Richard Feynman and Bill Gates                                                       
An imaginary encounter

By Hasan Zillur Rahim

Millions of kids around the world dream of becoming the next Bill Gates, the whiz kid who made good by anticipating the digital future and creating one of the world's most successful companies around it. That he has acquired a fortune in the process is almost incidental; the Microsoft chairman seems to have transcended the software industry to become a cultural icon that young minds find irresistible.

But who is a hero to Bill Gates? Who does he look up to?

In a syndicated column that he writes for The New York Times Special Features, Gates has identified individuals he respects and admires, "individuals who achieve something inspirational or who possess extraordinary character." Of these, one name comes up more often than others: the late great Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman.

Gates had planned on meeting with Feynman in 1988 but didn't get a chance. Feynman died of cancer in February of that year. "It’s an opportunity I’m sorry I missed," wrote Gates in the Times in 1995. "His book, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, is a favorite of mine."

Feynman was a hero because, as Gates put it, "he was incredibly inspirational. He was an independent thinker and gifted teacher who pushed himself to understand new things. I have enjoyed everything I’ve read about him and by him. I admired him deeply…"

In 1964, Feynman gave a series of lectures at Cornell University, the Messenger Lectures, under the title "The Character of Physical Law." His topics ranged from symmetry, probability and uncertainty in physical laws to techniques by which physicists seek new laws. The lectures were recognized for their extraordinary quality. "I have videotapes of physics lectures Feynman gave at Cornell decades ago," said Gates. "They are the best lectures I’ve seen on any subject. He shared his enthusiasm and clarity energetically and persuasively."

During an interview with CIO magazine in September 1997, Gates was asked: "Who would you invite to a dinner party?" Feynman was on the list, along with Einstein and Leonardo da Vinci.

On July 14, 2009, Microsoft Research, in collaboration with Gates, launched a Web site - Project Tuva - that makes The Messenger Lectures freely available to the general public for the first time. Gates purchased the rights to the seven lectures in the series to make them available to the public for free to help kids get excited about physics and science. “I think someone who can make science interesting is magical. And the person who did that better than anybody was Richard Feynman. He took the mystery of science, the importance of science, the strangeness of science, and made it fun and interesting and approachable,” said Gates.

At the time of his death, Feynman had become everyone’s favorite physicist, thanks to the popularity of Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman and What Do You Care What Other People Think. With these books, transcribed by his friend and drumming partner Ralph Leighton from taped conversations over a period of years, Feynman captured the public imagination as no other physicists had before him, with the possible exceptions of Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi.

The Feynman Lectures on Physics, a set of lectures Feynman gave to undergraduates at Caltech in '62-63, is now a classic. (For a description of how the lectures came about, see the definitive article by Feynman's colleague Matthew Sands in Physics Today, April 2005.) Feynman’s fame grew when he was appointed to the Rogers commission in 1986 to investigate the Challenger shuttle explosion. His dramatic demonstration on television of the loss of resiliency in O-ring at freezing temperature as a principal cause of the Challenger accident made him a national celebrity. In applauding his performance, the physicist Freeman Dyson said: "The public saw with their own eyes how science is done, how a great scientist thinks with his hands, how nature gives a clear answer when a scientist asks a clear question."

Since he passed away in 1988, Feynman lore has continued to grow. Several books have been published, including Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (James Gleick, 1992), Most of the Good Stuff: Memories of Richard Feynman (American Institute of Physics, 1993), No Ordinary Genius (Christopher Sykes, 1994), The Beat of a Different Drum (Jagdish Mehra, 1994), Feynman’s Lost Lecture: The Motion of Planets Around the Sun (W.W. Norton, 1996), The Meaning of It All (Helix Books, 1998), The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (Perseus Books, 1999) Feynman's Rainbow (Leonard Mlodinow, 2003), and Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track: The Letters of Richard Feynman (Edited by Michelle Feynman, Basic Books, 2005). Reminiscences by colleagues also appear from time to time in Physics journals, such as "Capturing the wisdom of Feynman" by Matthew Sands (Physics Today, April 2006) and "Memories of Feynman" by Theodore A. Welton (Physics Today, February 2007). A fascinating article on how Feynman approached the subject of piano tuning ("Stiff-string theory: Richard Feynman on piano tuning" by John C. Bryner) appeared in the December 2009 issue of Physics Today.

Feynman has even made it into the billboards! When Apple Computer began its "Think Different" series of ads featuring great scientists, artists, humanitarians and the like, the company chose Einstein and Gandhi among its first examples of the uncommon rewards awaiting those who dared to follow the beat of a different drum. "Can Feynman be far behind?" I wondered.

In November '98, I was driving in San Francisco's Mission District when I suddenly saw that familiar face with the knowing grin inviting commuters to ponder the mysteries of ... what? The photograph showed Feynman wearing the corporate T-shirt of Thinking Machine, a Boston-based company where he had briefly worked as a consultant in 1983. The shirt bore a schematic representation of Connection Machine - a cube of cubes -  that he helped design for Thinking Machine. (It's the same photograph on the cover of What Do You Care What Other People Think?) Then, in April '99, Feynman "came" to Silicon Valley where I live. Anyone driving along Highway 101 in the South Bay could "see" Feynman teaching quantum mechanics at the California Institute of Technology, in front of a blackboard on which he had written matrices and differential equations. According to Caltech archives, the photograph was taken on May 2, 1963, during his "Lectures on Physics" period. (Feynman has a large number of fans in Silicon Valley, so there was disappointment when Apple "replaced" him with an image of an iMac five months later.)

What may have pleased Bill Gates most, however, were the publications of The Feynman Lectures on Computation (edited by Anthony J. G. Hey and Robin W. Allen - 1996) and Feynman and Computation (edited by A. J. G. Hey - 1998.) The first is a collection of lectures Feynman gave at Caltech from 1983 to 1986 as part of an interdisciplinary course called "Potentialities and Limitations of Computing Machines." The second contains contributions by distinguished computer scientists and physicists who were guest lecturers in Feynman's interdisciplinary course. It also contains reprints of Feynman's prescient articles on the physics of computing: "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" (1959!) and "Simulating Physics with Computers" (1982). Anyone reading these two books will agree that Feynman's insight and ingenuity make his lectures on computation almost as timeless as his physics lectures.

And now Feynman has his own 37-cent first-class stamp! The US Postal Service has honored four American scientists  - physicists Richard Feynman and Josiah Willard Gibbs, mathematician John Von Neumann and geneticist Barbara McClintock. The stamps were issued on 4 May, 2005. The Feynman stamp shows the physicist in his 30s, framed by the unmistakable Feynman diagrams. The stamp came about thanks to the decade-long lobbying effort by Ralph Leighton, who organized a celebration on May 11, 2005, at the post office in Far Rockaway, the New York City neighborhood where Feynman grew up. On the same day, the street in Far Rockaway where Feynman lived - 2 blocks from the post office - was renamed in his honor, from Cornaga Ave to "Richard Feynman Way." The date was appropriately chosen: May 11 is Feynman's birthday.

Gates never met Feynman but it is fascinating to imagine a meeting between the two. Here is the whiz kid transformed into a wide-eyed pupil, marveling at the master’s facility with ideas and insights, wondering at the source of that magical genius that’s uniquely Feynman’s. What does Feynman think of the current state of computing? How does he envision its future? Are any architectural breakthroughs in software imminent? Where is the limit and why?