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Feynman's Letter to His Wife

lettersofnote.com

252 pointsMoshe_Silnorin60 comments

After my dad died my freshman year of college, I wrote a letter and sealed it. It's so hard to understand that a person that was so important to you won't be there to hear everything you wanted to tell them.

Since then, I've loved studying letters between friends and lovers.

This is a great letter.

> It's so hard to understand that a person that was so important to you won't be there to hear everything you wanted to tell them.

I agree. I know this is going to sound creepy, but in certain African countries like Ghana there is a video made of the funeral just like they do for weddings. And when you miss whoever has passed away, you get to watch the video. It doesn't bring them back but you get to see the person.

doesn't sound creepy to me at all. i wish it was done more.

i wanted to take pics and video at a funeral as there was a family member who couldn't be there, and was told to stop (by other family). Same family member who couldn't there was, days later, at a funeral of her own (in a different country) and received a DVD of the service. Very much 'cultural norms' at play, and it'll be many more years before video of funerals is considered 'normal'.

Not creepy at all. I wanted to make a video of my brother but I was immediately shunned by some religious elders.

How dare you try to grieve in your own way.

> a person that was so important to you won't be there

As I understand it, we die two deaths. Once when your last breath leaves your body and next when those who remember you say your name for the last time.

By continuing to tell their stories, continuing to read their words, continuing to live, cherishing and remembering, loving, they also live... Life extends through our bodies and beyond.

I've often thought the same thing. If I'm ever in an old cemetery, I walk through the graves and whisper names that are still legible to give the forgotten people one more time when someone said their names.

"PS Please excuse my not mailing this — but I don't know your new address."

I seem to have something in my eye

Yeah that one hit me.

Stupid onion-cutting ninjas..

This was quite an emotional read, a wake up call for many.

I was struck by the D'Arline, probably the sweetest pun I have ever heard.

I don't find this creepy or invasive at all. A bit hard to read, as my eyes are suddenly blurry, but I'm glad to have read it.

This is hard to read. It really is. A reminder to open our heart to the people in our lives, while they are still with us in the flesh, and vice versa.

That was beautiful. Recently I was feeling really, really lonely. This letter helped me remember what great feeling is to have someone you can love and care for. It's the little things like sending "Hello" texts in the morning to each other that I'm missing the most. Love is great.

"How beautiful life is and how sad! How fleeting, with no past and no future, only a limitless now."

I didn't read the letter. The framing of it was all I needed to text my wife and tell her how much I love her.

Feels kind of invasive reading this.

Then you definitely don't want to google Napoleon's letters to his wife Josephine.

Or James Joyce's correspondence of similar nature. Or Mozarts..

Or Warren G. Harding's love letters to Carrie Phillips whom he was having an extramarital affair with.

I agree with you.

Sitting in my office - crying.

I read this at my dad's wedding, five years after my mom died. Wasn't sure how an atheist's letter to his dead wife would be received, but it kind of spoke to me.

In general I don't think the best time and place to make a tribute to your dad's dead wife is at his new wife's wedding.

I hope it wasn't passive aggressive.

I would like to think that a woman marrying a man who has gone through this would be quite well acquainted with (and respect) the fact that the man's love for the woman who passed would not be replaced by the new love.

I agree but still, its her wedding. The focus should be on her and the future, not her predecessor and the past. There are plenty of other occasions for such a loving memorial, for example the anniversary of her passing.

The problem with software people is they too often treat people like logical code. Hence the stereotypes.

Feynman's letter itself is beautiful precisely because it isn't logical. Not only because he was writing to a dead person, but also beause he so deeply respected their intimacy and cherished her feelings even after her death that he kept the letter private. In other words it was a real letter not a memorial or tribute. It would have been quite logical to publish it in her honor. But he did not!

How was it received?

Very well. They asked for a copy of the book.

