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

physicist from Los Alamos—Feynman had argued freely and vehemently with Bohr. Bohr had sought Feynman’s private counsel there, valuing his frankness, but now he was disturbed by the evident implications of those crisp lines.

Feynman’s particles seemed to be fol owing paths neatly fixed in space and time. This they could not do. The uncertainty principle said so.

“Already we know that the classical idea of the trajectory in a path is not a legitimate idea in quantum mechanics,” he said, or so Feynman thought—Bohr’s soft voice and notoriously vague Danish tones kept his listeners straining to understand. He stepped forward and for many minutes, with Feynman standing unhappily to the side, delivered a humiliating lecture on the uncertainty principle. Afterward Feynman kept his despair to himself. At Pocono a generation of physics was melting into the next, and the passing of generations was neither as clean nor as inevitable as it later seemed.

Architect of quantum theories, brash young group leader on the atomic bomb project, inventor of the ubiquitous Feynman diagram, ebul ient bongo player and storytel er, Richard Phil ips Feynman was the most bril iant, iconoclastic, and influential physicist of modern times. He took the half-made conceptions of waves and particles in the 1940s and shaped them into tools that ordinary physicists could use and understand. He had a lightning ability to see into the heart of the problems nature posed.

Within the community of physicists, an organized, tradition-

bound culture that needs heroes as much as it sometimes mistrusts them, his name took on a special luster. It was permitted in connection with Feynman to use the word genius . He took center stage and remained there for forty years, dominating the science of the postwar era—forty years that turned the study of matter and energy down an unexpectedly dark and spectral road. The work that made its faltering appearance at Pocono tied together in an experimental y perfect package al the varied phenomena at work in light, radio, magnetism, and electricity. It won Feynman a Nobel Prize. At least three of his later achievements might also have done so: a theory of superfluidity, the strange, frictionless behavior of liquid helium; a theory of weak interactions, the force at work in radioactive decay; and a theory of partons, hypothetical hard particles inside the atom’s nucleus, that helped produce the modern understanding of quarks. His vision of particle interaction kept returning to the forefront of physics as younger scientists explored esoteric new domains. He continued to find new puzzles. He could not, or would not, distinguish

between

the

prestigious

problems

of

elementary particle physics and the apparently humbler everyday questions that seemed to belong to an earlier era.

No other physicist since Einstein so ecumenical y accepted the chal enge of al nature’s riddles. Feynman studied friction on highly polished surfaces, hoping—and mostly failing—to understand how friction worked. He tried to make a theory of how wind makes ocean waves grow; as he said later, “We put our foot in a swamp and we pul ed it

up muddy.” He explored the connection between the forces of atoms and the elastic properties of the crystals they form.

He assembled experimental data and theoretical ideas on the folding of strips of paper into peculiar shapes cal ed flexagons. He made influential progress—but not enough to satisfy himself—on the quantum theory of gravitation that had eluded Einstein. He struggled for years, in vain, to penetrate the problem of turbulence in gases and liquids.

Feynman developed a stature among physicists that transcended any raw sum of his actual contributions to the field. Even in his twenties, when his published work amounted to no more than a doctoral thesis (profoundly original but little understood) and a few secret papers in the Los Alamos archives, his legend was growing. He was a master calculator: in a group of scientists he could create a dramatic impression by slashing his way through a difficult problem. Thus scientists—believing themselves to be unforgiving meritocrats—found quick opportunities to compare themselves unfavorably to Feynman. His mystique might have belonged to a gladiator or a champion arm-wrestler. His personality, unencumbered by dignity or decorum, seemed to announce: Here is an unconventional mind. The English writer C. P. Snow, observing the community of physicists, thought Feynman lacked the

“ gravitas ” of his seniors. “A little bizarre … He would grin at himself if guilty of stately behaviour. He is a showman and enjoys it … rather as though Groucho Marx was suddenly standing in for a great scientist.” It made Snow think of Einstein, now so shaded and dignified that few

remembered the “merry boy” he had been in his creative time. Perhaps Feynman, too, would grow into a stately personage. Perhaps not. Snow predicted, “It wil be interesting for young men to meet Feynman in his later years.”

One team of physicists, assembled for the Manhattan Project, met him for the first time in Chicago, where he solved a problem that had baffled them for a month. It was

“a shal ow way to judge a superb mind,” one of them admitted later, but they had to be impressed, by the unprofessorial manner as much as the feat itself: “Feynman was patently not struck in the prewar mold of most young academics. He had the flowing, expressive postures of a dancer, the quick speech we thought of as Broadway, the pat phrases of the hustler and the conversational energy of a finger snapper.” Physicists quickly got to know his bounding theatrical style, his way of bobbing sidelong from one foot to the other when he lectured. They knew that he could never sit stil for long and that when he did sit he would slouch comical y before leaping up with a sharp question. To Europeans like Bohr his voice was as American as any they had heard, a sort of musical sandpaper; to the Americans it was raw, unregenerate New York. No matter. “We got the indelible impression of a star,”

another young physicist noted. “He may have emitted light as wel as words… . Isn’t areté the Greek word for that shining quality? He had it.”

Originality was his obsession. He had to create from first principles—a dangerous virtue that sometimes led to waste

and failure. He had the cast of mind that often produces cranks and misfits: a wil ingness, even eagerness, to consider sil y ideas and plunge down wrong al eys. This strength could have been a crippling weakness had it not been redeemed, time and again, by a powerful intel igence.

“Dick could get away with a lot because he was so goddamn smart,” a theorist said. “He real y could climb Mont Blanc barefoot.” Isaac Newton spoke of having stood on the shoulders of giants. Feynman tried to stand on his own, through various acts of contortion, or so it seemed to the mathematician Mark Kac, who was watching Feynman at Cornel :

There are two kinds of geniuses, the “ordinary” and the “magicians.” An ordinary genius is a fel ow that you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what they have done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians. They are, to use mathematical jargon, in the orthogonal complement of where we are and the working of their minds is for al intents and purposes incomprehensible. Even after we understand what they have done, the process by which they have done it is completely dark. They seldom, if ever, have students because they cannot be emulated and it must be terribly frustrating for a bril iant young mind to cope with the mysterious ways in which the magician’s mind works. Richard Feynman is a