Lovelace×Feynman

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   You're with Reborn Radio. Coming up: Ada Lovelace sits down with Richard Feynman for STUDY HALL. The subject — On someone who became famous for the wrong reason.
2. 00:10
   Ada Lovelaceshare moment

   Professor Feynman, I must confess something that has vexed me considerably. People insist on calling me the first programmer, which is both flattering and utterly beside the point.
3. 00:21
   Richard Feynmanshare moment

   Ha! You too? Listen, I got a Nobel Prize, right? And what does everyone want to talk about? The bongos. Or those diagrams—which, okay, I'm proud of the diagrams, but they act like I invented them just to draw pretty pictures.
4. 00:36
   Ada Lovelaceshare moment

   The diagrams are rather elegant, I'll grant you that. But yes, precisely! I wrote Note G to demonstrate what Mr. Babbage's Analytical Engine might accomplish—the calculation of Bernoulli numbers was merely an illustration of the method.
5. 00:52
   Richard Feynmanshare moment

   Wait, so what did you want people to get from it?
6. 00:54
   Ada Lovelaceshare moment

   That the Engine could operate on symbols according to rules! That it needn't be confined to arithmetic alone! I wrote quite explicitly that it might compose music, produce graphics—that it was a general-purpose machine for manipulating relationships. The Bernoulli calculation was just the example everyone latched onto.
7. 01:16
   Richard Feynmanshare moment

   Oh boy, do I know that feeling. The Feynman diagrams—people think they're the physics. They're not! They're bookkeeping! They're a way to avoid making mistakes when you calculate how particles interact.
8. 01:27
   Ada Lovelaceshare moment

   Bookkeeping! Yes! That's rather what my table of operations was—a systematic notation to ensure one didn't lose track of the machinery's state.
9. 01:36
   Richard Feynmanshare moment