Man I am justing reading Surely you are joking mr Feynman, this comes in the right time

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman is a fantastic book; worth every page. I was just listening to the Upvoted podcast where they interview Unidan, a once popular scientist on Reddit. One of the things he talked about was how he always wanted to convey to others that scientists are normal people just like everyone else. They don't live in a clean white lab coat atop a pedestal of beakers; scientists spend most of their time doing average joe stuff, running experiments in their underpants, and brewing craft beer with lab equipment. He wanted to make that clear, in the hopes that it would inspire people to go "Hey, if that shumlp can be a scientist, why can't I?"

That immediately reminded me of the Feynman book. It humanizes Feynman, turning him from the great untouchable figurehead of quantum physics to an average, hounddog schlum like most of us. The guy would hang out in titty bars while working on his theories! It's oddly inspiring.

>In October of 1946, Richard wrote his late wife a heartbreaking love letter and sealed it in an envelope. It remained unopened until after his death in 1988.

It is a very heartbreaking and sad. But was there instruction for it to be shared publicly? It will pain me if someone is sharing this just to further their own agenda. It seems kind of private.

We'd be missing a large portion of our civilization's history without the private writings of notable people. I can't find anything on the provenance of Feynman's letters, but I'd suspect either he or his estate willingly donated them.

>But I'd suspect either he or his estate willingly donated them.

Agreed. That was what I thought after my post.

(Source: The Letters of Note book - reproduced with permission of Richard Feynman's Estate.)

@javawizard, thank you.

The letter is in "Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track", a book of letters edited by Feynman's daughter, Michelle, and with the co-operation of his son, Carl.

It still brings me comfort in a small way to see a dead friend in my contact list, or old emails from him.

I liked Feynman before and more so now. It's endearing that he's trying to work through it with her.

I was under impression that Feynman was a pickup artist (i.e. persuading ladies to have flings). During his work on the Bomb, i.e. before 1945. That's from his books.

Can you please enlighten me on the issue?

Just another walking contradiction like the rest of us.

My impression, which others may correct me on, is that he started down that road while in Los Alamos: I vaguely recall that his "You just ask them?" story was in that setting, anyway. I've always had the sense that he was deeply (and monogamously) devoted to his wife until her death. After her death, well, he says in this letter that he's had multiple girlfriends but that those relationships never went anywhere; my guess would be that he's telling his wife about precisely those early flings, and what they meant to him.

But yeah, for all his brilliance and magnetism and vision, Feynman was also (eventually) pretty terrible toward women. I gaze in grateful awe and reverence at his personal contributions to human knowledge, even as I grimace in frustration and disappointment at his contributions to a culture that continues to drive too many potentially brilliant contributors away. So this letter is bittersweet to me, since it calls to mind one of the few significant areas where Feynman's life did harm to humanity rather than good. I wonder if that might have been different if his wife had lived?

I know he was somewhat rakish before he married his third wife, but in what manner was he terrible to women? It takes two to tango, so his rakishness doesn't seem to imply sexism.

Yeah, you kind of have to keep the context in mind when reading about Feynman's "pick up artist" stories. Much of it takes place not only in the context of the "hook up scene", but also in the hook up scene fifty-plus years ago. The guy giving him lessons in how to pick up girls was basically telling him there's a certain process to the hook up scene, and part of it involved women taking advantage of men who will allow it. The key bit of advice was to recognize when they were pushing for freebies, and to push right back. It established a relationship of equals, which then had a fairly good chance of resulting in the casual sex both parties were ultimately looking for. From our perspective some of the behavior seems pretty crass, but that's because the subtleties of the hook up scene change over time. The cultural anchors have shifted, and what was once simply an offhand citation of the normative gender roles now sounds downright boorish.

Partly it's a matter of culture. Generations of physics students grow up seeing Feynman presented as an ideal, and in so very many ways (not just scientific!) he's a great person to emulate. But if his "rakishness" is lumped into that package as part of your vision of "an ideal physicist", that actively does harm: it encourages male students to treat the women around them like meat[0], and it gives female students a yet another signal that "physicist" and "feminine" are incompatible. This culture is pretty clearly one reason that physics lags behind almost all of the other sciences (including pure math) in approaching gender parity.

