Feynman's Heart-breaking Letter to His Deceased Wife

This is a letter the physicist Richard Feynman wrote to his wife 17 months after she passed. 

Feynman was a young physicist at Los Alamos, New Mexico during the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. He was a junior scientist put in charge of the calculating division, the "human calculators" doing all the arithmetic that needed done, especially complicated integrals. 

(Sothebys confirms)

A little about his marriage, from Wikipedia:

One of the conditions of Feynman's scholarship to Princeton was that he could not be married; nevertheless, he continued to see his high school sweetheart, Arline Greenbaum, and was determined to marry her once he had been awarded his PhD despite the knowledge that she was seriously ill with tuberculosis. This was an incurable disease at the time, and she was not expected to live more than two years. On June 29, 1942, they took the ferry to Staten Island, where they were married in the city office. The ceremony was attended by neither family nor friends and was witnessed by a pair of strangers. Feynman could kiss Arline only on the cheek. After the ceremony he took her to Deborah Hospital, where he visited her on weekends.

Oppenheimer recruited Feynman for Los Alamos. He was there by late March 1943.

Oppenheimer recruited many young physicists, including Feynman, whom he telephoned long distance from Chicago to inform that he had found a Presbyterian sanatorium in Albuquerque, New Mexico for Arline. They were among the first to depart for New Mexico, leaving on a train on March 28, 1943. The railroad supplied Arline with a wheelchair, and Feynman paid extra for a private room for her. There they spent their wedding anniversary.

Feynman visited his wife in Albuquerque every weekend. Even today it's a two-hour drive from Los Alamos to Albuquerque. Back then, when the roads weren't nearly as good, especially from Los Alamos to Santa Fe, it must have taken him several hours to travel to see his wife. 

She died in June 1945. 

The Trinity test at White Sands, New Mexico was July 16, 1945, and of course the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.

[BTW, I once met and talked with the guy who set off the Trinity bomb--Joseph McKibben, who was in charge of the detonation electronics. Another time.]

Talk about a love story!! Feynman couldn't have been more devoted to his sweetheart and wife, despite all the difficulties and turmoil in both their lives at the time. 

Here's a picture of them:

As I was writing this I thought, wow, this would make a great screenplay, but then I though I had once seen such a movie, and sure enough there is one, from 1996:

But Matthew Broderick as Richard Feynman? Eh.

Sagan

"If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe."

– Carl Sagan

Via: "Why Boltzmann Brains are Bad," Sean Carroll 2017. 

Indonesian Keyboard Player

I'm a little obsessed with this clip:

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President of the Dunning-Kruger Club

Global temperatures: NOAA found August to be the warmest August in their records (which start in 1850), as they did for -July among Julys. August was the 6th warmest month that NOAA ever recorded. Also the warmest ever meteorological summer (June-August). 

2026 has a chance to be the warmest year in their records, especially with the El Nino here already: it would need a Sept-Dec average of 1.44°C, when the year-to-date average has been 1.16°C and the 12-month moving average is at 1.14°C. July's anomaly was 1.20°C, and August was 1.32°C. I suspect someone like Berkeley Eart has estimated the chances.

The record year is 2024, at 1.26 C above their 1901-2000 baseline period. Relative to their first three decades, 1850-1879, 2024's anomaly was 1.39°C, while this year's average-to-date is 1.30°C.

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Wall Street Journal (no paywall):

Spain is getting cooked. 

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US summer heat shatters record.

Western Europe did too.

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NY Times: "In an Age of Perpetual Climate Disaster, Rebuilding Is the Wrong Goal" (free)

Rebuilding could unfold over decades, too: new infrastructure, new patterns of development, perhaps new evacuation routes and emergency-response units. When truly scarring cataclysms struck, survivors built whole new worlds in their wake. This work was difficult even in stable circumstances. But increasingly, weather extremes are arriving not only as crises but premonitions, with future disasters following now within a generation, often within years, and sometimes, unnervingly, within months.

“Nobody really knows what real recovery looks like,” says Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security under Barack Obama and now a disaster-management scholar at Harvard’s Kennedy School. “But the whole apparatus was built on the assumption that disasters were random and rare and that recovery was one and done.”

