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Heat had seemed to flow from one place to another as an invisible fluid—“phlogiston” or “caloric.” But a succession of natural philosophers hit on a less intuitive idea—that heat was motion. It was a brave thought,

because no one could see the things in motion. A scientist had to imagine uncountable corpuscles banging invisibly this way and that in the soft pressure of wind against his face. The arithmetic bore out the guess. In Switzerland Daniel Bernoul i derived Boyle’s law by supposing that pressure was precisely the force of repeated impacts of spherical corpuscles, and in the same way, assuming that heat was an intensification of the motion hither and thither, he derived a link between temperature and density. The corpuscularians advanced again when Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, again with painstaking care, demonstrated that one could keep reliable account books of the molecules entering and exiting any chemical reaction, even when gases joined with solids, as in rusting iron.

“Matter is unchangeable, and consists of points that are perfectly simple, indivisible, of no extent”—that the atom could itself contain a crowded and measurable universe remained for a later century to guess—“& separated from one another.” Ruggiero Boscovich, an eighteenth-century mathematician and director of optics for the French navy, developed a view of atoms with a strikingly prescient bearing, a view that Feynman’s single-sentence credo echoed two centuries later. Boscovich’s atoms stood not so much for substance as for forces. There was so much to explain: how matter compresses elastical y or inelastical y, like rubber or wax; how objects bounce or recoil; how solids hold together while liquids congeal or release vapors;

“effervescences & fermentations of many different kinds, in which the particles go & return with as many different

velocities, & now approach towards & now recede from one another.”

The quest to understand the corpuscles translated itself into a need to understand the invisible attractions and repulsions that gave matter its visible qualities. Attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another , Feynman would say simply. That mental picture was already available to a bright high-school student in 1933.

Two centuries had brought more and more precise inquiry into the chemical behavior of substances. The elements had proliferated. Even a high-school laboratory could run an electric current through a beaker of water to separate it into its explosive constituents, hydrogen and oxygen. Chemistry as packaged in educational chemistry sets seemed to have reduced itself to a mechanical col ection of rules and recipes. But the fundamental questions remained for those curious enough to ask, How do solids stay solid, with atoms always “jiggling”? What forces control the fluid motions of air and water, and what agitation of atoms engenders fire?

A Century of Progress

By then the search for forces had produced a decade of reinterpretation of the nature of the atom. The science known as chemical physics was giving way rapidly to the sciences that would soon be known as nuclear and high-energy physics. Those studying the chemical properties of

different substances were trying to assimilate the first startling findings of quantum mechanics. The American Physical Society met that summer in Chicago. The chemist Linus Pauling spoke on the implications of quantum mechanics for complex organic molecules, primitive components of life. John C. Slater, a physicist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, struggled to make a connection between the quantum mechanical view of electrons and the energies that chemists could measure.

And then the meeting spil ed onto the fairgrounds of the spectacular 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, “A Century of Progress.” Niels Bohr himself spoke on the unsettling problem of measuring anything in the new physics. Before a crowd of visitors both sitting and standing, his ethereal Danish tones often smothered by crying babies and a balking microphone, he offered a principle that he cal ed

“complementarity,” a recognition of an inescapable duality at the heart of things. He claimed revolutionary import for this notion. Not just atomic particles, but al reality, he said, fel under its sway. “We have been forced to recognize that we must modify not only al our concepts of classical physics but even the ideas we use in everyday life,” he said. He had lately been meeting with Professor Einstein (their discussions were actual y more discordant than Bohr now let on), and they had found no way out. “We have to renounce a description of phenomena based on the concept of cause and effect.”

Elsewhere amid the throngs at the fairground that summer, enduring the stifling heat, were Melvil e, Lucil e,

Richard, and Joan Feynman. For the occasion Joan had been taught to eat bacon with a knife and fork; then the Feynmans strapped suitcases to the back of a car and headed off crosscountry, a seemingly endless drive on the local roads of the era before interstate highways. On the way they stayed at farmhouses. The fair spread across four hundred acres on the shore of Lake Michigan, and the emblems of science were everywhere. Progress indeed: the fair celebrated a public sense of science that was reaching a crest. Knowledge Is Power —that earnest motto adorned a book of Richard’s cal ed The Boy Scientist .

Science was invention and betterment; it changed the way people lived. The eponymous business enterprises of Edison, Bel , and Ford were knotting the countryside with networks of wire and pavement—an altogether positive good, it seemed. How wonderful were these manifestations of the photon and the electron, lighting lights and bearing voices across hundreds of miles!

Even in the trough of the Depression the wonder of science fueled an optimistic faith in the future. Just over the horizon were fast airships, half-mile-high skyscrapers, and technological cures for diseases of the human body and the body politic. Who knew where the bright young students of today would be able to carry the world? One New York writer painted a picture of his city fifty years in the future: New York in 1982 would hold a magnificent fifty mil ion people, he predicted, the East River and much of the Hudson River having been “fil ed in.” “Traffic arrangements wil no doubt have provided for several tiers of elevated

roadways and noiseless railways—built on extended balconies flanking the enormous skyscrapers …”

Nourishment wil come from concentrated pel ets. Ladies’

dress wil be streamlined to something like the 1930s bathing suit. The hero of this fantasy was the “high-school genius (who general y knows more than anybody else).”

There was no limit to the hopes vested in the young.

Scientists, too, struggled to assimilate the new images pouring into the culture from the laboratory. Electricity powered the human brain itself, a University of Chicago researcher announced that summer; the brain’s central switchboard used vast numbers of connecting lines to join brain cel s, each one of which could be considered both a tiny chemical factory and electric battery. Chicago’s business community made the most of these symbols, too.

In an opening-day stunt, technicians at four astronomical observatories used faint rays of starlight from Arcturus, forty light-years distant, focused by telescopes and electrical y amplified, to turn on the lights of the exposition. “Here are gathered the evidences of man’s achievements in the realm of physical science, proofs of his power to prevail over al the perils that beset him,” declared Rufus C.

Dawes, president of the fair corporation, as loud projectiles released hundreds of American flags in the sky over the fairgrounds. Life-size dinosaurs awed visitors. A robot gave lectures. Visitors less interested in science could pay to see an unemployed actress named Sal y Rand dance with ostrich-feather fans. The Feynmans, though, took the Sky Ride, suspended on cables between two six-hundred-