And partly it really does feel like Feynman literally thought less of most of the women in his life. (On some level, that's par for the course: Feynman was an asshole to just about everyone.) Just for instance, the conclusion of that "You just ask them?" story (from memory, again) includes the observation that female college students are "no better than" women who hang around in bars, whom he had already called "whores" (and seemed to mean it). See also [0], again.

Some of this is a reflection of the era when he lived. But it's a particularly vivid reflection, and it was a pretty thoroughly sexist era. When Feynman is held up as an ideal without keeping that context in mind, it can tend to propagate the shortcomings of that era into the present.

It does indeed take two to tango. But nothing about that guarantees that both dancers are equals. When I tango, just for instance, tradition insists that as a man, I get to lead, and my partner's job is to do what I tell her to as gracefully as possible. It's stretching the metaphor to apply that directly here, I know (though it is unquestionably a manifestation of our society's invisible background sexism). But I suspect that most of Feynman's many lovers did not think less of him in the ways that he very explicitly learned and practiced thinking less of them.

[0] Just for instance, in one of his stories, Feynman was clearly delighted by the description of a local woman in Brazil as "a sleeping dictionary", since he didn't speak Portuguese well.

I don't know about other theoretician's love lives but wasn't Einstein also something of a womaniser? Is there a trend, perhaps attraction to great minds coupled with the person being so deep in their work as to disrespect normal social mores?

See also Schrödinger's discovery of his eponymous equation.

Feynman, 1966 (http://www.fotuva.org/feynman/what_is_science.html):

> I listened to a conversation between two girls, and one was explaining that if you want to make a straight line, you see, you go over a certain number to the right for each row you go up--that is, if you go over each time the same amount when you go up a row, you make a straight line--a deep principle of analytic geometry! It went on. I was rather amazed. I didn't realize the female mind was capable of understanding analytic geometry.

She went on and said, "Suppose you have another line coming in from the other side, and you want to figure out where they are going to intersect. Suppose on one line you go over two to the right for every one you go up, and the other line goes over three to the right for every one that it goes up, and they start twenty steps apart," etc.--I was flabbergasted. She figured out where the intersection was. It turned out that one girl was explaining to the other how to knit argyle socks. I, therefore, did learn a lesson: The female mind is capable of understanding analytic geometry. Those people who have for years been insisting (in the face of all obvious evidence to the contrary) that the male and female are equally capable of rational thought may have something. The difficulty may just be that we have never yet discovered a way to communicate with the female mind. If it is done in the right way, you may be able to get something out of it.

That's almost 60 years ago that he went on record saying that pedagogical issues may be affecting women in mathematics and he had lost faith in the assumption of their inferiority. This wasn't just anybody saying this and this wasn't just any physicist saying this - this was Feynman. This was the guy the other physicists looked at in awe and it was the year after he won his Nobel Prize for Quantum Electrodynamics. Few physicists have ever earned so much respect from their peers.

If that's not convicing then read how he was the one who encouraged his sister Joan to pursue science against the wishes of their mother who thought women lacked the cranial capacity to do science. (http://www.aas.org/cswa/status/2003/JANUARY2003/MyMotherTheS...)

> It wasn’t until her 14th birthday—March 31, 1942— that her notion of becoming a scientist was revived. Richard presented her with a book called Astronomy. “It was a college textbook. I’d start reading it, get stuck, and then start over again. This went on for months, but I kept at it. When I reached page 407, I came across a graph that changed my life.” My mother shuts her eyes and recites from memory: “‘Relative strengths of the Mg+ absorption line at 4,481 angstroms . . . from Stellar Atmospheres by Cecilia Payne.’ Cecilia Payne! It was scientific proof that a woman was capable of writing a book that, in turn, was quoted in a text. The secret was out, you see.”