This, she says, is the original sin of recovery — that we don’t recognize what the disaster itself is telling us. A true thousand-year flood doesn’t reveal much about what new resilience must be built over the next decade, since you only expect to see something like it again 10 centuries from now. That it might come again before the next census or town council election is such an unnerving prospect that we resist it almost magnetically, preferring to believe our suffering was freakish and improbable. And in the immediate aftermath of disaster, public attention and collective ambition are pulled perversely backward, toward restoration, as much as pushed forward, toward adaptation.

I'm sure AI will be able to solve it, one way or the other.

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NYT again: "Why States Are Cutting Back on Their Climate Goals: Ambitious aims have given way to political anxiety over prices as many states’ 2030 emissions targets appear increasingly out of reach." (free)

After President Trump pulled the United States out of the Paris climate agreement during his first term, many Democratic-led states passed their own laws to curtail carbon emissions.

But most states that set goals for 2030 are not on track to meet them. Now, with voters worried about inflation, and with the war in Iran raising energy prices, some states have begun to cut back or abandon those goals instead.

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With news like this, and all the talk of an AI apocalypse, I'm finding it difficult not to be discouraged. I don't like the idea of just throwing my hands up in frustration, but what can I do about any of this? Inflation, wars in Iran and Ukraine, dumb tariffs with once-friendly countries, the ever increasing cost of health insurance and health care, "E.P.A. Erases Limits on Climate Pollution From Power Plants"...all caused or made worse by the bozo in the White House, who gave advice today on AI: Don't worry, be happy. 

Only a low IQ person could think Trump is a high IQ person. President Dunning–Kruger. The only think Trump is qualified for is to be president of the Dunning-Kruger Club. Honestly. So many problems now cry for wise, intelligent, smart leaders, and we get someone too dumb to know how dumb he is. His paranoid narcissism could ruin us all. What is an educated, decent person supposed to do? Seriously, WHAT? 

Some of Today's News

Wow, lots of news today.

• An AI formalized the proof of the famous Fermat's Last Theorem in 13-million lines of code. 
• The same AI, Claude, but in the hands of different people, found that a long-standing question about the Navier-Stokes equation (fluids) has an answer: it does break down in a certain domain.
• Almost half of world’s farmers are poisoned by pesticides every year. This is no way to run a civilization.
• Americans do not get to know where their meat comes from.
• Surprise, surprise: New Yorkers were misled by government officials about how bad their air was after the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center buildings. 

More From Sebastian Junger's "Tribe"

This is from the Introduction to Tribe. It's about a time Junger was threadbare and hitchhiking in Wyoming, and a homeless-looking man came up to him and insisted he [Junger] accept a lunch box.

The lunch box contained a bologna sandwich, an apple, and a bag of potato chips. The food had probably come from a local church. I had no choice but to take it. I thanked him and put the food in my pack for later and wished him luck. Then he turned and made his way back down the on-ramp toward Gillette.

I thought about that man for the rest of my trip. I thought about him for the rest of my life. He'd been generous, yes, but lots of people are generous; what made him different was the fact that he'd taken responsibility for me. He'd spotted me from town and walked half a mile out a highway to make sure I was okay. Robert Frost famously wrote that home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. The word "tribe" is far harder to define, but a start might be the people you feel compelled to share the last of your food with. For reasons I'll never know, the man in Gillette decided to treat me like a member of his tribe.

This book is about why that sentiment is such a rare and precious thing in modern society, and how the lack of it has affected us all. It's about what we can learn from tribal societies about loyalty and belonging and the eternal human quest for meaning. It's about why — for many people — war feels better than peace and hardship can turn out to be a great blessing and disasters are sometimes remembered more fondly than weddings or tropical vacations. Humans don't mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary. It's time for that to end.

US Voted No on New UN Equal Area Map

The US was the only country to vote no on this equal area map, which Africans rightly consider the map to more just in showing the continent's true size.

The US often votes no on seemingly obvious issues, like a UN resolution affirming that access to food is a fundamental human right. 180 countries voted in favor. Only the US and Israel voted no.

The UN identified "the right to safe and clean drinking water and sanitation as a human right that is essential for the full enjoyment of life and all human rights." The US abstained from voting.

The US is not a member of the International Criminal Court (ICC). In fact they are now saying they will try to dismantle it.

And on and on. The US has, over the decades, very often voted against what seems to clearly be in the best interest of the world and also of Americans. It's embarrassing and infuriating.

