Exuberance: The Passion for Life (32 page)

Explosions, flashes, and bubbles were only part of Faraday’s genius at lecturing, however. Like that of so many other enthusiasts—Snowflake Bentley, John Muir, Richard Feynman, Humphry Davy—Faraday’s work and teaching were fueled by an exuberance for science. He, like they, maintained the joy in discovery
that children have in play; he taught best, as children learn best, because he had the ebullient inquisitiveness so central to youthful exploration. “
The Christmas lectures brought out the boy in Faraday,” writes his biographer James Hamilton, “his
‘wonderful juvenility of spirit’ being never far from the surface: ‘Hilariously boyish upon occasion he could be, and those who knew him best knew he was never more at home, that he never seemed so pleased, as when making an old boy of himself, as he was wont to say, lecturing before a juvenile audience at Christmas.’ The fun came to a climax in many ways, most noisily perhaps in Faraday’s flinging a coal scuttle full of coal, a poker and tongs at an electro-magnet to demonstrate the powers of magnetism.” Faraday said simply, “
I claim the privilege of speaking to juveniles as a juvenile myself.”

Faraday punctuated his lectures not only with explosions and dramatic hurlings but with bursts of his own enthusiasm. “Wonderful” and “beautiful” emerge time and again to describe his delight in nature. In Faraday’s attempts to link gravity, magnetism, and electricity he wrote memorably, “
Nothing is too wonderful to be true” (a statement he qualified by the less often quoted, “if it be consistent with the laws of nature, and in such things as these, experiment is the best test of such consistency”). Indeed, an irrepressible sense of wonder finds its way into his talks. During the sixth and final lecture in his Christmas series “On the Chemical History of a Candle,” for instance, Faraday’s language is charged with that sense of wonder, of beauty and joy: nature is wonderful, beautiful, and curious.

“
Wonderful
it is,” he said to his young audience when explaining the conversion of carbon into carbonic acid, and
“wonderful,”
he said again, is the change provided by respiration, the life and support of plants and vegetables. He continued, during the candle’s burning: “What a
wonderful
change of carbon must take place … what a
curious, wonderful
change.” Powdered lead burning
in air, he said, is a
“beautiful
instance” of chemical affinity; Japanese candles do not start into action at once, they wait for years or ages, and this waiting is a
“curious and wonderful
thing.” “See how
beautifully
[the candles] are colored,” he went on. They are “most
beautifully
shaped” and, if watched carefully, there is a “
beautifully
regular ascending current of air.” Rubies and diamonds cannot rival the remarkable beauty of a candle’s flame, he enthused; the light is
“glorious.”
The use of “beautiful” and “wonderful” continues: a process of nature is not just a process, said Faraday, it is a
“beautiful
and simple process.” The analogy between respiration and combustion is
“beautiful and striking,”
he tells his audience;
“what an extraordinary notion,”
what a
“most curious and beautiful
[thing] it is to see.” Faraday’s language, if stripped of “wonderful,” “curious,” “extraordinary,” and “beautiful,” which I have italicized for emphasis, would be plain speech indeed; it would also have been speech unlikely to infect an audience with the enthusiasm for science that he so deeply felt. Nature, he knew as well as anyone, was never too wonderful to be true.

A century after Faraday’s last Christmas lecture at the Royal Institution, Richard Feynman gave three lectures at the University of Washington in Seattle. The imagination of nature, he told his audience, is always far greater than the imagination of man. He contrasted the scientific view of the natural world to the one contrived by the ancients: their belief that the earth was the back of an elephant that stood on a tortoise that swam in a bottomless sea, he said, was the result of imagination. But truth is even more marvelous: “
Look at the way we see it today. Is that a dull idea? The world is a spinning ball, and people are held on it on all sides, some of them upside down. And we turn like a spit in front of a great fire. We whirl around the sun. That is more romantic, more exciting.”

Feynman’s exuberance about science, about life, and about discovery, together with his rapier, intuitive intellect made him a celebrated
teacher. Robert Oppenheimer, who worked with him at Los Alamos, described him in 1943 as “
the most brilliant young physicist here, and everyone knows this … and [he is] an excellent teacher.” Later, when trying to recruit him to Berkeley, Oppenheimer specifically cited Feynman’s lucidity as a teacher and recommended him as “a rare talent and a rare enthusiasm.” Those who heard him teach would resoundingly echo Oppenheimer’s early observations. The physicist David Goodstein, vice provost of the California Institute of Technology, where Feynman was on the faculty, said, “
I think Dick was a truly great teacher, perhaps the greatest of his era and ours.” For Feynman, he said, “the lecture hall was a theater, and the lecturer a performer, responsible for providing drama and fireworks as well as facts and figures.” His graduate students agreed. Laurie Brown, who went on to become a professor of physics and astronomy, said that Feynman stressed creativity: “
He urged each of us to create his or her universe of ideas.… It was excitingly different from what most of us had been taught earlier.”

Feynman was an exuberant teacher in every way. His enthusiasm and curiosity spilled over onto those whom he held captive in his orbit. He thought the quest to know the laws of the universe was the most exciting adventure a person could undertake. “I’m an explorer,” he once said, “I like to find out.” The natural world was to him wonderful, beautiful, and an object of endless play.