Richard was 23 or 24 when he gave her that book. Keep in mind this was the 1940's and it was the same year he received his PhD - so he wasn't just a kid and supporting women in science wasn't the popularity contest it is today. When 24 years later he made the other quote in 1966 he knew women were capable scientists because his sister had already become one.

This is all to say that before you take one chapter from one book out of context and extrapolate across his entire life make sure you get a few more data points to see if the extrapolation makes any sense.

That's heartening to read! But still, it rather damns with faint praise, doesn't it? With its "in the face of all obvious evidence to the contrary" and its "you may be able to get something out of it" and its observation that "we" have never been able to communicate with "the female mind".

Yes, he's presumably trying to be lighthearted and cute and speak in a way that might connect with reluctant colleagues. But it's still awfully condescending.

And yes, I know that Feynman was condescending to everyone who wasn't Feynman. Here, though, he continues a trend of being condescending toward women as a group. Just because he could recognize individual women as talented (his wife, too!) doesn't mean that he didn't have negative (and harmful) attitudes toward them on the whole. And I think that those harmful attitudes have become a more lasting part of his popular image than have the quotes you've shared here.

> "...and supporting women in science wasn't the popularity contest it is today."

This quote speaks volumes about your own perspective.

> Yes, he's presumably trying to be lighthearted and cute and speak in a way that might connect with reluctant colleagues. But it's still awfully condescending.

He said that literally sixty years ago. Is every historical figure who didn't have the good fortune to live in our modern era of tolerance to be disavowed?

I don't think there's a single word in what I've written here that says "We must disavow Feynman!"

But Feynman is still held up as an ideal here in our modern era, for very good reasons. As such, it is both just and necessary for us to point out to the next generation the handful of areas where emulating him is not a good idea.

Is it necessary to bring it up every time he's mentioned anywhere, as has happened in this comments section?

> This quote speaks volumes about your own perspective.

Does it? I was pointing out that today there are motives for publicly supporting women in the sciences that didn't exist in 1966. In that quote Feynman pushed things in a progressive direction in a different political atmosphere than we live in today.

No, it does not and you're completely right nerd_stuff. With all the feminism going on these days, accepting women as equals does not seem to be enough anymore.

As a sort of slight compensation for his behaviour toward women in a sexual context there is always the comment made by a woman engineer who was one of his victims, see the last paragraph of the section title Feynman the Explainer on W. Daniel Hillis' essay: http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine...

Oh, that's a perfect encapsulation of this topic! For the lazy:

> The charming side of Richard helped people forgive him for his uncharming characteristics. For example, in many ways Richard was a sexist. Whenever it came time for his daily bowl of soup he would look around for the nearest "girl" and ask if she would fetch it to him. It did not matter if she was the cook, an engineer, or the president of the company. I once asked a female engineer who had just been a victim of this if it bothered her. "Yes, it really annoys me," she said. "On the other hand, he is the only one who ever explained quantum mechanics to me as if I could understand it." That was the essence of Richard's charm.

"You just ask them?" was in Albuquerque during a summer after he was at Cornell, so 1946 at the earliest.[1]

[1] http://www.e-reading.club/chapter.php/71262/34/Feynman_-_Sur...

This is a legitimate question. (I suspect you're being down-voted for emotional reasons.)

Feynman began work on the bomb when he was 21. He did not marry his first wife until he was 23.

The "You Just Ask Them?" story occurred when he was teaching at Cornell, after his wife's death - and he disclaimed the techniques in the book. Even if your worst impressions are correct, we don't have access to their marital situation - she had a highly contagious disease for the entirety of their marriage. It is obviously very clear that he loved her from the letter. I don't think there's much I could learn that could cheapen the sentiments within it.

It always seems such a shame to me when a decent, well placed and lucid question such as this is downvoted to the "grey zone".

It feels creepy to read this, like if you were to hack into someone's private emails or Facebook or such.

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