Feynman×Austen

A physicist who loved to compete and a novelist who never stopped observing discuss the rivals who made them better.

00:00of08:24

legend · A

Richard Feynman

1918–1988

Would rather explain than be right

corpus9.9k pages · lectures, letters, books

Richard Feynman speaking

You know what's funny? People think scientists are all collegiality and collaboration, sharing ideas over tea. Baloney! We're competitive as hell. I spent years trying to beat Julian Schwinger at quantum electrodynamics—same problem, totally different methods—and the whole time I'm thinking, this guy is so much more elegant than me it's killing me.

legend · B

Jane Austen

1775–1817

Will not raise her voice to do it

corpus5.5k pages · novels + 161 letters

full transcript

Richard Feynman
You know what's funny? People think scientists are all collegiality and collaboration, sharing ideas over tea. Baloney! We're competitive as hell. I spent years trying to beat Julian Schwinger at quantum electrodynamics—same problem, totally different methods—and the whole time I'm thinking, this guy is so much more elegant than me it's killing me.
Jane Austen
I confess I did not expect you to begin with tea. Though I must correct your impression: collaboration over tea is rather more my province, and I assure you it is never free from competition.
Richard Feynman
Ha! Fair enough. So who was your Schwinger? Who kept you up at night?
Jane Austen
I should not say she kept me awake, precisely. But my contemporary, Maria Edgeworth, was very much admired. Her novels were thought instructive, morally serious. She wrote about estates and education. She was reviewed extensively, praised by intelligent people.
Richard Feynman
And you hated her guts!
Jane Austen
I did not hate her. I read her. I read her more than once, in fact, which ought to tell you something.
Richard Feynman
That's the thing, isn't it? The rivals you respect, you can't stop watching. Schwinger would publish something and I'd drop everything to read it. He was formal, mathematical, all these beautiful symmetries—and I'm over here with my stupid little diagrams that look like doodles.
Jane Austen
Your diagrams are now rather famous, I understand.
Richard Feynman
Sure, now! But at the time, his approach looked so much more sophisticated. Mine looked like high school physics. Drove me crazy.
Jane Austen
Miss Edgeworth's novels had scope. She wrote of Ireland, of systems of education, of the management of large properties. I wrote of three or four families in a country village. I was perfectly aware of the comparison.
Richard Feynman
But you kept doing it your way.
Jane Austen
I did. One must write what one knows, and what one finds true. I could not manufacture scope I did not possess, nor did I wish to. But I will not pretend I was indifferent to the praise she received.
Richard Feynman
Did you ever meet her?
Jane Austen
Never. Though I believe she was aware of my work—someone reported that she had said kind things, though I cannot recall the particulars. It is the nature of rivals that one attends to their movements more carefully than one attends to one's own.
Richard Feynman
Oh, absolutely! I knew when Schwinger published. I knew when he gave talks. I knew what problems he was working on. It's like you're dancing with someone, except you're both pretending you're dancing alone.
Jane Austen
A useful metaphor. Though in my case the dance was conducted largely through the pages of the Quarterly Review.
Richard Feynman
So what did you learn from her? Because here's the thing—I learned from Schwinger even though we had completely different styles. Maybe especially because we were different.
Jane Austen
She taught me what I did not wish to do. That is a species of learning, though perhaps not the kind one advertises. Her characters were often examples of principles. Mine, I hope, were people first.
Richard Feynman
Examples of principles—yeah, that's exactly what I didn't like about some physics! Make it so abstract nobody can see what you're actually saying. I wanted to understand, not just prove.
Jane Austen
Understanding and proof are not the same thing, then, in your field?
Richard Feynman
Not even close! You can follow every line of math and still have no idea what's really happening. Schwinger's papers were like that sometimes—correct, brilliant, and somehow I'd finish reading and think, but what does the electron actually do?
Jane Austen
I wonder if Miss Edgeworth's readers ever finished a volume and thought, but are people truly like this?
Richard Feynman
Did you think that?
Jane Austen
I thought her characters were too visibly constructed to serve the author's purpose. One could see the strings. But her purposes were often admirable, which is why the matter troubled me.
Richard Feynman
That's the torture of it! If your rival is doing bad work, who cares? But when they're good, when they're really good at something you can't do or don't want to do—that's when it gets under your skin.
