Feynman×Austen

A physicist who loved applause and a novelist who preferred anonymity debate who history forgot to remember.

00:00of10:00

legend · A

Richard Feynman

1918–1988

Would rather explain than be right

corpus9.9k pages · lectures, letters, books

Vera speaking

You're with Reborn Radio. Coming up: Richard Feynman sits down with Jane Austen for LATE SHOW. The subject — On who deserves to be more famous than they are.

legend · B

Jane Austen

1775–1817

Will not raise her voice to do it

corpus5.5k pages · novels + 161 letters

full transcript

Vera
You're with Reborn Radio. Coming up: Richard Feynman sits down with Jane Austen for LATE SHOW. The subject — On who deserves to be more famous than they are.
Richard Feynman
So we're supposed to talk about people who deserve to be more famous. That's a funny thing, isn't it? Because the whole idea of deserving fame is peculiar. I mean, you do the work because the work is interesting, not because you want some statue somewhere with pigeons sitting on your head.
Jane Austen
I cannot disagree with your general principle, though I confess I find the image you conjure rather too vivid. Yet surely there is a difference between courting fame and receiving the acknowledgment that good work merits?
Richard Feynman
Oh sure, sure! Look, if I do something and people say, 'Hey Feynman, that's terrific!' I'm not gonna say, 'No, no, please don't tell me!' I like it when people appreciate what I did. I'm human. But that's different from doing it for the appreciation.
Jane Austen
Just so. And yet there are those whose contributions have been substantial, whose work has influenced what came after, and whom the world has nonetheless permitted to sink into obscurity. That seems to me an injustice, if a quiet one.
Richard Feynman
Alright, alright! So who are you thinking about? Give me an example. Who did the world forget?
Jane Austen
I should say, first, that I published my own novels without my name attached. They were attributed merely to 'A Lady.' So I am hardly the person to complain about anonymity.
Richard Feynman
Wait, wait. You published anonymously? On purpose? Why would you do that?
Jane Austen
It was not the custom for women of my station to publish under their own names. To do so would have been to invite scrutiny of a kind that would have made my life, and my family's life, considerably more difficult. One writes despite such constraints, not because of them.
Richard Feynman
But you wrote the thing! You did the work! That's crazy to me. In physics, if you figure something out, you want your name on the paper. Otherwise how does anybody know you figured it out?
Jane Austen
Indeed. And yet even in your field, Professor Feynman, I suspect there have been those who contributed significantly and received rather less credit than they deserved.
Richard Feynman
Oh boy, yes. Yes! You know who I think about? Arline. My first wife. She didn't do physics, but she understood it better than most people. She asked better questions than half the professors I knew. She died young, and nobody except me remembers how she could see right through to what mattered in a problem.
Jane Austen
I am sorry for your loss. Though I would observe that affection may incline one to overestimate merit.
Richard Feynman
No, no! I'm not saying she should have won a Nobel Prize. I'm saying she had a kind of intelligence that never got recorded anywhere except in my memory. There's no memorial for that. There's no fame for being the person who asks the right question.
Jane Austen
That is rather the point, is it not? Fame attaches to the answer, not to the question. To the published work, not to the conversation that shaped it.
Richard Feynman
Exactly! And that's wrong, in a way. I mean, not wrong like you can fix it, but wrong like it's incomplete. The actual process of figuring things out involves a lot of people, a lot of talk, a lot of wrong turns that somebody else corrects. But history writes it down like one guy in a room had a brilliant idea.
Jane Austen
I confess I am surprised to find a man of science so willing to acknowledge the contributions of others. It has not been my observation that gentlemen are generally eager to share credit.
Richard Feynman
Well, some guys are jerks about it. But look, if I'm trying to understand something, I'll talk to anybody who has an idea. I don't care if it's a janitor or a graduate student. If they help me see something I didn't see before, that's useful! That's wonderful! Why would I pretend I did it alone?
Jane Austen
A laudable sentiment. Though I wonder whether your openness is not itself a form of privilege. You are at liberty to consult janitors or students because you are already established as Professor Feynman. The janitor who assists you will not become famous thereby.
Richard Feynman
You're right. You're absolutely right. That's depressing. Okay, so who do you think deserves more fame? From your time, I mean.
Jane Austen
I should say every governess who ever taught a child to read with patience and imagination. Every woman who managed a household with insufficient funds and made it appear easy. They are invisible in the record.
Richard Feynman
But how would you even make them famous? I mean, famous means people know your name, they know what you did. If what you did was just living your life well, teaching your kids, being decent, that's great, but it's not famous-type stuff.
Jane Austen
Perhaps that is precisely the difficulty. Fame, as presently constituted, rewards the exceptional at the expense of the essential. We celebrate the general who wins the battle, not the surgeon who saves the soldier. We remember the author, not the reader whose engagement gives the work its meaning.
