Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman, who won the prize in Physics in 1965, used to play
with ants. He was curious about everything, including how ants managed to find food.
In one of his books he wrote: "I wondered, how do they know where to go? Can they tell
each other where food is, like bees can? Do they have any sense of geometry?"
He didn't have an ant farm to observe, so he created his own experiments.
When he was a student at Princeton University, in the early 1940s, he tried to figure out
how ants communicated. He put sugar on a piece of folded cardboard and hung it on a string
stretched across a window. Then he waited for some ants to appear. Whenever he saw one,
he picked it up on a piece of paper and took it to the sugar.
"I wanted to see how long it would take the other ants to get the message to go to the
'ferry terminal'. It started slowly, but rapidly increased until I was going mad ferrying
the ants back and forth." After a while, he started taking the ants from the sugar to a different spot. None of them went back to the original starting place, which would have
returned them to the sugar. They followed one another, but not to the sugar.
Feynman did other experiments with ants. In one, he laid out glass microscope slides and
got ants to walk back and forth on them to some sugar. When he rearranged the slides or replaced an old one with a new one, the ants got confused and couldn't figure out how
to reach the sugar. "It was pretty clear, from rearranging the glass slides that the ants
left some sort of trail." He concluded.
He tried to figure out whether the trail indicated which direction to take to the sugar
or only that an ant had been on the slide already. He also wanted to know how long the
trail lasted. "I tried at one point to make the ants go around in a circle, but I didn't
have enough patience to set it up." He wrote.
More than ten years later, after he had worked on a number of important projects, including
the Manhattan project, Feynman was still wondering about ants. He was frustrated because
the experiments he had done to demonstrate the ants' sense of geometry had not worked. He
still wondered, "Why do ant trails look so straight and nice?" By this time he was teaching
at the California Institute of Technology.
One day some ants came out around the bathtub in his house and he thought, "This is a great
opportunity." He put some sugar at one end of the bathtub and sat there until an ant found it.
He drew a colored pencil line behind the ant's return route; when a second ant found the
sugar, he marked the ant's return trip with another color. The second ant followed the first
ant's trail back, but when the trail was "wiggly" the ant would "go straight out, as if
it were coasting," until it found the trail again.
The second ant's return was straighter than that of the first one; the third ant's trail
was even straighter and so on. "I followed eight or ten ants with my pencil until their
trails became neat line... It's something like sketching. You draw a lousy line at first;
then you go over it a few times and it makes a nice line after a while."
Part of Feynman's work in Physics involved the notion of particles and waves traveling
backwards in time. In both physics and his ant studies, he asked how straight paths could
develop from the motions of entities that have no innate notion of straightness.
Feynman became known for his diagrams, a method he invented for performing calculations
in quantum field theory. Some of them look remarkably similar to the diagrams he made during
his study of ants.
Throughout his life, the Nobel prize winner tried to understand and simplify complex
concepts. "The deeper the law we found in physics, the simpler it becomes," he noted.
"I know how hard it is to really know something; how careful you have to be about
checking the experiments; how easy it is to make mistakes and fool yourself. I know
what it means to know something."