Feynman was the ultimate scientific galumpher. Science was fun for him, and he made science fun for those he taught. Freeman Dyson observed, “
I never heard him give a lecture that did not make the audience laugh.” For Feynman, laughter, excitement, and scientific imagination were inseparable. His sister said of their childhood that there was “
this excitement in the house, this great love of physics.… The feeling of excitement was in the house all the time, in my brother and my father. So I just grew up with it.”
His mother, Feynman wrote, taught him that one of the highest forms of understanding was laughter; in like vein, his thesis adviser at Princeton observed that for Feynman, “
discussions turned into laughter, laughter into jokes and jokes into more to-and-fro and more ideas.” All his life, his sister said, Feynman did physics for fun: “
When people asked him how long he worked each week, he really couldn’t say, because he never knew when he was working and when he was playing.” Not surprisingly, perhaps, Feynman was the “favorite adult playmate” of the children of his colleagues.

Even at his last public appearance, just a few months before he died of cancer, a fellow physicist was amazed by Feynman’s joy in talking about teaching high school physics: “
As I watched, I realized I was witnessing something extraordinary. Feynman’s energies grew as he responded to question after question. The outside corners of his eyes were creased by the smiles that played over his face as he talked about physics. His hands and arms cut through the air with increasing vigor.… It was the enjoyment he exuded as he stood there talking physics with an eager, receptive group of physics teachers that moved me. It was an enjoyment I could feel.… I had the feeling that I was standing on holy ground.”

Feynman utterly enjoyed the idea of things. Science, he said, is “
done for the excitement of what is found out.… It is almost impossible for me to convey in a lecture this important aspect, this exciting part, the real reason for science.” You cannot understand science, he emphasized, unless you “
understand and appreciate the great adventure of our time… [this] tremendous adventure…[is] a wild and exciting thing.” Life, for Feynman, was the fabulous pursuit of truth and beauty and joy:

Like John Muir, who could not keep “glorious” from popping out of his inkwell, and Snowflake Bentley, who didn’t even try, Feynman’s exuberant affair with nature bubbled over into his writings and into the lecture hall. “
The world is so wonderful,” he exclaimed, using the word that dotted Faraday’s talks at the Royal Institution. To trace out the origins of man and the universe, Feynman believed, is to be held spellbound; it is to stand in awe, to fill with delight: “
Where did the stuff of life and of the earth come from? It looks as if it was belched from some exploding star, much as some of the stars are exploding now. So this piece of dirt waits four and a half billion years and evolves and changes, and now a strange creature stands here with instruments and talks to the strange creatures in the audience. What a wonderful world!”

When the chairman of a conference attended by Feynman proclaimed that scientists should teach what is known about science and not the “wonders of science,” Feynman passionately disagreed.
“
I think we should teach them wonders,” he insisted, “that the purpose of knowledge is to appreciate wonders even more. And that the knowledge is just to put into correct framework the wonder that nature is.” The thrill and mystery of nature, he said, “come again and again,” and with more knowledge comes “deeper, more wonderful mystery.” (Einstein spoke of this love for the mysterious as well. “
The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious,” he said in Berlin, in 1932. “It is the underlying principle of religion as well as all serious endeavour in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead then at least blind.” Einstein, like Feynman, felt that the mystery of nature carried with it a trace of religion: “To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious.”)

Feynman knew—his life was a testament to it—that exploration leads to pleasure and that such pleasure, in turn, leads to more discovery; that wonderful mysteries lure one “
to penetrate deeper still … we turn over each new stone to find unimagined strangeness leading on to more wonderful questions and mysteries—certainly a grand adventure!” He addressed Thoreau’s pessimism about education—that it “
makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook”—with the expansive love and optimism of a wondering mind. (Carl Sagan, another great teacher of science, agreed that to teach science is to teach awe. “
Not explaining science seems to me perverse,” he once said. “When you’re in love you want to tell the world.” When we understand science, he continued, “
we’re moved—because in its encounter with Nature, science invariably conveys reverence and awe.”)

Feynman dazzled his audiences with intellectual cape-work and held them riveted by wit and energy. Mostly, he infected audiences
with his own joy in discovering the “beautiful things” of nature. Exuberance is beauty, declared Blake, and so Feynman showed it to be. “
I’m delighted with the width of the world!” he said, and he found great delight in sharing his joy with others: “
I love to teach. I like to think of new ways of looking at things as I explain them, to make them clearer—but maybe I’m not making them clearer. Probably what I’m doing is entertaining myself.”

The world outside the lecture halls of Caltech needs enthusiastic teachers more than did the math and science students kept enthralled by Richard Feynman. In
The Water Is Wide
—a devastating, often hilarious, but finally heartbreaking account of a year fighting dim-witted education bureaucrats while trying to teach impoverished African-American schoolchildren living on an island off the South Carolina coast—the novelist Pat Conroy makes this point painfully clear. When Conroy first met with the children assigned to him, he found that they had been taught next to nothing. They were essentially illiterate; their expectations of life were bleak and their notions of themselves worse. The school system had given up on them, if indeed it had ever tried at all. Many of his students could not recite the alphabet, he discovered by the end of his first day of teaching, and several could not spell their own names. The litany of neglect went on: most of the children thought John F. Kennedy was the first president of the United States and they “
concurred with the pre-Copernican Theory that the earth was the center of the universe”; two children did not know how old they were.

Conroy went through an early and understandable period of complete discouragement: “
What could I teach them or give them that would substantially alter the course of their lives? Nothing. Not a goddam thing. Each had come into the world imprisoned by
the water binding them to their island and by a system which insured his destruction the moment he uttered his first cry by his mother’s side.” Learning not only was not fun, it was at its best drudgery; at worst it came with whippings and humiliation. It seemed impossible to instill joy in such forgotten children. Conroy was saved, in the end, by his own enthusiasm for life and an emerging belief that a “pep-rally” method of education could work. He would transfuse his energies into his students: “
All right, young cats,” he told his young students, “we are about to embark on a journey of knowledge.”