Джеймс Глик - Genius - The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

discovery was esoteric compared to other milestones of modern physics. If Feynman, Gel -Mann, Marshak, or Sudarshan had not made it in 1957, others would have soon after. Yet to Feynman it was as pure an achievement as any in his career: the unveiling of a law of nature. His model had always been Dirac’s magical discovery of an equation for the electron. In a sense Feynman had discovered an equation for the neutrino. “There was a moment when I knew how nature worked,” he said. “It had elegance and beauty. The goddamn thing was gleaming.”

To other physicists, “Theory of the Fermi Interaction,” barely six pages long, shone like a beacon in the literature. It seemed to announce the beginning of a powerful col aboration between two great and complementary minds. They took a distinctive kind of theoretical high ground, repeatedly speaking of universality, of simplicity, of the preservation of symmetries, of broad future applications. They worked from general principles rather than particular calculations of dynamics. They made clear predictions about new kinds of particle decay. They listed specific experiments that contradicted their theory and declared that the experiments must therefore be wrong.

Nothing could have more strikingly declared the supremacy of the theorists.

Toward a Domestic Life

The two-piece “bikini” bathing suit, named after the tiny Pacific atol that was blasted by atomic and hydrogen bombs through the forties and fifties, had not yet taken over the beaches of the United States in 1958, but Feynman saw one, blue, on the sand of Genève-Plage, and laid his beach towel down nearby. He was visiting Geneva for a United Nations conference on the peaceful uses of atomic energy. He was preparing to give a summary talk in his own

name and Gel -Mann’s, tel ing the assembly: We are wel aware of the fragility and incompleteness of our present knowledge and of the manifold of speculative possibilities… . What is the significance or the pattern behind al these interrelated symmetries, partial symmetries, and asymmetries?

The yearly Rochester conference had also changed venue for the occasion, and he discussed the weak-interaction theory, impressing listeners with the body language he used to demonstrate the appropriate spins and handednesses. He had just turned forty. It was spring, and the young woman in the blue bikini volunteered that Lake Geneva was cold. “You speak English!” he said. She was Gweneth Howarth, a native of a vil age in Yorkshire, England. She had left home to see Europe by working as an au pair. That evening he took her to a nightclub.

The violation of parity had reached newspapers and magazines briefly. For readers who looked to science for a general understanding of the nature of the universe, the fal of left-right symmetry may have been the last genuinely meaningful lesson to emerge from high-energy physics, circumscribed though it was in the domain of certain very short-lived particle interactions. By contrast, though the universal theory of weak interactions commandeered the attention of theorists and experimenters a year later, the replacement of S and T with V and A made no ripple in the cultural consciousness. By then the American public was busy anyway, assimilating the most shocking scientific development of the 1950s, the piece of news establishing once again in the public mind the truism that science is power.

The beachbal -sized aluminum sphere cal ed Sputnik began orbiting the earth on October 4, 1957. Its unexpected presence overhead and the insouciant beep-

beep-beep played again and again on American radio and television broadcasts set off a wave of anxiety like nothing since the atomic bomb itself. (Feynman arrived at a picnic that evening in the biologist Max Delbrück’s backyard with a smal gray radio receiver that looked as if he had built it himself. He cal ed for an extension cord, tuned the receiver quickly, held up a finger to demand silence, and grinned as the beeps played out over the crowd.) “Red Moon over U.S.,” said Time magazine, immediately announcing “a new era in history” and “a grim new chapter in the cold war.”

Newsweek cal ed it “The Red Conquest”—with “al the mastery that it implies in the affairs of men on earth.” Why had the United States established no comparable space program? A worried-looking President Eisenhower said at a news conference, “Wel , let’s get this straight. I am not a scientist.” The director of the American Institute of Physics seized the occasion to say that unless his country’s science education caught up with the Soviet Union’s, “our way of life is doomed.” That message was heard: Sputnik produced a rapid new commitment to the teaching of science.

Magazines focused new attention on American physicists.

Among the younger generation, Time singled out Feynman

—

Curly-haired and handsome, he shuns neckties and coats, is an enormously dedicated adventurer …

became fascinated with samba rhythms … playing bongo drums, breaking codes, picking locks …

and Gel -Mann—

he formulated the “Strangeness Theory,” i.e.

assigned physical meanings to the behavior of newly discovered particles. At CalTech Gel -Mann works closely with Feynman on weak couplings. At the

blackboard the two explode with ideas like sparks flying from a grindstone, alternately slap their foreheads at each other’s simplifications, quibble over the niceties.

But the physicist who received most of the public’s attention that fal was Edward Tel er. He was in tune with the cold war. Sputnik led him to declare—though there was evidence to the contrary—“Scientific and technical leadership is slipping from our hands.” A direct Soviet attack on the United States was possible, but he saw an even greater threat. “I do not think this is the most probable way in which they wil defeat us,” he said. He predicted that the Soviet Union would gain a broad technological dominance over the free world. “They wil advance so fast in science and leave us so far behind that their way of doing things wil be the way, and there wil be nothing we can do about it.”

With the winter’s excitement barely waning—the Reader’s Digest had now faced into the wind with an article titled “No Time for Hysteria”—a State Department official let Caltech know that the department would appreciate a presentation at the Geneva conference in the name of both Feynman and Gel -Mann, to balance the expected Soviet scientific presence there. Feynman acquiesced, although the mixing of propaganda and science disturbed him.

He declined to let the State Department make his hotel reservation; he found a walk-up room in an establishment cal ed, in English, Hotel City. It reminded him of the flophouses he had known in Albuquerque and on his crosscountry trip with Freeman Dyson. He had hoped to bring a woman with whom he had been having a sporadic and tempestuous yearlong love affair—the wife of a research fel ow. She had accompanied him on a trip the summer before, when he was working on weak interactions. Now she agreed to meet him afterward in England but refused to

come to Geneva. Instead, he met Gweneth Howarth on the beach.

She told him she was making her way around the world.

She was twenty-four years old, the daughter of a jeweler in a town cal ed Ripponden. She had worked as a librarian for a salary of three pounds weekly and then as a yarn tester at a cotton mil before deciding life in the backwaters of Yorkshire was too dul . She let Feynman know that she had two current boyfriends, a semiprofessional miler from Zurich, always in training, and a German optician from Saarbrücken. He immediately invited her to come to California and work for him. He needed a maid, he said.