The nurse recorded the time of death, 9:21 P.M. He discovered, oddly, that the clock had halted at that moment —just the sort of mystical phenomenon that appealed to unscientific people. Then an explanation occurred to him. He knew the clock was fragile, because he had repaired it several times, and he decided that the nurse must have stopped it by picking it up to check the time in the dim light.
[ James Gleick—Genius—The work and Life of Richard Feynman; this is a really chilling passage, which describes the moments just after Feynman’s wife has passed away, which devastated him. Somehow, this struck me.]
Arlene died a few hours after I got there. A nurse came in to fill out the death certificate, and went out again. I spent a little more time with my wife. Then I looked at the clock I had given her seven years before, when she had first become sick with tuberculosis. It was something which in those days was very nice: a digital clock whose numbers would change by turning around mechanically. The clock was very delicate and often stopped for one reason or another—I had to repair it from time to time—but I kept it going for all those years. Now, it had stopped once more—at 9:22, the time on the death certificate!
I remembered the time I was in my fraternity house at MIT when the idea came into my head completely out of the blue that my grandmother was dead. Right after that there was a telephone call, just like that. It was for Pete Bernays—my grandmother wasn’t dead. So I remembered that, in case somebody told me a story that ended the other way. I figured that such things can sometimes happen by luck—after all, my grandmother was very old—although people might think they happened by some sort of supernatural phenomenon.
Arlene had kept this clock by her bedside all the time she was sick, and now it stopped the moment she died. I can understand how a person who half believes in the possibility of such things, and who hasn’t got a doubting mind—especially in a circumstance like that—doesn’t immediately try to figure out what happened, but instead explains that no one touched the clock, and there was no possibility of explanation by normal phenomena. The clock simply stopped. It would become a dramatic example of these fantastic phenomena.
I saw that the light in the room was low, and then I remembered that the nurse had picked up the clock and turned it toward the light to see the face better. That could easily have stopped it.
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, “Los Alamos from Below” (third chapter of Part 3)
Nice. This is probably where mr. Gleick got it from. The strange thing is that (I think), Feynman’s wife’s first name is Arline, not the more common Arlene. I found Gleick’s book nice in that it did attempted to look beyond some of legends/anecdotes.
I recognized it from Mr. Gleick’s remarks. As for the name, I copied the text from the free preview on Amazon.com—they spelled it Arlene in the book. Guess there was an overambitious proofreader.
Alternate explanation: The clock stopped before his wife died, but the nurse recorded 9:21 as his wife’s time of death, because she determined the time by checking the clock, not realizing it had already stopped.
Things like this always remind me to doubt clever-sounding explanations of phenomena I wouldn’t actually have predicted in advance. Obviously, “not supernatural” is a very strong bet—but the specific hypotheses? Those are less obvious.
[ James Gleick—Genius—The work and Life of Richard Feynman; this is a really chilling passage, which describes the moments just after Feynman’s wife has passed away, which devastated him. Somehow, this struck me.]
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, “Los Alamos from Below” (third chapter of Part 3)
Nice. This is probably where mr. Gleick got it from. The strange thing is that (I think), Feynman’s wife’s first name is Arline, not the more common Arlene. I found Gleick’s book nice in that it did attempted to look beyond some of legends/anecdotes.
I recognized it from Mr. Gleick’s remarks. As for the name, I copied the text from the free preview on Amazon.com—they spelled it Arlene in the book. Guess there was an overambitious proofreader.
If you are up to a harder read, Jagdish Mehra’s biography The Beat of a Different Drum does a better job of covering Feynman’s actual work.
Thanks—I’ll put that on my reading list. Will read some other books in between though!
Alternate explanation: The clock stopped before his wife died, but the nurse recorded 9:21 as his wife’s time of death, because she determined the time by checking the clock, not realizing it had already stopped.
Things like this always remind me to doubt clever-sounding explanations of phenomena I wouldn’t actually have predicted in advance. Obviously, “not supernatural” is a very strong bet—but the specific hypotheses? Those are less obvious.
According to this comment, he had seen the nurse pick up the clock. So there’s that.