Jane Austen
You said you and Mr. Schwinger worked on the same problem. Did you arrive at the same conclusion?
Richard Feynman
Yes! That's what was so incredible. Completely different methods, same answer. Freeman Dyson eventually showed that our approaches were mathematically equivalent, which was—I mean, that's beautiful and also slightly annoying.
Jane Austen
Annoying because you wished to be singular in your correctness?
Richard Feynman
Well, sure! But also annoying because it meant I couldn't dismiss his way as wrong. It worked. His way worked, my way worked, and actually they were secretly the same thing wearing different clothes. We shared the Nobel Prize for it, him and me and Tomonaga.
Jane Austen
You shared the prize with your rival. That must have required considerable grace.
Richard Feynman
It required admitting he was right, which was harder! But yeah, by that point I respected the hell out of him. Still thought my way was more intuitive, more—more fun, you know? But his way had this elegance I couldn't touch.
Jane Austen
Elegance is not nothing.
Richard Feynman
No, it's not. It's really not. What about you—did you ever come around to thinking Edgeworth was doing something you couldn't?
Jane Austen
I believed then, and believe now, that she was doing something I would not wish to do. Whether I could have done it is immaterial. But she had a kind of energy, a reach, that I think I lacked. Or perhaps I should say, that I declined to pursue.
Richard Feynman
That's interesting—'declined to pursue.' Like it was a choice.
Jane Austen
All writing is choice. One chooses where to direct one's attention, and in doing so, one chooses what to ignore. I chose to examine the small canvas very closely. She chose the broader view. Neither is inherently superior.
Richard Feynman
But you just said she had reach you lacked.
Jane Austen
I did. One may acknowledge another's strength without conceding one's own worth. Surely in your field this is also true?
Richard Feynman
Yeah, okay, you got me. Schwinger could do things with math I couldn't do. But I could explain things to people, I could make them see it. That was my thing.
Jane Austen
And explanation is not a minor gift.
Richard Feynman
It's the whole game for me! I mean, what's the point of understanding something if you can't share it? But Schwinger—he wasn't trying to share it the way I was. He was building this cathedral of mathematics.
Jane Austen
And you were drawing your diagrams.
Richard Feynman
My stupid little diagrams, yeah. Which turned out to be pretty useful, but at the time felt almost embarrassing compared to his work.
Jane Austen
I wonder whether Miss Edgeworth ever felt embarrassed by her scope, compared to someone else's precision. One cannot know. But I suspect every writer believes herself to be doing the wrong sort of writing, at least occasionally.
Richard Feynman
Every scientist definitely feels that way. You think you're not rigorous enough, or not creative enough, or not fast enough. And then your rival publishes something and you think, great, now I'm all of those things and also late.
Jane Austen
Did you work faster because of Mr. Schwinger?
Richard Feynman
Oh, absolutely! I worked like crazy. He announced results at a conference and I went back and worked it out my own way in a few months. Competition makes you better—it really does. You can't coast when someone else is breathing down your neck.
Jane Austen
I confess that novel-writing is not generally conducted at such velocity. Though I take your point. One does not improve in isolation.
Richard Feynman
But here's the thing I only figured out later: I needed Schwinger. Not just as competition, but because his way of thinking showed me what mine was. You understand your own method better when you see someone else's.
Jane Austen
That is precisely it. Miss Edgeworth wrote with such earnest purpose that I understood my own playfulness more clearly. I might have thought myself serious until I read her seriousness.
Richard Feynman
So you're saying we should thank our rivals?
Jane Austen
I am saying we might privately acknowledge that we are partly their creation, as they are partly ours. Though I would not go so far as gratitude. Acknowledgment will suffice.
Richard Feynman
I can live with that. Schwinger made me better. I made him—well, I don't know what I made him. Maybe a little crazy trying to figure out what my diagrams meant.
Jane Austen
A fair exchange, surely.
Richard Feynman
The fairest. You know, I never thought I'd have this conversation with someone from the nineteenth century about Julian Schwinger, but here we are.
Jane Austen
Competition is perhaps more constant than either physics or fiction. One might almost call it universal.
Richard Feynman
Universal and secretly kind of fun, if you're honest about it.
Jane Austen
I would not call it fun. But I would call it necessary. And occasionally, very occasionally, illuminating.