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LATE SHOW

Austen×Feynman

A Hampshire novelist and a Brooklyn physicist discover that being wrong is often the most educational position to occupy.

00:00of07:48
legend · A
Jane Austen
1775–1817
Will not raise her voice to do it
corpus5.5k pages · novels + 161 letters
Vera speaking
Welcome back to Reborn Radio. Up next on LATE SHOW: Jane Austen and Richard Feynman, on On the moment they understood the difference between being clever and being right.
legend · B
Richard Feynman
1918–1988
Would rather explain than be right
corpus9.9k pages · lectures, letters, books

full transcript

  1. Vera
    Welcome back to Reborn Radio. Up next on LATE SHOW: Jane Austen and Richard Feynman, on On the moment they understood the difference between being clever and being right.
  2. Jane Austen
    I have been thinking, Professor Feynman, about the particular species of vanity that consists in mistaking one's own quickness for wisdom. I was guilty of it in my youth, though I flattered myself I was not.
  3. Richard Feynman
    Oh boy, do I know that one! When I was at MIT, I thought I was hot stuff because I could solve integrals faster than the other guys. I'd show off these tricks, you know, and I was real pleased with myself.
  4. Jane Austen
    Just so. Except I demonstrated my cleverness with words rather than mathematics, which I confess I never mastered. I took great pleasure in observing the follies of others and recording them with what I believed was penetrating wit.
  5. Richard Feynman
    Were you wrong about the follies, or just wrong about how great you were for spotting them?
  6. Jane Austen
    An excellent distinction. I was not wrong about the follies themselves—people remain remarkably consistent in their absurdities. But I was wrong to suppose that identifying foolishness was the same as understanding it.
  7. Richard Feynman
    Yeah! Yeah, that's it exactly! You can be right about what's happening but completely miss why it's happening. That's what got me with the Challenger disaster, actually.
  8. Jane Austen
    I am not familiar with that event.
  9. Richard Feynman
    The space shuttle that exploded in 1986. I was on the commission investigating it, and I figured out pretty quick that these rubber O-rings got stiff in the cold and that's what caused the leak. I even did this demonstration on TV, dropping the rubber in ice water. Very dramatic!
  10. Jane Austen
    And you were correct, I presume?
  11. Richard Feynman
    About the O-rings? Sure. But I was so pleased with myself for finding the technical problem that I almost missed the real story, which was about how the managers ignored the engineers who knew it was dangerous. The cleverness was in the ice water trick. The rightness would've been understanding the whole human system.
  12. Jane Austen
    Ah. So your moment was late in life, then. Mine came much earlier—I must have been twenty-one or twenty-two.
  13. Richard Feynman
    What happened?
  14. Jane Austen
    I had written a rather cruel portrait of a young woman in our neighborhood. She was the sort who speaks a great deal and says very little, and I captured this perfectly in my private papers. My sister Cassandra read it and did not laugh.
  15. Richard Feynman
    Uh oh. When Cassandra doesn't laugh, you're in trouble?
  16. Jane Austen
    Precisely. She pointed out that I had rendered the young woman's manner with great accuracy but had entirely failed to consider that the poor creature spoke so much because she was desperately anxious in company and silence terrified her. I had been clever. Cassandra was right.
  17. Richard Feynman
    Oh man, that's harsh. Did you tear it up?
  18. Jane Austen
    I did. And I found I could not write properly for several months afterward. It is one thing to discover you have been wrong. It is quite another to discover you have been unkind while being correct about the surface of things.
  19. Richard Feynman
    See, that's interesting though! Because you didn't stop being observant after that, right? I mean, your books are full of people being ridiculous.
  20. Jane Austen
    They are. But I hope—I believe—that I learned to observe with more charity. Mr. Collins is absurd, certainly, but he is not evil. He is the product of his situation and his temperament. One may laugh, but one ought not to despise.
  21. Richard Feynman
    You know what's funny? That's exactly what I learned about physics, but it took me way longer. When you're a young physicist, you want to catch people making mistakes. You want to be the guy who stands up in the seminar and says 'Yeah, but what about this case?' and embarrass the speaker.
  22. Jane Austen
    And you were good at this, I take it.
  23. Richard Feynman
