Feynman: “I Was Born Not Knowing” and the 1985 Letter

In 1985 Feynman was suddenly famous outside physics. Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! had come out in January and sat on the bestseller lists all year, and strangers began writing to him. One of them was Armando Garcia J., a reader who said that where he lived a professor who admitted “I don't know” or “I'm not sure” would be teased for it, and who sent Feynman his own examples of times when a scientific law had been doubted.

Feynman answered on 11 December. The examples were good, he wrote, and there was no harm in doubt and skepticism, because that is how new discoveries are made. He was sure of nothing and said “I don't know” very often. Then came the line: he had been born not knowing, and had only had a little time to change that here and there.

He had said the same thing to a BBC camera four years earlier, in the interview that became The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: he could live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing, and found it much more interesting than answers that might be wrong. The letter puts it in a single sentence, and adds the clock. Feynman was 67, had been operated on for cancer twice, and had two years left. Seven weeks after he signed the letter, the Challenger exploded, and he spent the spring finding out what had happened to it.

The collage crosses three things off his list: how light bounces off glass, which became QED and the 1965 Nobel Prize; why liquid helium flows without friction, which he explained in the 1950s; and how to open a safe, a skill he picked up at Los Alamos. Everything else stayed on the list, which was the point. For the opposite temperament, read Hilbert's “we must know, we will know”. For the man behind the grin, read the letter he wrote to his dead wife and never mailed.

Richard Phillips Feynman was born in Far Rockaway, Queens, in 1918. He studied at MIT and took his doctorate at Princeton under John Wheeler in 1942, then spent the war at Los Alamos running the computing group for the atomic bomb and cracking his colleagues' safes for fun.

At Cornell and then at Caltech, where he taught from 1950 until his death, he rebuilt quantum electrodynamics around the diagrams that now carry his name, sharing the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga. He also explained superfluid helium, proposed the parton model, gave the Feynman Lectures on Physics, played the bongos, and in 1986 showed on live television, with a clamp and a glass of ice water, why the Challenger's O-rings had failed. He died in Los Angeles on 15 February 1988.