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

foot towers, and visited the Hal of Science, where a 151-word wal motto summed up the history of science from Pythagoras to Euclid to Newton to Einstein.

The Feynmans had never heard of Bohr or any of the other physicists gathering in Chicago, but, like most other American newspaper readers, they knew Einstein’s name wel . That summer he was traveling in Europe, uprooted, having left Germany for good, preparing to arrive in New York Harbor in October. For fourteen years America had been in the throes of a publicity craze over this

“mathematician.” The New York Times , the Feynmans’

regular paper, had led a wave of exaltation with only one precedent, the near deification of Edison a generation earlier. No theoretical scientist, European or American, before or since, ignited such a fever of adulation. A part of the legend, the truest part, was the revolutionary import of relativity for the way citizens of the twentieth century should conceive their universe. Another part was Einstein’s supposed claim that only twelve people worldwide could understand his work. “Lights Al Askew in the Heavens,” the Times reported in a 1919 classic of headline writing.

“Einstein Theory Triumphs. Stars Not Where They Seem or Were Calculated to Be, but Nobody Need Worry. A Book for 12 Wise Men. No More in the World Could Comprehend It, Said Einstein.” A series of editorials fol owed. One was titled “Assaulting the Absolute.” Another declared jovial y,

“Apprehensions for the safety of confidence even in the multiplication table wil arise.”

The presumed obscurity of relativity contributed heavily to its popularity. Yet had Einstein’s message real y been incomprehensible it could hardly have spread so wel . More than one hundred books arrived to explain the mystery. The newspapers mixed tones of reverence and self-deprecating amusement about the mystery of relativity’s paradoxes; in actuality, they and their readers correctly understood the elements of this new physics. Space is curved—curved where gravity warps its invisible fabric. The ether is banished, along with the assumption of an absolute frame of reference for space and time. Light has a fixed velocity, measured at 186,000 miles per second, and its path bends in the sway of gravity. Not long after the general theory of relativity was transmitted by underwater cable to eager New York newspapers, schoolchildren who could barely compute the hypotenuse of a right triangle could nevertheless recite a formula of Einstein’s, E equals MC

squared, and some could even report its implication: that matter and energy are theoretical y interchangeable; that within the atom lay unreleased a new source of power. They sensed, too, that the universe had shrunk. It was no longer merely everything —an unimaginable totality. Now it might be bounded, thanks to four-dimensional curvature, and somehow it began to seem artificial. As the English physicist J. J. Thomson said unhappily, “We have Einstein’s space, de Sitter’s space, expanding universes, contracting universes, vibrating universes, mysterious universes. In fact the pure mathematician may create universes just by writing down an equation … he can have a

universe of his own.”

There wil never be another Einstein—just as there wil never be another Edison, another Heifetz, another Babe Ruth, figures towering so far above their contemporaries that they stood out as legends, heroes, half-gods in the culture’s imagination. There wil be, and almost certainly have already been, scientists, inventors, violinists, and basebal players with the same raw genius. But the world has grown too large for such singular heroes. When there are a dozen Babe Ruths, there are none. In the early twentieth century, mil ions of Americans could name exactly one contemporary scientist. In the late twentieth century, anyone who can name a scientist at al can name a half-dozen or more. Einstein’s publicists, too, belonged to a more naïve era; icons are harder to build in a time of demythologizing, deconstruction, and pathography. Those celebrating Einstein had the wil and the ability to remake the popular conception of scientific genius. It seemed that Edison’s formula favoring perspiration over inspiration did not apply to this inspired, abstracted thinker. Einstein’s genius seemed nearly divine in its creative power: he imagined a certain universe and this universe was born.

Genius seemed to imply a detachment from the mundane, and it seemed to entail wisdom. Like sports heroes in the era before television, he was seen exclusively from a distance. Not much of the real person interfered with the myth. By now, too, he had changed from the earnest, ascetic-looking young clerk whose genius had reached its productive peak in the first and second decades of the

century. The public had hardly seen that man at al . Now Einstein’s image drew on a colorful and absentminded appearance—wild hair, il -fitting clothes, the legendary socklessness. The mythologizing of Einstein occasional y extended to others. When Paul A. M. Dirac, the British quantum theorist, visited the University of Wisconsin in 1929, the Wisconsin State Journal published a mocking piece about “a fel ow they have up at the U. this spring …

who is pushing Sir Isaac Newton, Einstein and al the others off the front page.” An American scientist, the reporter said, would be busy and active, “but Dirac is different. He seems to have al the time there is in the world and his heaviest work is looking out the window.” Dirac’s end of the dialogue was suitably monosyl abic. (The Journal ’s readers must have assumed he was an ancient eminence; actual y he was just twenty-seven years old.)

“Now doctor wil you give me in a few words the low-down on al your investigations?”

“No.”

“Good. Wil it be al right if I put it this way

—‘Professor Dirac solves al the problems of mathematical physics, but is unable to find a better way of figuring out Babe Ruth’s batting average’?”

“Yes.”

…

“Do you go to the movies?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“In 1920—perhaps also 1930.”

The genius was otherworldly and remote. More than the practical Americans whose science meant gizmos and machines, Europeans such as Einstein and Dirac also incarnated the culture’s standard oddbal view of the scientist. “Is he the tal , backward boy … ?” Barbara Stanwyck’s character asked in The Lady Eve about Henry Fonda’s, an ophiologist roughly Feynman’s age.

—He isn’t backward, he’s a scientist.

—Oh, is that what it is. I knew he was peculiar .

“Peculiar” meant harmless. It meant that bril iant men paid for their gifts with compensating, humanizing flaws.

There was an element of self-defense in the popular view.

And there was a little truth. Many scientists did walk through the ordinary world seeming out of place, their minds elsewhere. They sometimes failed to master the arts of dressing careful y or making social conversation.

Had the Journal ’s reporter solicited Dirac’s opinion of the state of American science, he might have provoked a longer comment. “There are no physicists in America,”

Dirac had said bitingly, in more private company. It was too harsh an assessment, but the margin of his error was only a few years, and when Dirac spoke of physics he meant something new. Physics was not about vacuum cleaners or rayon or any of the technological wonders spreading in that decade; it was not about lighting lights or broadcasting

radio waves; it was not even about measuring the charge of the electron or the frequency spectra of glowing gases in laboratory experiments. It was about a vision of reality so fractured, accidental, and tenuous that it frightened those few older American physicists who saw it coming.