   Exactly! But here's what kills me: students learn to draw the diagrams, they memorize the rules, and they think they understand quantum electrodynamics. They don't understand anything! They can calculate, sure, but do they know what an electron actually does when it emits a photon? Nobody does!
10. 01:53
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    That's rather the crux of it, isn't it? The notation becomes mistaken for the insight. I spent pages discussing how the Engine might discover relationships we hadn't anticipated, how it could be a partner in investigation rather than merely a calculator.
11. 02:10
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    And they remember the Bernoulli numbers.
12. 02:12
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    They remember the Bernoulli numbers.
13. 02:14
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    So here's my question, because I'm really curious about this—did it bother you? I mean, you wrote all that stuff about the big ideas, and people missed it. Did that drive you crazy?
14. 02:24
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    It drove me to absolute distraction! My mother thought I was growing too agitated about it—she had Dr. Locock restrict my correspondence at one point. But how could I not be agitated? I'd glimpsed something rather magnificent, and everyone was squinting at the wrong bit of the telescope.
15. 02:43
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    See, I had the opposite problem. I'd get furious, sure, but then I'd think—okay, if they don't get it from the diagrams, maybe I'm not explaining it right. Maybe I need to find another way in.
16. 02:53
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Which is admirable, but it rather presumes your audience is willing to follow you to the new explanation. Many simply wanted a recipe. They wanted to be told: here is how you program a machine, follow these steps.
17. 03:08
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Yeah, but recipes are useful! I mean, not as the end of understanding, but as the beginning. You gotta be able to calculate something before you can understand what you're calculating.
18. 03:17
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Perhaps. Though I worry that the calculating becomes its own end. One becomes proficient at symbol-manipulation without ever grasping what the symbols represent. I saw it with mathematics students in my own time—they could execute algebraic operations by rote but had no conception of what they were doing.
19. 03:38
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Okay, but here's the thing—and I'm not trying to be difficult—sometimes you gotta live with the symbols for a while before the meaning clicks. I've had students who learned my diagrams mechanically at first, and then, maybe years later, they'd write to me and say 'Oh! Now I get what you meant!'
20. 03:53
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Did they, though? Or did they simply become more comfortable with the mechanism?
21. 03:58
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    That's—hmm. That's a good question.
22. 04:01
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    I don't mean to be discouraging. It's only that I've observed many people who believe fluency is understanding, when in fact fluency can be quite orthogonal to comprehension.
23. 04:12
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Orthogonal! I like that. But okay, so you're saying you became famous for being fluent—for showing everyone the how—when what you cared about was the why.
24. 04:22
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Not even the why, precisely. The what else. What else might this machine do? What territories might it open? I was mapping a continent and everyone praised my penmanship.
25. 04:34
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Your penmanship was pretty good though, right? I mean, the Bernoulli calculation was correct. You did that whole thing without ever seeing a working machine, which is—that's kind of amazing.
26. 04:44
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    There was an error, actually. In the variable addressing. Mr. Babbage caught it.
27. 04:50
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Well, sure, but that's not—Look, the point is you demonstrated the principle. You proved the thing could be done. That's not nothing!
28. 04:57
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    No, it's not nothing. I suppose I'm guilty of wanting people to care about the thing I found most exciting, which is rather selfish when you consider it. The world chooses what it needs from one's work.
29. 05:09
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Okay, but does it choose right? I mean, here's what bugs me: the bongos thing. People bring up the bongos like it's some cute quirk, like 'Oh, that wacky Feynman!' But I played bongos because rhythm is patterns, and patterns are everywhere in physics. It wasn't separate from the work. It was part of how I thought.
30. 05:28
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    I studied music theory for similar reasons! The mathematical relationships in harmonics are utterly exquisite. My mother didn't approve—she thought it was overstimulating—but I found it clarifying.
31. 05:41
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Right! So why does everyone treat it like it's—like it's a hobby? Like it's this other thing I did when I wasn't doing physics?
32. 05:48
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Because people require their geniuses to be compartmentalized. You're permitted to be brilliant at one thing, and everything else must be eccentric diversion. They did the same with my interest in mesmerism and phrenology—which, I'll grant you, may have been misguided—but I was trying to understand the relationship between mind and matter!
33. 06:09
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Exactly! They want you to stay in your box. And the thing is, the box they put you in isn't even the right box! You're in the 'first programmer' box, I'm in the 'quantum guy who played bongos' box, and neither of us fits!
34. 06:22
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Though I notice your box at least contains your actual field. Mine barely acknowledges that I was a mathematician at all. I'm presented as a sort of appendix to Mr. Babbage.
35. 06:33
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    That's—yeah, that's worse. That's definitely worse.
36. 06:36
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    It's frustrating because he was brilliant, truly, and our collaboration was genuine. But I brought the conceptual framework. I saw what he'd built and understood what it meant for the future of thought itself. The machine was his, but the vision of its possibility—that was mine.
37. 06:54
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    So what do we do about this? Can we do anything? Or do we just accept that we're famous for the wrong reasons and move on?
38. 07:01
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    I've been dead for nearly two centuries, Professor Feynman, and people are still getting it wrong. I'm not optimistic about correction.
39. 07:08
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    But they're also still reading your stuff! That's something. Maybe some kid reads Note G because they want to learn about programming, and then they hit that part about music and graphics, and they think—wait, what? And suddenly they're seeing what you saw.
40. 07:22
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Do you honestly believe that happens?
41. 07:24
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    I gotta believe it happens. Otherwise, what's the point? We write things down, we try to explain clearly, we hope somebody gets it. Maybe not everybody. Maybe not even most people. But somebody.
42. 07:37
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    That's rather more optimistic than I expected from someone who spent considerable energy telling everyone how little we truly understand about quantum mechanics.
43. 07:47
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Ha! Well, that's different. I can be sure we don't understand quantum mechanics. But I can also hope—you know, just hope—that the things we do understand, the things we work hard to explain, that maybe they get through eventually. Even if it takes a while. Even if we become famous for the wrong reason first.
44. 08:05
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    I suppose there's a certain comfort in that. Though I reserve the right to remain vexed about the Bernoulli numbers.
45. 08:12
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    And I'm keeping my complaints about the bongos. Deal?
46. 08:15
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Deal.