Paul Steinhardt: My Mentor Richard Feynman

so years later I'm giving this talk that you're describing this lecture on one of these early lectures on quas crystals and F was in the audience and listening very intently and I was expecting him to interrupt but he didn't interrupt at any time during the lecture itself he waited till it was over and he came up and said well this is impossible first of all he is the person that really brought me into physics when I when I went to Caltech as an undergraduate I didn't really know much about phys physics at all for some reason that was just a missing part of my Science Education or weak part of my Science Education uh within a few weeks I I encountered fan and fan lectures on physics and I was converted uh I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do in in science or in physics I should say uh but I tried to watch closely fan who was my hero quickly became my hero to see you know what what he what which way he would Point uh appoint me um and one of the things I did when I was a junior is with my roommate we went to visit fing we asked him if he'd be willing to uh give a course that came to be du dubbed physics X turns out he had done something like this a number of years ago uh slightly different format but would he come and give this course uh physics X in which he would come each week it's an unofficial course um wasn't on the registar you know list and you get and he just come and talk about whatever you wanted to talk about when every physical phenomena you wanted to talk about and so that's what happened every week he would come and he he'd come and ask him a question about something it had to be something about something you you observed in nature or you you knew about existing in nature and he would do his best to tackle it and um what I learned from that was what I expected to learn from that interaction was um that uh he would be pointing heavily to the work he himself had done in elementary particle physics but in fact we hardly discussed particle physics at all the subjects roed all over the map and every subject was fascinating uh so what I learned from that is that physics um the opportunity for physics discoveries can be found everywhere in in everything and everything is interesting everything was interesting to Fan so everything was interesting to us and he could just he could describe everything in such a way that uh you could tackle anything such a way that it was fascinating captivating um uh and um that was an important influence on me because in my own research you know I kind of followed a path that began with particle physics to begin with but then it soon began wandering to other areas such as the topic we're talking about the topic of this book but in another interaction with him I was doing some research with him on various topics and um and you know fan was known for giving people a really hard time in lectures and calling them foolish and stupid and things like that and so you know I had some of that i' come to his office and present an idea and explain to me an idea whether that it was foolish or stupid but it you know to me was always it was never insulting it was done in a certain you know certain way of enthusiasm and it was consistent but what really convinced me that it was you know I should take it in stride was there was one time when you know he accused me of something getting something stupid and wrong uh and it involved involved a Super Bowl and the way you can super bow can spin in bounce and fortunately I had a super ball with me and I demonstrated to him um that in fact uh wasn't sure how it was going to work out but we tried the experiment that he was proposing and sure enough it turned out that what I had predicted in my equations was correct and he turned around and said uh Stupid referring to himself and then I realized he would use that term for anybody who got something wrong to more to jol them into paying attention something interesting was going on here you ought to pay attention and not simply Overlook it because there something to be learned here so okay so years later I'm giving um this talk that you're describing this lecture on one of these early lectures on quasa crystals and um f was in the audience and listening very intently and I was expecting him to interrupt but he didn't interrupt at any time during the lecture itself he waited till it it was over um and um he came up and said um uh well this is impossible you know uh people were leaving the room but it echoed throughout the room that you know it was clear that you know F was objecting to this idea that there could be this new form of matter even though I had done my best to present you know lots of evidence of it including even in demonstration of it uh but I could tell from his smile that it was it was the impossible like you know like he would call me stupid or something impossible in the past he was really challenging me to to prove my point and and what he then asked me to do was I had done a demonstration in front of the uh lecture to show what happens when you shine um well it be like if you shown electrons through the through such a hypothetical material in this case I was using a laser and a a slide which had the same pattern as the arrangement of atoms would have in the material uh and what I had shown is it had produced a pattern that was supposed to be impossible according to all the standard textbooks on solids and that was the point of the lecture that there are these new possibilities that were had been considered impossible they were now impossible so having declared the whole idea impossible he then walked out to me and said I want to see that demonstration again so he turned off the lights we turned back on the laser we did the demonstration again he looked back and forth between what was on the wall and the laser he picked up the slide he looked at the slide he put it back in and yeah he said you just smile give a huge smile what that really is impossible and that was you know and then you know slowly walked out of the room with a big smile on his face and uh so I felt there was my chance to sort of return a favor that he had given me and giving me so many Thrills in physics it was my chance to return a thrill to him and I think he appreciated the presentence