Feynman: The Universe In A Glass of Wine

Last night in a BD celebration (1001011 in binary, 4B in hexadecimal, “.” in EBCDIC, forget what it is in decimal, or “denumerably infinite” to mathematicians) at my wine tasting, I was gifted a framed/wall-hangable quote on wine from Richard Fenyman:
Feynman:Universe in a Glass of Wine
Glass Of Wine Cartoon

In 1961, Nobel prize winner Feynman was asked by CalTech to teach an undergraduate course in introductory physics. His book, Six Easy Pieces, contains this short story on wine. His lectures revolutionized the teaching of physics in colleges.

My interest in wine has a direct connection to Feynman. One of his contemporaries who worked a bit together was PaulZweifel, a mathematician who applied N.I Muskhelishvilli’s singular eigenfunction expansion techniques to neutron transport…so-called Caseology, when he was at Univ of Michigan. Paul was passionately interested in wine. He transmitted that wine interest to one of his students, Ken Shultis. Ken was my major professor at KansasState. He and Sue had me over for dinner one night…this fuzzy-cheeked grad student all of 26 yrs of age. Up until then, my wine interest (such as it was…coming from a family of Methodist tee-totallers) was Taylor Lake Country Red. With grilled steak, Ken served a '66 Lynch-Bages. “Hmmmm…this is wine? This stuff is pretty good”. And then with Sue’s GrandMarnierSouffle, he pulled out a hlf-btl of '65 d’Yquem (miserable/rain-besotted year). “Wow…this stuff is incredible. I don’t like sweet wine”. That was my epiphany wine…I was hooked. Berbiglia’s in KC carried that wine at $11.99/hlf btl at the time.

During the War, Feynman was an Army PFC assigned to the ManhattanProject, because of his mathematical/physics skills, in LosAlamos. He was quite the character w/ lots of stories about his time here. After the war, he went on to earn a Nobel Prize in Physics for his Feynman Diagram methodology for explaining sub-atomic particle behavior and his quantuum mechanics work.

During his days at LosAlamos, he developed the Pre-Detonation (or Pre-Initiation) Equation to predict the probability of a super-critical assembly having an uncontrolled chain reaction before it was fully assembled, from a stray cosmic neutron or spontaneous fission. It is an adjoint Boltzmann transport equation with a bunch of non-linear fission terms…one of the ugliest equations I ever worked with. Alas, because of the lack of appropriate nuclear data and the lack of computers, he was a failure at solving that equation.

He came to LosAlamos in the early '90’s and delivered a Lab colloquium on Quantuum Computing (something that is finally starting to come to fruition). After this very illuminating colloquium, they had a reception for him that was sparsely attended. On a whim, I decided to go. Feynman had a very engaging personality and asked me what I was working on. I explained…“why Dr.Feynman…it’s your Pre-Detonation Equation. I’ve been able to accelerate the iterations so that we can actually solve it on the computer in a reasonable amount of compute time”. That very much piqued his interest and he started asking me all sorts of questions…some of which strayed into S/RD classified information & had to explain to him we couldn’t talk about this stuff here in public. Of the 6 Nobel prize-winners I’ve met, Feynman was, by far, the best (Edward Teller was a self-absorbed dunce). His many books are very highly-recommended reading.

So now you know the rest of this SWR story. More detail than you every wanted to know.
Tom (#75 if you havent computed it yet)

Do list the 6 Nobel laureates.

RichardFeynman
EdwardTeller
FredReines
ClydeCowan
Murray Gell-Mann
HansBethe

Tom (whose Nobel prize is pending!!)

Happy Birthday, old man!

Congrats on another birthday Tom. Your remark about Teller made me laugh. My postdoc advisor Gilbert Stork sat with Edward Teller at dinner for the National Medal of Science awardees in 1982. As they introduced themselves to each other Gilbert told Edward that his introduction preceded him and that it was not entirely flattering. I’m sure that there was no intention of malice but rather a small talk fact.

Yup, Gary. Edward was visiting one of our Assoc Directors & his secretary, knowing I was a fan of nuclear history, invited me
up to have Edward autograph my copy of his book (Better A Shield Than A Sword). I immediately made a bee-line for her office,
she introduced me to Edward, who signed my book, and then just turned away. No interest in engaging whatsoever.

Edward was pretty much persona non grata in LosAlamos after he testified against Oppenheimer in his security hearings
and Oppy’s clearance was lifted. It wasn’t until GeorgeKeyworth, who was the Reagan Science Advisor later, reached out
to Edward and healed the rift between the Lab and Edward.
Edward, in his later yrs, was quite a sight to behold. He carried this 5 foot tall walking stick (like he used to hike with in Hungary
afore the War) and would repeatedly thump it on the floor when he wanted to make a point.
Tom

Happy Birthday Tom!
Thank you for the link to Feynman’s quote which I will surely reuse ad nauseam with colleagues (I am a physicist too)…

My pleasure, Gilberto. You don’t happen to work at CERN, do you??
Tom

No, but close, just replace the C in Cern with B
Gilberto

Thanks for the link Tom. As one with a nuclear engineering/physics background I very much enjoy the old Feynman lectures that often focused on the discipline of science and not just the science itself.

Feynman is a hero of mine – thrilled to know you met him, and that he lived up to his billing. Gleik’s biography of him is really good.

Yes, thanks Tom,

Happy B-day and great to know about the Feynman Los Alamos (and Tom Hill) connection.

Curious if you or anyone knows what wine Feynman liked to drink.

All best,
Josh

Yup …everything Gleik writes is good, Glen. I take friends on a personal tour of the Bradbury Science Museum about once a month. One of the premier science museums in the Nation. I always choke up when I get to the Feynman picture. He was a scientist with personality.
Tom

Happy birthday Tom! Being the humanities major that I am, I computed 4B to 76. Sorry!

Such a great story, thanks for sharing it. Richard Feynman was an amazing human being. I’m not sure if I’m more jealous that you got to meet him or that you actually understand a meaningful fraction of his research.

Happy birthday Tom.

Happy Birthday Tom - and thanks for giving us the gift of this memory and the poem.

I have no physics background but Feynman’s Surely You’re Joking as well as his post-Challenger book are favorites – and as said above, I’m jealous you got to meet him and so glad he did not disappoint in person!

Nope…sorry, Charles. I only understand a small fraction of Feynman’s technical work. I didn’t take enough pure physics to understand
most of it and it is, by & large, way over my head. I’m awaiting release of the “Feynman for Dummies” book.
After all, I’m just a simple little ole country computational physicist…spoken in my finest SamErwin drawl.
Tom

If you are not careful, physicists will take over the board.

I too admired Feynman. I regret being a little too young to meet him, but we saw the documentary he made shortly before he died in my senior year high school class just after he died (1988), and his personality and love for Physics always stuck with me. So much so that I was very happy when a project I worked on as a grad student unexpectedly allowed me to develop Feynman diagrams and to write Feynman rules relating to atom-laser interactions and to put his name in the title to the paper.

I have to admit, Tom, that your post had me writing down the number of Nobel laureates I’ve met and I’m a little embarrassed by the number.

But note Teller never won the Nobel. I actually had a chance to attend a small dinner party with him in the early 90s, and I passed. Probably silly in retrospect, but his reputation preceded him.

And by the way happy birthday!!