers forgive characters their flaws because characters exist to be flawed and then improved. Authors are expected to have sorted themselves out before putting pen to paper.
21. 03:09
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    That seems like a terrible double standard.
22. 03:11
    Jane Austenshare moment

    It is absolutely a terrible double standard. I benefited from it nonetheless.
23. 03:16
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    You know what's funny? I think I did the opposite with my physics. People thought I was just this intuitive genius who didn't need to work hard, and I let them think that because admitting how much I struggled would've made me look—I don't know—less legitimate somehow?
24. 03:29
    Jane Austenshare moment

    You permitted them to believe you found it easy.
25. 03:31
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Yeah! But the truth was I'd spend weeks stuck on something, trying it seventeen different ways, getting nowhere, feeling like an idiot. Then I'd find the answer and explain it, and because I explained it clearly, people assumed I'd understood it clearly from the start.
26. 03:46
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Whereas clarity in exposition is often the reward of considerable prior confusion.
27. 03:51
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Exactly! But if I said 'I was confused about this for three months,' students would panic. They'd think 'If Feynman was confused, I'll never get it.' Better to let them think it came easy to me, so they'd believe it could come easy to them eventually.
28. 04:05
    Jane Austenshare moment

    A pedagogical fiction.
29. 04:06
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    I guess. Although—wait, is that better or worse than your thing? I was lying to make people feel better about themselves. You were lying to make yourself look better.
30. 04:16
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I was not lying, Mr. Feynman. I was declining to correct a misapprehension.
31. 04:21
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    That's what lying is!
32. 04:22
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Lying is active. What I engaged in was strategic silence.
33. 04:26
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Okay, but you just said you benefited from people not knowing the truth! That's lying by omission!
34. 04:32
    Jane Austenshare moment

    And you permitted your students to believe you were never confused, which by your own admission was false. Shall we agree we are both guilty of allowing convenient fictions to stand?
35. 04:43
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Fine. Yeah. We're both guilty.
36. 04:45
    Jane Austenshare moment

    The question, then, is whether we would do it again, knowing what we know now.
37. 04:49
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Oh, I'd absolutely do it again! If I told every student about every time I got stuck, they'd spend all their time worrying instead of learning. Sometimes you gotta simplify the story so people can get to the good stuff.
38. 05:02
    Jane Austenshare moment

    And I have no intention of posthumously rehabilitating my reputation for indecision. The gentleman in question married someone else quite happily. No harm was done, except perhaps to my pride, which hardly requires public examination.
39. 05:17
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    So we both agree—sometimes the fake version is better than the real one.
40. 05:21
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I would not phrase it quite so baldly, but yes. The truth is not always edifying, Mr. Feynman. Sometimes it is merely complicated in dull ways.
41. 05:30
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Although—okay, devil's advocate here—what if somebody reads this conversation? Now they know the truth. Doesn't that defeat the whole purpose?
42. 05:38
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I have been dead for more than two hundred years. The gentleman in question has been dead nearly as long. Everyone who might have been embarrassed by the truth is beyond embarrassment.
43. 05:48
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    And I wrote about the safecracking thing myself in my books! Once enough time passes, the truth becomes a funny story instead of a humiliation.
44. 05:57
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Time is an excellent editor.
45. 05:59
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    So what you're saying is—lie in the moment, confess in your memoirs?
46. 06:03
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I am saying that there is a season for discretion and a season for candour, and the wise person knows which is which.
47. 06:10
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    You know, for somebody who wrote about people being honest with each other, you're remarkably comfortable with strategic dishonesty.
48. 06:17
    Jane Austenshare moment

    My novels are about people learning to be honest with themselves, Mr. Feynman. Being honest with the world is a separate skill entirely, and not always a useful one.
49. 06:28
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Fair enough. Although I still think my thing was less bad than your thing.
50. 06:31
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Of course you do. You are a man, and were permitted the luxury of being confused in public once your achievements were secure. I was not.
51. 06:39
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Okay, that's a good point.
52. 06:41
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I have them occasionally.
53. 06:43
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    So—bottom line—we both let people believe something false because the truth would've made things worse for everybody involved?
54. 06:49
    Jane Austenshare moment

    That is a fair summary.
55. 06:51
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    And we're both okay with that?
56. 06:52
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I am perfectly comfortable with it. Are you?
57. 06:55
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Yeah. Yeah, I think I am. The truth's supposed to set you free, but sometimes it just makes everybody uncomfortable at dinner.
58. 07:02
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Precisely. And dinner, Mr. Feynman, must be gotten through.