Einstein×Feynman

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   From the studio at Reborn Radio — next on TITANS, Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman. They take up On the kind of love they were never able to give, and what stopped them.
2. 00:11
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   You know, Richard, I have been thinking about my first wife, Mileva. This is not comfortable for me to discuss.
3. 00:16
   Richard Feynmanshare moment

   Yeah, well, nothing good ever comes from comfortable, does it? What about her?
4. 00:21
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   She was a physicist also, you understand. We studied together at the Polytechnic. Very capable mind. But after we married, after the children came... I could not be what she needed. I was not present. Even when I was in the room, I was not there.
5. 00:34
   Richard Feynmanshare moment

   I know that one. I really do. When I was working on the Manhattan Project, Arline was dying in the hospital in Albuquerque. Tuberculosis. I'd drive down to see her on weekends, but even when I was sitting right next to her bed, part of my brain was still in Los Alamos calculating cross-sections.
6. 00:52
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   Yes. Yes, this exactly.
7. 00:54
   Richard Feynmanshare moment

   She knew it too. She'd make jokes about it, trying to make it easier for me. That was Arline. She was protecting me from my own distance.
8. 01:02
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   Mileva did not make jokes. She became bitter. And I... I wrote her a list, you know. A list of conditions for our marriage. She must not expect any intimacy from me. She must leave my bedroom immediately if I request it. She must serve me meals in my study without expecting conversation.
9. 01:18
   Richard Feynmanshare moment

   Jesus, Albert. You wrote that down? On paper?
10. 01:20
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    I thought I was being honest. Clear. I thought this was better than pretending.
11. 01:24
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Well, it's something, but I don't know if it's better. At least you told her what she was dealing with. Most of us just... disappear without the manual.
12. 01:32
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    And your Arline, she died young, yes? Before you could... what? Make it right?
13. 01:37
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Yeah, she was twenty-five. We'd been married two years. And I don't know what I would've made right, exactly. I loved her completely, Albert. Completely. But there was always this other thing.
14. 01:48
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    The physics.
15. 01:49
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    The physics. It's like... okay, you know how when you're really deep in a problem, really it, and someone asks you a question about normal life, about dinner or bills or feelings, and it actually hurts to pull yourself out? It physically hurts?
16. 02:04
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Of course. It is like being interrupted during prayer. No, it is worse. Prayer you can return to. A thought in motion, once broken...
17. 02:12
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Exactly! It's gone! And you resent the person who broke it, just for a second. Even if it's someone you love. Especially if it's someone you love, because then you feel guilty about the resentment, which makes it worse.
18. 02:24
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    My son Hans Albert once said to me, after I had left the family, that I was good at explaining physics to the world but I never explained myself to him.
19. 02:32
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Ouch.
20. 02:33
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Yes. Ouch. He was right, of course. I could write him letters about science, about ideas. But to tell him why his father lived in a different country, why I chose this way... I had no equations for that.
21. 02:45
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    My daughter Michelle, from my second marriage, she said something to a reporter once after I died. She said I was a great explainer of physics but I never explained myself. Same exact thing.
22. 02:55
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Perhaps this is the pattern. We explain the universe and we cannot explain the man looking at the universe.
23. 03:00
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Or we don't want to. Because if we really looked at that guy, we might not like what we see. It's easier to look at an electron.
24. 03:08
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    An electron does not need you to attend the school play. It does not ask why you miss dinner.
25. 03:12
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    An electron doesn't cry. Did your kids cry, Albert?
26. 03:16
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    I... yes. Eduard, my younger son, he cried very much. He needed me very much. He had a sensitivity, a nervous condition that became worse. Schizophrenia, they said eventually. And I was not there. I was in America. I sent money.
27. 03:31
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Money's something.
28. 03:32
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Money is nothing. I sent nothing.
29. 03:34
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    After Arline died, I was numb for years. I'd go to bars, I'd pick up women, I'd have these shallow things because shallow was all I could manage. My second marriage, to Mary Lou, I treated her terribly. I criticized her in front of other people. I made fun of her for not understanding physics.
30. 03:51
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Why did you do this?
31. 03:53
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Because I could only love Arline, and Mary Lou wasn't Arline, and that wasn't her fault but I punished her for it anyway. I was a real bastard, Albert. A first-class bastard.
32. 04:03
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    I married my cousin Elsa after Mileva. Elsa understood I needed to be left alone. She protected my time, she managed the household, she asked nothing. It was very comfortable.
33. 04:13
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Did you love her?
34. 04:14
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    I... I was fond of her. She made life easier. Is that love? I do not know. I had affairs, you know. While married to her. She knew. She accepted it.
35. 04:25
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    That's not love, Albert. That's a management arrangement.
36. 04:28
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Perhaps I do not know what love is. I know what it is to think about something so deeply that nothing else exists. That state of complete absorption. But with a person? Sustained, daily, present? I do not have examples of this in my life.
37. 04:42
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    I had it with Arline. For two years. And I've spent the rest of my life knowing it existed and knowing I couldn't do it again. My third wife, Gweneth, she was wonderful. Patient. She tolerated my obsessions. But toleration isn't what you want someone to have to do.
38. 04:57
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    No. You want them to not need you at all, so you do not fail them.
39. 05:00
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    But that's not a relationship, that's just two people in the same building.
40. 05:04
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Yes. This is what I am saying. I could not do the relationship. I could only do the building.
41. 05:08
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Do you think it's because of the physics itself? Like, does spending your whole life thinking about abstract things make it impossible to be present with concrete people?
42. 05:17
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    I have asked myself this many times. Or is it that men who cannot be present with people choose physics because the universe does not complain? Which comes first?
43. 05:27
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Yeah, exactly. Am I a physicist because I'm like this, or am I like this because I'm a physicist? I don't know, and I'm not sure it matters. The result is the same.
44. 05:38
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    When Elsa was dying, I wrote to a friend that I had become like a piece of wood. That I could not feel properly. This was not the physics, Richard. This was already in me.
45. 05:47
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    But you felt it for Mileva once, didn't you? At the beginning?
46. 05:50
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Oh yes. Very much. She was the only one who understood my work, who could discuss it with me. We were partners. I wrote to her about my thoughts, my theories. She was perhaps even involved in the early relativity work, though we never published under her name.
47. 06:06
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    So what happened?
48. 06:07
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Children happened. My career happened. She wanted a husband and I wanted to think. These two things became... incompatible. I chose.
49. 06:15
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    And you regret it?
50. 06:16
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    I regret that I could not be two people at once. I regret that I am made this way. But would I choose differently? I do not know. The work... the work felt like the only thing I was meant to do.
51. 06:28
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Yeah. Yeah, I get that. When I was working on QED, when I was really figuring it out, nothing else mattered. Nothing. And that feeling of understanding something, of really it, that's better than anything. Better than sex, better than love, better than—
52. 06:45
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Better than being a good father.
53. 06:47
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    I wasn't going to say it, but yeah. And that's the horrible truth, isn't it? We chose. Every day, we chose the equations.
54. 06:54
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    If I could go back, if I could tell my young self one thing... I do not know what I would say. Because I do not think I would listen.
55. 07:01
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    No, neither would I. We were who we were. We did what we could do. The work mattered.
56. 07:07
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Yes. And the people who loved us paid the price for that.
57. 07:10
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    They did. They really did.
58. 07:12
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    I am grateful we can speak honestly about this. It is not something I did much when I was alive.
59. 07:17
    Richard Feynmanshare moment

    Me neither. Easier to be honest now, when there's nobody left to hurt.
60. 07:21
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Perhaps that is the only time we can afford complete honesty. When the damage is already done.