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

also found a way to make the color filters his professors wanted.

Developing a theory for reflection by multiple-layer thin films was not so different for Feynman from math team in the now-distant past of Far Rockaway. He could see, or feel, the intertwined infinities of the problem, the beam of light resonating back and forth between the pair of surfaces, and then the next pair, and so on, and he had a giant mental kit bag of formulas to try out. Even when he was fourteen he had manipulated series of continued fractions the way a pianist practices scales. Now he had an intuition for the translating of formulas into physics and back, a feeling for the rhythms or the spaces or the forces that a given set of symbols implied. In his senior year the mathematics department asked him to join a team of three entrants to the nation’s most difficult and prestigious mathematics contest, the Putnam competition, then in its second year. (The top five finishers are named as Putnam Fel ows and one receives a scholarship at Harvard.) The problems were intricate exercises in calculus and algebraic manipulation; no one was expected to complete them al satisfactorily in the al otted time. In some years the median has been zero—more than half the entrants fail to solve a single problem. One of Feynman’s fraternity brothers was surprised to see him return home while the examination was stil going on. Feynman learned later that the scorers had been astounded by the gap between his result and the next four. Harvard sounded him out about the scholarship, but he told them he had already decided to go elsewhere:

to Princeton.

His first thought had been to remain at MIT. He believed that no other American institution rivaled it and he said so to his department chairman. Slater had heard this before from loyal students whose provincial world contained nothing but Boston and the Tech, or the Bronx and the Tech, or Flatbush and the Tech. He told Feynman flatly that he would not be al owed back as a graduate student—for his own good.

Slater and Morse communicated directly with their col eagues at Princeton in January 1939, signaling that Feynman was something special. One said his record was

“practical y perfect,” the other that he had been “the best undergraduate student we have had in the Physics Department for five years at least.” At Princeton, when Feynman’s name came up in the deliberations of the graduate admissions committee, the phrase “diamond in the rough” kept materializing out of the wash of conversation. The committee had seen its share of one-sided applicants but had never before admitted a student with such low scores in history and English on the Graduate Record Examination. Feynman’s history score was in the bottom fifth, his literature score in the bottom sixth; and 93

percent of those who took the test had given better answers about fine arts. His physics and mathematics scores were the best the committee had seen. In fact the physics score was perfect.

Princeton had another problem with Feynman, as the head of its department, H. D. Smyth, made clear to Morse.

“One question always arises, particularly with men interested in theoretical physics,” Smyth wrote.

Is Feynman Jewish? We have no definite rule against Jews but have to keep their proportion in our department reasonably smal because of the difficulty of placing them.

By March no word had come and Slater was concerned enough to write Smyth again, col egial y: “Dear Harry …

definitely the best undergraduate we have had for a number of years … first-rate both in matters of scholarship and personality …” The recommendation was formal and conventional, but in a handwritten postscript that would not appear on the carbon copies Slater got to the point:

“Feynman of course is Jewish …” He wanted to assure Smyth there were mitigating circumstances:

… but as compared for instance with Kanner and Eisenbud he is more attractive personal y by several orders of magnitude. We’re not trying to get rid of him

—we want to keep him, and privately hope you won’t give him anything. But he apparently has decided to go to Princeton. I guarantee you’l like him if he does.

Morse, too, reported that Feynman’s “physiognomy and manner, however, show no trace of this characteristic and I do not believe the matter wil be any great handicap.”

On the eve of the Second World War institutional anti-

Semitism remained a barrier in American science, and a higher barrier for graduate schools than col eges. At universities a graduate student, unlike an undergraduate, was as much hired as admitted to a department; he would be paid for teaching and research and would be on a track for promotion. Furthermore, graduate departments considered themselves responsible to the industries they fed, and the industrial companies that conducted most research in the applied sciences were largely closed to Jews. “We know perfectly wel that names ending in ‘berg’

or ‘stein’ have to be skipped,” the chairman of Harvard’s chemistry department, whose name was Albert Sprague Coolidge, said in 1946. Admissions quotas had been imposed broadly in the twenties and thirties, with immigrant children seeking admission to col ege in greater numbers.

The case against Jews rarely had to be articulated. It was understood that their striving, their pushiness, smel ed of the tenement. It was unseemly. “They took obvious pride in their academic success… . We despised the industry of those little Jews,” a Harvard Protestant wrote in 1920.

Thomas Wolfe, himself despising the ambition of “the Jew boy,” nevertheless understood the attraction of the scientific career: “Because, brother, he is burning in the night. He sees the class, the lecture room, the shining apparatus of gigantic laboratories, the open field of scholarship and pure research, certain knowledge and the world distinction of an Einstein name.” It was also understood that a professor needed a certain demeanor to work wel with students; that Jews

were

often

soft-spoken

and

diffident

or,

contradictorily, so bril iant as to be impatient and insensitive.

In

the

close,

homogenous

university

communities, code words were attractive or nice . Even the longtime chairman of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s department at the University of California at Berkeley, Raymond T.

Birge, was quoted as saying of Oppenheimer, “New York Jews flocked out here to him, and some were not as nice as he was.”

Feynman, as a New York Jew distinctly uninterested in either the faith or the sociology of Judaism, did not give voice to any awareness of anti-Semitism. Princeton did accept him, and from then on he never had occasion to worry about the contingencies of academic hiring. Stil , when he was at MIT, the Bel Telephone Laboratories turned him down for summer jobs year after year, despite recommendations by Wil iam Shockley, Bel ’s future Nobel laureate. Bel was an institution that hired virtual y no Jewish scientists before the war. Birge himself eventual y had an opportunity to hire Feynman for Berkeley: a frustrated Oppenheimer was recommending him urgently, but Birge put off a decision for two years, until it was too late. In the first case anti-Semitism may have played the deciding role; in the second case perhaps a smal er role. If Feynman ever suspected that his religion might have shifted the path of his career, he declined to say so.

Forces in Molecules

Thirteen physics majors completed senior theses in 1939.

The world of accumulated knowledge was stil smal enough that MIT could expect a thesis to represent original and possibly publishable work. The thesis should begin the scientist’s normal career and meanwhile supply missing blocks in the wal of organized knowledge, by analyzing such minutiae as the spectra of singly ionized gadolinium or hydrated manganese chloride crystals. (Identifying the tel tale combinations of wavelengths emitted by such substances stil required patience and good experimental technique, and science seemed to be engendering new substances as fast as spectroscopists could analyze them.) Seniors could devise new laboratory instruments or investigate crystals that produced electrical currents when squeezed. Feynman’s thesis began as a circumscribed problem like these. It ended as a fundamental discovery about the forces acting within the molecules of any substance. If it bore little connection to his greater work that fol owed—and Feynman himself dismissed it as an obvious result that he should have written in “half a line”—it nevertheless found its way into the permanent tool kit of the physics of solids.