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

I guess maybe it is like rol ing off of a log—my heart is fil ed again & I’m choked with emotions—and love is so good & powerful—it’s worth preserving—I know

nothing can separate us—we’ve stood the tests of time and our love is as glorious now as the day it was born—dearest riches have never made people great but love does it every day—we’re not little people—

we’re giants … I know we both have a future ahead of us—with a world of happiness—now & forever.

With his parents frightened and unreconciled, he borrowed a station wagon from a Princeton friend, outfitted it with mattresses for the journey, and picked up Arline in Cedarhurst. She walked down her father’s hand-poured concrete driveway wearing a white dress. They crossed New York Harbor on the Staten Island ferry—their honeymoon ship. They married in a city office on Staten Island, in the presence of neither family nor friends, their only witnesses two strangers cal ed in from the next room.

Fearful of contagion, Richard did not kiss her on the lips.

After the ceremony he helped her slowly down the stairs, and onward they drove to Arline’s new home, a charity hospital in Browns Mil s, New Jersey.

LOS ALAMOS

Feynman tinkered with radios again at the century’s big event. Someone passed around dark welding glass for the eyes. Edward Tel er put on sun lotion and gloves. The bomb makers were ordered to lie face down, their feet toward ground zero, twenty miles away, where their gadget sat atop a hundred-foot steel tower. The air was dense. On the way down from the hil three busloads of scientists had pul ed over to wait while one man went into the bushes to be sick. A moist lightning storm had wracked the New Mexican desert. Feynman, the youngest of the group leaders, now grappled more and more urgently with a complicated ten-dial radio package mounted on an army weapons carrier. The radio was the only link to the observation plane, and it was not working.

He sweated. He turned the dials with nervous fingers. He knew what frequency he needed to find, but he asked again anyway. He had almost missed the bus after having flown back from New York when he received the urgent coded telegram, and he had not had time to learn what al those dials did. In frustration he tried rearranging the antenna. Stil nothing—static and silence. Then, suddenly, music, the eerie, sweet sound of a Tchaikovsky waltz floating irrelevantly from the ether. It was a shortwave transmission on a nearby frequency, al the way from San Francisco. The

signal gave Feynman a bench mark for his calibrations. He worked the dials again until he thought he had them right.

He reset them to the airplane’s wavelength one last time.

Stil nothing. He decided to trust his calibrations and walk away. Just then a raspy voice broke through the darkness.

The radio had been working al along; the airplane had not been transmitting. Now Feynman’s radio announced,

“Minus thirty minutes.”

Distant searchlights cut the sky, flashing back and forth between the clouds and the place Feynman knew the tower must be. He tried to see his flashlight through his welder’s glass and decided, to hel with it, the glass was too dim. He looked at the people scattered about Campania Hil , like a movie audience wearing 3-D glasses. A bunch of crazy optimists, he thought. What made them so sure there would be any light to filter? He went to the weapons carrier and sat in the front seat; he decided that the windshield would cut out enough of the dangerous ultraviolet. In the command center twenty-five miles away, Robert Oppenheimer, thin as a specter, wearing his tired hat, leaned against a wooden post and said aloud, “Lord, these affairs are hard on the heart,” as though there had ever been such an affair.

At 5:29:45 A.M., July 16, 1945, just before dawn would have lighted the place cal ed (already) the Jornada del Muerto, Journey of Death, instead came the flash of the atomic bomb. In the next instant Feynman realized that he was looking at a purple blotch on the floor of the weapons carrier. His scientific brain told his civilian brain to look up again. The earth was paper white, and everything on it

seemed featureless and two-dimensional. The sky began to fade from silver to yel ow to orange, the light bouncing off new-formed clouds in the lee of the shock wave.

Something creates clouds! he thought. An experiment was in progress. He saw an unexpected glow from ionized air, the molecules stripped of electrons in the great heat.

Around him witnesses were forming memories to last a lifetime. “And then, without a sound, the sun was shining; or so it looked,” Otto Frisch recal ed afterward. It was not the kind of light that could be assessed by human sense organs or scientific instruments. I. I. Rabi was not thinking in foot-candles when he wrote, “It blasted; it pounced; it bored its way into you. It was a vision which was seen with more than the eye.” The light rose and fel across the bowl of desert in silence, no sound heard until the expanding shel of shocked air final y arrived one hundred seconds after the detonation.

Then came a crack like a rifle shot, startling a New York Times correspondent at Feynman’s left. “What was that?”

the correspondent cried, to the amusement of the physicists who heard him.

“That’s the thing ,” Feynman yel ed back. He looked like a boy, lanky and grinning, though he was now twenty-seven. A solid thunder echoed in the hil s. It was felt as much as heard. The sound made it suddenly more real for Feynman; he registered the physics acoustical y. Enrico Fermi, closer to the blast, barely heard it as he tore up a sheet of paper and calculated the explosive pressure by dropping the

pieces, one by one, through the sudden wind.

The jubilation, the shouting, the dancing, the triumph of that day have been duly recorded. On the road back, another physicist thought Feynman was going to float through the roof of the bus. The bomb makers rejoiced and got drunk. They celebrated the thing, the device, the gadget. They were smart, can-do fel ows. After two years in this brown desert they had converted some matter into energy. The theorists, especial y, had now tested an abstract blackboard science against the ultimate. First an idea—now fire. It was alchemy at last, an alchemy that changed metals rarer than gold into elements more baneful than lead.

Accustomed to spending their days in a mostly mental world, the theorists had sweated over messy problems that they could touch and smel . Almost everyone was working in a new field, the theory of explosions, for example, or the theory of matter at extremely high temperatures. The practicality both sobered and thril ed them. The purest mathematicians had to soil their hands. Stanislaw Ulam lamented that until now he had always worked exclusively with symbols. Now he had been driven so low as to use actual numbers, and, even more humbling, they were numbers with decimal points. There was no choosing issues for their elegance or simplicity. These problems chose themselves—ticklish chemicals and exploding pipes. Feynman himself interrupted diffusion calculations to repair typewriters, interrupted typewriter repair to check the safety of accumulating masses of uranium, and invented

new kinds of computing systems, part machine and part human, to solve equations that theoretical y could not be solved at al . A pragmatic spirit had taken over the mesas of Los Alamos; no wonder the theorists were exhilarated.

Later

they

remembered

having

had

doubts.

Oppenheimer, urbane and self-torturing aficionado of Eastern mysticism, said that as the firebal stretched across three miles of sky (while Feynman was thinking,