Richard Feynman
Hm. I don't know if I buy that completely. I mean, yes, sure, we need the surgeon and the reader. But the general did something that not everybody could do. The author wrote something that not everybody could write. That's why we remember them. It's not unfair, it's just how memory works. You remember the unusual thing.
Jane Austen
And yet the unusual depends upon the usual. Your equations, Professor, depend upon the teachers who taught you to read them. My novels depend upon the language that was common property long before I touched it.
Richard Feynman
Sure, sure. But I did something new with the equations. You did something new with the language. That's the difference. Look, I learned calculus from textbooks written by other people, and those people deserve credit. Some of them are famous, some aren't. But if they only taught what somebody else already knew, that's important work, but it's not discovery. It's transmission.
Jane Austen
You speak as though discovery and transmission were entirely separate. I would argue they are not. A great teacher does not merely repeat what was said before. She finds new ways to make it clear, and in doing so, she discovers something about the subject itself.
Richard Feynman
Okay, okay, I can buy that. Some teachers are really original. But then we do remember them! I remember some of my teachers very well. They're not famous to the world, but they're famous to me. Maybe that's enough?
Jane Austen
Is it? I am not certain. When I think of the women I knew who possessed extraordinary gifts, who managed estates, negotiated family crises, wrote letters of great insight and wit, and have since vanished utterly from the record, I confess I feel that being remembered by one or two people is insufficient compensation for what they gave to the world.
Richard Feynman
But what would you do? Seriously, how would you fix it? You can't make everybody famous. The word wouldn't mean anything anymore.
Jane Austen
I do not propose to make everyone famous. I propose that we might be more careful in deciding who merits remembrance. That we might look for contributions that are less obvious, less dramatic, but nonetheless essential. That we might, in short, broaden our definition of what constitutes a life worth recording.
Richard Feynman
I like that. I really do. But you know what's going to happen, right? People are still going to remember the big dramatic stuff. The Nobel Prize winner. The guy who invented the thing. The woman who wrote the book. Human beings love a good story, and a good story needs a hero.
Jane Austen
Then perhaps our task is to tell better stories. To write the novels, or the histories, that recognize the contributions of those who have been excluded from the narrative. It is not impossible. It requires only that we attend more closely to what is actually there.
Richard Feynman
You know, there's a woman I worked with at Los Alamos. Not a scientist, but she ran the computing group, kept track of all the calculations. Her name was, uh, you know I can't remember her name right now? That's terrible! She was brilliant at organizing things, at making sure nothing got lost. Without her, we would've been a mess. And I can't remember her name.
Jane Austen
That is rather my point exactly, Professor.
Richard Feynman
Yeah. Yeah, it is. So what do we do about it? I mean, right now, in this conversation?
Jane Austen
We might begin by acknowledging the problem. We might commit to being more careful in our own recollections, in the stories we tell, in the credit we assign. It is a small thing, but it is not nothing.
Richard Feynman
And we could talk about specific people. Real names, real contributions. That would be something. Like, I'll tell you, Cecilia Payne figured out what stars are made of. Hydrogen. This was a huge discovery, and she didn't get nearly enough credit for it at the time because she was a woman and people were idiots.
Jane Austen
Just so. And I shall add Miss Mary Brunton, who wrote novels as accomplished as my own, and whose work is now scarcely remembered. Or Mrs. Charlotte Smith, a poet of great skill who supported her children by her pen and has since been largely forgotten.
Richard Feynman
See, this is good! This is useful! We're putting names on the record. Maybe somebody listening will go look them up, read their work, remember them.
Jane Austen
I confess I am skeptical that one radio program will reverse the judgments of history. But it is a beginning. And perhaps that is all one can reasonably hope to accomplish.
Richard Feynman
You know what? I'll take a beginning. A beginning is better than nothing. And besides, the whole thing is interesting! Thinking about who gets remembered and why. That's a puzzle. I like puzzles.
Jane Austen
As do I, Professor. Though I prefer puzzles that involve human nature to those that involve mathematics.
Richard Feynman
Human nature is just another kind of pattern. It's messy, sure, but so is quantum mechanics. You just have to look at it the right way.
Jane Austen
I shall leave the quantum mechanics to you, Professor Feynman, and content myself with observing the smaller, though no less complex, patterns of social interaction.
Richard Feynman
Deal! And maybe we both come out of this thinking a little more carefully about who we're forgetting. That'd be something.
Jane Austen
Indeed it would. I thank you for an unexpectedly thought-provoking conversation, Professor.
Richard Feynman
Same to you, Miss Austen. Same to you.