I once interviewed a well known European physicist whom I had arranged to meet at a table in the noisy lunchroom at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. I pulled out a tape recorder and asked him about one of his experiments. The scientist could barely disguise his impatience. After five minutes we had a slight misunderstanding about where a certain event took place. I corrected him; he thought I hadn’t been listening.

“That’s it!” he fairly roared as he abruptly stood up, his chair shooting backwards. The background hubbub in the lunchroom suddenly plummeted and everyone turned to stare. He strode away, shouting, “This is a total waste of time! You’re an imbecile!” Or at least I think that’s what he shouted. I can’t be sure, because I destroyed the tape. I was too embarrassed to consider replaying it, or risk having others know my humiliation.

Many who write about physics from the outside – historians, sociologists, anthropologists, or journalists – have had experiences like this. At conferences we regale each other with stories. Most of us destroy our tapes, swallow our pride, regard the episodes as occupational hazards and never write about them. The scientists involved count on that, I think, and would be annoyed if we did use the material.

I’m not talking about cases of writers trying to reap publicity, prestige and money by seeking to glean nuggets from prominent, busy people who are struggling with a full schedule. No, I’m talking about scholars and writers who are trying to carry out research into the history, nature or place of science in society. They contact a physicist, describe their purpose, confirm arrangements and then get treated like a cold-call solicitor. It happens rarely, but often enough to arouse speculation that physicists have a special contempt for outsiders.

Writing the Sistine Chapel

One man who does not destroy his tapes is John Horgan, a former editor on Scientific American. Horgan once flew to Chicago for a prearranged interview with the late astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who shared the 1983 Nobel Prize for Physics for his theoretical work on the structure and evolution of stars.

Chandrasekhar, who was then writing a book on Newton’s Principia, demanded to know Horgan’s purpose. Horgan replied that he was writing a two-page profile about Chandrasekhar and his project.

“What!” the Nobel laureate hollered, ordering Horgan out. “You think that you can summarize Homer’s Odyssey in two pages? You think that you can write about the Sistine Chapel in two pages?” Horgan laughed nervously, wondering if this was a joke. It was not. Chandrasekhar again demanded he leave.

A University of Chicago public-relations aide eventually coaxed Chandrasekhar to stop the bullying and go through with the interview – but afterwards Chandrasekhar insisted that Horgan should not print anything about their meeting. Horgan, within his rights, did so anyway, penning a delicate, toned-down description of the encounter.

Horgan’s book, The End of Science, is full of such stories. I think the outraged reaction of many scientists to his book stemmed from the fact that Horgan seemed to pay less attention to what the scientists said than to the way they said it. But his point, in part, was to display the personal involvement of scientists in their work. Uncharitably, one might say that they revelled in the purity and majesty of their knowledge and resented having to debase it by using terms that outsiders can handle – like doing a two-page Odyssey or a dot-to-dot Sistine Chapel.

More charitably, one might say that scientists, ultimately, traffic in words to a lesser extent than others and can get distracted or frustrated by using only that medium. In Horgan’s portrait of the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, he notes that the latter can be careless with words not because he doesn’t care about his thoughts but because he cares too much. “Mere speech,” writes Horgan, “is not enough to engage him fully.”

And Richard Feynman, according to one story, was once thrown uncharacteristically on the defensive in a discussion. Losing his temper, he said: “Damn it, don’t listen to what I say, listen to what I mean!”

Hard on colleagues, Feynman was rougher on outsiders who were not up to speed. He was once so rude and rebuffing to an Omni editor that she hung up in disgust. He then called her back to apologize and invited her to fly to Los Angeles to speak to him. She did, produced a tape recorder and asked the first question – whereupon he became enraged because he had been asked precisely that question before in a published interview, screamed at her for her supposed ignorance, ended the interview before it began, and left her to fly back to New York empty-handed.

The critical point

In my own encounter with Feynman – which, incidentally, is recounted in the epilogue to James Gleick’s biography Genius – I asked him questions about episodes of his intellectual development. Feynman’s replies were direct, but accompanied by intense curiosity about why I was asking; he sought to learn. Then I asked him about progress in science. This did not interest him. A physiological change in his face told me that I had abruptly gone from scholar to scribbler.

All at once he grew angry, stood up, and began shouting. “It’s a dumb question,” he yelled, “I don’t know how to answer it. Cancel everything I said!” He slammed his fist into the mountains of papers on his desk, then strode to the door. “It’s all so stupid. All of these interviews are always so damned useless.” He walked down the corridor, shouting: “It’s goddamned useless to talk about these things! It’s a complete waste of time! The history of these things is nonsense! You’re trying to make something difficult and complicated out of something that’s simple and beautiful!”

In that instant, witnessing his curiosity evaporate, I realized this had nothing to do with me, nor with contempt for outsiders, nor with scorn for history. Rather, it had everything to do with Feynman’s absorption in his own work – the same kind of absorption that made him a great physicist.

That was one tape I kept.