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

“I feel that there is a real world corresponding to our sense perceptions,” Yale University’s chief physicist, John Zeleny, defensively told a Minneapolis audience. “I believe that Minneapolis is a real city and not simply a city of my dreams.” What Einstein had (or had not) said about relativity was truer of quantum mechanics: a bare handful of people had the mathematics needed to understand it.

Richard and Julian

Summer brought a salty heat to Far Rockaway, the wind rising across the beaches. The asphalt shimmered with refractive air. In winter, snow fel early from low, gray clouds; then dazzlingly white hours would pass, the sky too bright to see clearly. Free and impudent times—Richard lost himself in his notebooks, or roamed to the drugstore, where he would play a mean-spirited optical-hydrodynamical trick on the waitress by inverting a glass of water over a one-penny tip on the smooth tabletop.

On the beach some days he watched a particular girl.

She had warm, deep blue eyes and long hair that she wore deftly knotted up in a braid. After swimming she would comb it out, and boys Richard knew from school would

flock around her. Her name was Arline (for a long time Richard thought it was spel ed the usual way, “Arlene”) Greenbaum, and she lived in Cedarhurst, Long Island, just across the city line. He dreamed about her. He thought she was wonderful and beautiful, but getting to know girls seemed hopeless enough, and Arline, he discovered, already had a boyfriend. Even so, he fol owed her into an after-school social league sponsored by the synagogue.

Arline joined an art class, so Richard joined the art class, overlooking a lack of aptitude. Shortly he found himself lying on the floor and breathing through a straw, while another student made a plaster cast of his face.

If Arline noticed Richard, she did not let on. But one evening she arrived at a boy-girl party in the middle of a kissing session. An older boy was teaching couples the correct lip angles and nose positions, and in this instructional context a certain amount of practice was under way. Richard himself was practicing, with a girl he hardly knew. When Arline came in, there was a little commotion.

Almost everyone got up to greet her—everyone, it seemed to her, but one horribly rude boy, off in the corner, who ostentatiously kept on kissing.

Occasional y Richard went on dates with other girls. He could never rid himself of a sense that he was a stranger engaging in a ritual the rules to which he did not know. His mother taught him some basic manners. Even so, the waiting in a girl’s parlor with her parents, the procedures for cutting in at dances, the stock phrases (“Thank you for a lovely evening”) al left him feeling inept, as if he could not

quite decipher a code everyone else had mastered.

He stayed not quite conscious of the hopes his parents had for him. He was not quite aware of the void left by the death of his infant brother—his mother stil thought of the baby often—or of his mother’s social descent to the lower middle class, in increasingly tight circumstances. With the coming of the Depression the Feynmans had to give up the house and yard on New Broadway and move to a smal apartment, where they used a dining room and a breakfast room as bedrooms. Melvil e was often on the road now, sel ing. When he was home, he would read the National Geographic magazines that he col ected secondhand. On Sundays he would go outdoors and paint woodland scenery or flowers. Or he and Richard would take Joan into the city to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They went to the Egyptian section, first studying glyphs in the encyclopedia so that they could stand and decode bits of the chiseled artifacts, a sight that made people stare.

Richard stil had some tinkering and probing to do. The Depression broadened the market for inexpensive radio repair, and Richard found himself in demand. In just over a decade of ful -scale commercial production, the radio had penetrated nearly half of American households. By 1932

the average price of a new set had fal en to $48, barely a third of the price just three years before. “Midget” sets had arrived, just five tubes compactly arranged within an astonishing six-pound box, containing its own built-in aerial and a shrunken loudspeaker the size of a paper dol ar.

Some receivers offered knobs that would let the user adjust

the high and low tones separately; some advertised high style, like the “satin-finished ebony black Durez with polished chromium gril e and trimmings.”

Broken radios confronted Richard with a whole range of pathologies in the circuits he had learned so wel . He rewired a plug or climbed a neighbor’s roof to instal an antenna. He looked for clues, wax on a condenser or tel tale charcoal on a burned-out resistor. Later he made a story out of it—“He Fixes Radios by Thinking!” The hero was an exaggeratedly young boy, with a comical y large screwdriver sticking out of his back pocket, who solved an ever-more-chal enging sequence of puzzles. The last and best broken radio—the one that established his reputation

—made a bloodcurdling howl when first turned on. Richard paced back and forth, thinking, while the curmudgeonly owner badgered him: “What are you doing? Can you fix it?”

Richard thought about it. What could be making a noise that changed with time? It must have something to do with the heating of the tubes—first some extraneous signal was swol en into a shriek; then it settled back to normal. Richard stopped pacing, went back to the set, pul ed out one tube, pul ed out a second tube, and exchanged them. He turned on the set, and the noise had vanished. The boy who fixes radios by thinking —that was how he saw himself, reflected in the eyes of his customers in Far Rockaway. Reason worked. Equations could be trusted; they were more than schoolbook exercises. The heady rush of solving a puzzle, of feeling the mental pieces shift and fade and rearrange

themselves until suddenly they slid into their grooves—the sense of power and sheer rightness—these pleasures sustained an addiction. Luxuriating in the buoyant joy of it, Feynman could sink into a trance of concentration that even his family found unnerving.

Knowledge was rarer then. A secondhand magazine was an occasion. For a Far Rockaway teenager merely to find a mathematics textbook took wil and enterprise. Each radio program, each telephone cal , each lecture in a local synagogue, each movie at the new Gem theater on Mott Avenue carried the weight of something special. Each book Richard possessed burned itself into his memory.

When a primer on mathematical methods baffled him, he worked through it formula by formula, fil ing a notebook with self-imposed exercises. He and his friends traded mathematical tidbits like basebal cards. If a boy named Morrie Jacobs told him that the cosine of 20 degrees multiplied by the cosine of 40 degrees multiplied by the cosine of 80 degrees equaled exactly one-eighth, he would remember that curiosity for the rest of his life, and he would remember that he was standing in Morrie’s father’s leather shop when he learned it.

Even with the radio era in ful swing, one’s senses encountered nothing like the bombardment of images and sounds that television would bring—accelerated, flash-cut, disposable knowledge. For now, knowledge was scarce and therefore dear. It was the same for scientists. The currency of scientific information had not yet been devalued by excess. For a young student, that meant that the most

timely questions were surprisingly close to hand. Feynman recognized early the special, distinctive feeling of being close to the edge of knowledge, where people do not know the answers. Even in grade school, when he would haunt the laboratory late in the afternoon, playing with magnets and helping a teacher clean up, he recognized the pleasure of asking questions that the teacher could not handle. Now, graduating from high school, he could not tel how near or how far he was from science’s active frontier, where scientists pul ed fresh problems like potatoes from the earth, and in fact he was not far. The upheaval caused by quantum mechanics had laid the fundamental issues bare.