    I was great at it! Too great. Then I spent years working on quantum electrodynamics, and boy, did I make every mistake in the book. I'd go down these paths that seemed so clever, these beautiful mathematical tricks, and they'd just be wrong. Not even interesting wrong—just dead ends.
  24. Jane Austen
    What altered your understanding?
  25. Richard Feynman
    Hans Bethe. He was this older physicist, already famous, and he made mistakes all the time. But he'd just shrug and say 'Well, that doesn't work!' and try something else. No ego about it. And somehow he got to the right answers more often than us clever guys did.
  26. Jane Austen
    Because he was not attached to his own ingenuity.
  27. Richard Feynman
    Exactly! He cared about understanding the physics, not about being the smart guy in the room. Though he was the smart guy in the room—he just didn't need you to know it.
  28. Jane Austen
    I wonder if this is why both our fields require, in the end, a certain humility. You cannot force nature to behave as you wish it would. And I cannot force my characters to be other than what their circumstances and dispositions would make them.
  29. Richard Feynman
    Yeah, but you made up your characters! You could've made them do whatever you wanted!
  30. Jane Austen
    In theory. In practice, once one truly understands a character, one finds they have very little freedom of action. Emma Woodhouse, for instance, absolutely had to make the mistakes she did. I could no more have prevented them than you could make an electron behave contrary to its nature.
  31. Richard Feynman
    Huh. That's wild. So you're saying that getting the character right means you lose control of the plot?
  32. Jane Austen
    Not lose control, precisely. But if one is to be right about human nature rather than merely clever about plot construction, one must allow the characters their own logic. This is harder than it sounds.
  33. Richard Feynman
    It is! It's exactly like physics! You can make up any theory you want, but if it doesn't match what nature actually does, who cares how elegant it is? Nature wins every time.
  34. Jane Austen
    Does this happen often? Scientists becoming enamored of elegant theories that prove false?
  35. Richard Feynman
    All the time! Einstein spent the last decades of his life on unified field theory—beautiful mathematics, really gorgeous stuff, but it just didn't describe reality. And he knew it wasn't working, but he couldn't let it go.
  36. Jane Austen
    Perhaps because he had been so spectacularly correct before that he could not quite believe himself mistaken.
  37. Richard Feynman
    Maybe. Or maybe when you've been clever and right at the same time, like he was with relativity, it's harder to tell them apart later. You think 'This feels like that did,' but feelings aren't evidence.
  38. Jane Austen
    No, but they are not irrelevant either. I trust my instinct about whether a sentence is true to a character. That is not the same as evidence, but it is a kind of knowledge.
  39. Richard Feynman
    Sure, but you can check yourself. You can reread and say 'Would she really say that?' With Einstein, the problem was there was no experiment that could test his theory. He couldn't check himself against reality.
  40. Jane Austen
    And I check myself against... what? The imaginary reality of imaginary people?
  41. Richard Feynman
    Against whether real people recognize themselves in your imaginary ones! If readers say 'Yes, that's exactly how people are,' you were right. If they say 'That's very witty but nobody actually behaves that way,' you were just clever.
  42. Jane Austen
    You make it sound simple.
  43. Richard Feynman
    It's not simple, but it's clear. The hard part is being willing to be wrong. You gotta love being wrong, in a way, because that's when you learn something.
  44. Jane Austen
    I cannot say I love it. But I have learned to bear it with better grace than I did at twenty-one.
  45. Richard Feynman
    Did Cassandra ever let you forget that incident with the young woman?
  46. Jane Austen
    She never mentioned it again. Which was, perhaps, more effective than if she had reminded me weekly.
  47. Richard Feynman
    Smart sister.
  48. Jane Austen
    The smartest person I have ever known. Though I was, naturally, too clever to realize it for some years.
  49. Richard Feynman
    See, now you're being clever about having been clever! Is that allowed?
  50. Jane Austen
    I believe one is permitted a modest degree of retrospective wit, provided one was genuinely foolish at the time.
  51. Richard Feynman
    Fair enough. I've been telling stories about my own mistakes for years—might as well get some entertainment value out of them.
  52. Jane Austen
    Quite so. The only thing worse than having been wrong would be having been wrong and learning nothing from it.
  53. Richard Feynman
    Now that would be a real tragedy.