Feynman, Richard P.

"IF IT'S A BOY, HE'LL BE A SCIENTIST." — Melville Feynman

Melville Feynman, Richard's father, had grown up poor on Long Island, NY. He had wanted to go to medical school but, due to lack of funds, he enrolled in a homeopathic institute. Sadly, he was forced to discontinue his education soon after, needing to get a job to bring in money for his family. Nevertheless, he was "eager to learn and absorbed a great deal of knowledge, especially in the sciences...Melville had a rational mind and liked those things that could be understood by thinking" (Mehra, "Richard Phillips Feynman," p. 100).

In this long and touching letter, Richard Feynman tells his father of the many ways in which he encouraged and fostered Feynman's interest in science. In addition, we see Feynman's artistic skill on display, with small drawings of an insect and a leaf to the center of the fourth page.

Feynman's letter discusses his father introducing him to biology ("I remember walks in the woods at Sand Lake when we looked at toadstools + overturned stones to see the little insects"), dinosaurs ("I was introduced, by you, to the great reptiles of the past — the dinosaurs for which I have ever since had a liking + a kind of sympathy that the poor animals couldn’t make it so are now extinct"), the immune system ("Once you had just cut your hand with some tool or other...you told me how if we only had a microscope we could see the healing operation, which seemed to our eyes to be so slow, to be a beehive of activity"), and geometry ("...in Cedarhurst you told me the square of the hypotenuse is the sum of the square of the other two legs in a right triangle – I remember at first not understanding what the squares were doing on the legs but I soon understood when you showed me with numbers"), amongst many other topics.

Richard Feynman's autograph letter reads, in part:

"Dear Pop,

I’ve been meaning to write you a letter something like this one for a long time. I’ve thought of it many times but have never gotten to do it before.

[...]

These are a few of the many things that remind me of you + in which I am just like you – a chip off the old block. There are many more – cryptograms + puzzles interest me like you, etc. but I could almost go on endlessly.

But there is another aspect of my makeup which I also want to talk about. I am supposed to be a theoretical physicist + I want to tell you about that. Many times people ask me what business you are in + I say a sales manager in a uniform co. Then they ask me how I got interested in science + I say from you + tell them one or a number of the following stories which I can remember. You can no doubt remember much more – but I thought it would be interesting to you if I told you some of the events I remember.

I remember you first interested me in biology – in plants + insects. I remember walks in the woods at Sand Lake when we looked at toadstools and overturned stones to see the little insects that looked like this: [drawing of an insect] roll up into a little ball – for protection you would explain. I’d tell how you would take a leaf which had a non-green track on it: [drawing of a leaf] + would explain that a tiny insect spent his whole life in that one leaf going a few inches – eating his way so there was no food problem. It was only on thinking this over preparing to write this letter that I remember this particular thing was not told an 8 year old boy in Sand Lake woods – but a boy three times as old about a leaf picked from a tree outside the Graduate College at Princeton! 

[...]

Also I learned of π from you around the same time. I remember in school we were learning decimals for fractions + one problem was 3 1/8 + I wrote 3.125 then some dim memory was awakened in my mind + I wrote “equals pi, equals ratio of circumference to diameter of a circle” – but the teacher noticed + corrected me by writing “pi = 3.1416.” She must have been amazed!

I came to you one day after playing with my express wagon with a ball in it – I noticed the ball ran toward the back when I started the wagon suddenly— + ran to the front when I stopped it. You told me all about inertia – and about molecules and about electricity, and about everything.

So I surely got my interest in science from you – and that is one of the most wonderful things I have. I know you were always somewhat disappointed that I turned out so theoretical – you would rather I built + ran + did experiments with the atom-smashers rather than thought about them. Maybe someday I will – I have the desire + the spirit + I can handle tools – so who knows whether between terms I’ll have time for a real experiment or two?"

The El Fidel Hotel, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, is where Feynman would stay when visiting first wife Arline, while she was dying of tuberculosis at the Southwestern Presbyterian Sanitorium.

REFERENCES:

Not in Michelle Feynman, ed. Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track. The Letters of Richard P. Feynman. New York: Basic Books, 2005.