The United Nations General Assembly voted to adopt a new world map that reflects countries’ true relative sizes, after African nations urged the UN to right a centuries-old wrong.

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— CNN (@cnn.com) 8:01 PM · Sep 4, 2026

A Wild Analogy

Quantum mechanics has revealed the probabilistic nature of fundamental particles, while Einstein's general relativity describes how the fabric of spacetime is warped by mass and energy to produce gravity. As a result, we have semiconductors and GPS.

Yet unifying these incredibly successful but separate theories into a single 'Theory of Everything' may be modern physics' greatest challenge (like unifying oil and vinegar into tasty dressing using mustard).

from: Wild experiment reveals quantum objects do obey gravity, Ivan Farkas, ScienceAlert, 4 Sept 2026.

"Tribe" by Sebastian Junger

King George III of England caused the English colonies in America to rebel by trying to tax them without allowing them a voice in government. In this sense, democratic revolutions are just a formalized version of the sort of group action that coalition of senior males have used throughout the ages to confront greed and abuse. Thomas Paine, one of the principal architects of American democracy, wrote a formal pronunciation of civilization in a tract called Agrarian Justice: “Whether…civilization has most promoted or most injured the general happiness of man is a question that may be strongly contested,” he wrote in 1795. "[Both] the most affluent and the most miserable of the human race are to be found in the countries that are called civilized."

I got this from Tribe, Sebastian Junger's latest 2016 book. It's short but very good. Junger's thesis is that modern society, maybe just modern US society but I don't think so, has gotten so far removed from tribal life & community that it's no wonder so many people, perhaps mostly men, feel adrift and alienated and depressed and unmotivated. In tribal life, such as the indigenous people in North American, everyone had a purpose. First, men needed to defend the tribe and they knew this was a primary responsibility of each one of them. They also had to hunt and gather and bring food back for the tribe (and not just to their own family). Men felt necessary and needed and a vital piece of their tribe/community. Women had children to replenish the tribe and prepare food for the tribe (again, not just their own family). Everyone lived in a definite community, they all knew each other, they'd grown up together and learned together and fought together and suffered together. There was also a great deal of equality and egalitarianism in their societies. Anyone who tried to get on top would be torn down by the others, as referenced in the quote up top. He writes about the thousands of white people who choose to live with the "Indians," after being abducted or choosing it on their own. Some would be rescued and rush right back to live with their tribe. There were almost no cases of Indians defecting to the other side. 

Another example Junger gives is the Bosnian war. Junger went into Sarajevo and lived amongst the people as Serbs bombed the hell out of the town from the surrounding hills. Very quickly, collections of apartment buildings would come together to share food, commiserate together and take care of one another. Teens huddled amongst themselves in deep underground bunkers and lived with one another, ate together, and laughed and loved together. No one was kept outside the group. He quotes more than one person whom he interviewed 20 years later who called wartime madness but also the best times of their lives. Even a happy time for some. They were in their own tribe and had people to take care of, talk to, be scared with and celebrate with. 

I can admit that both of these are likely simplifications. 

I'm about halfway through the book and am just starting to get into a section about modern warfare and the experiences of the soldiers. Many also recall it as some of their best days. (For example, the WW2 veterans who get together even now to see their buddies and tell their stories, stories they've maybe never shared with anyone else.) Junger cites many scientific studies that show veteran suicide and PTSD are more complex issues and do not appear randomly.

I can't wait to read the second half of this book. I can identify with it in that I also feel adrift and alienated and depressed and unmotivated. I work remotely by myself, and although I live in a suburb I essentially live remotely. I got a taste of what Junger is talking about when I spent five months on the Appalachian Trail in 1996. (I didn't finish the Trail, only hiking 1500 miles because I partially tore two ligaments (I learned later) 500 miles in.) Even though I didn't complete the hike, it was some of the most memorable times of my life, because I had a definite goal, I was motivated, and, believe it or not, there was a tight linear trail community where everyone comes together because we were all suffering and learning together. Many other thru-hikers (who completed the entire 2100-mile trail) would and do say exactly the same thing, even if they can't quite express it. I wish I had anything like that kind of commitment and community today.

JD Vance and the Insanity of His Religion

This guy wants to have his finger on the nuclear button!!