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

“Clouds!”) he had thought of a passage from the Bhagavad-Gita , “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” The test director, Kenneth Bainbridge, supposedly told him, “We are al sons of bitches now.” Rabi, when the hot clouds dissipated, said he felt “a chil , which was not the morning cold; it was a chil that came to one when one thought, as for instance when I thought of my wooden house in Cambridge …” In the actuality of the event, relief and excitement drowned out most such thoughts. Feynman remembered only one man “moping”—his own recruiter to the Manhattan Project, Robert Wilson. Wilson surprised Feynman by saying, “It’s a terrible thing that we made.” For most the second thoughts did not come until later. On the scene the scientists, polyglot and unregulation though they seemed to the military staff, shared a patriotic intensity that faded from later accounts. Three weeks after the test, and three days after Hiroshima—on the day, as it happened, of Nagasaki—Feynman used a typewriter to set down his thoughts in a letter to his mother.

We jumped up and down, we screamed, we ran

around slapping each other on the backs, shaking hands, congratulating each other… . Everything was perfect but the aim—the next one would be aimed for Japan not New Mexico… . The fel ows working for me al gathered in the hal with open mouths, while I told them. They were al proud as hel of what they had done. Maybe we can end the war soon.

The experiment code-named Trinity was the threshold event of an age. It permanently altered the psychology of our species. Its prelude was a proud mastery of science over nature—irreversible. Its sequel was violence and death on a horrible scale. In the minute that the new light spread across that sky, humans became fantastical y powerful and fantastical y vulnerable. A story told many times becomes a myth, and Trinity became the myth that il uminated the postwar world’s anxiety about the human future and its reckless, short-term approach to life. The images of Trinity—the spindly hundred-foot tower waiting to be vaporized, the jackrabbits found shredded a half-mile from the blast, the desert sand fused to a bright jade-green glaze—came to presage the central horror of an age. We have hindsight. We know what fol owed: the blooding of the scientists, the loss of innocence—Hiroshima, Dr.

Strangelove, throw weights, radwaste, Mutual Assured Destruction. The irony is built in. At first, though, ground zero stood for nothing but what it was, a mirrored surface, mildly radioactive, where earlier had stood a tower of steel.

Richard Feynman, stil not much more than a boy, wrote, “It

is a wonderful sight from the air to see the green area with the crater at the center in the brown desert.”

The Man Comes In with His Briefcase

Thirty months had passed since the closing of the isotron project at Princeton. Feynman and the rest of Wilson’s team had been left in a tense limbo—not knowing. Wilson thought they were like professional soldiers awaiting their next orders. “We became then what I suppose is the worst of al possible things,” he said later, “a research team without a problem, a group with lots of spirit and technique, but nothing to do.” To pass the time he decided to invent some neutron-measuring equipment, sure to be needed before long. He meanwhile felt a dearth of hard information from Chicago, the project’s temporary center, domain of Enrico Fermi and his atomic “pile” (the leather-jacketed physicist from Rome was using his freshly acquired Anglo-Saxon vocabulary to coin a blunt nuclear jargon). The pile—

graphite bricks and uranium bal s assembled into a lattice on a university squash court—was chain-reacting. Wilson sent Feynman as his emissary.

First came a briefing on the art of information gathering.

He told Feynman to approach each department in turn and offer to lend expertise. “Have them describe to you in every detail the problem to such a point that you real y could sit down and work on it without asking any more questions.”

“That’s not fair!” Feynman recal ed saying.

“That’s al right, that’s what we’re going to do, and that way you’l know everything.”

Feynman took the train to Chicago early in 1943. It was his first trip west since the Century of Progress fair a decade before. He did gather information as efficiently as a spy. He got to know Tel er and they talked often. He went from office to office learning about neutron cross sections and yields. He also left behind an impressed group of theorists. At one meeting he handed them a solution to an awkward class of integrals that had long stymied them. “We al came to meet this brash champion of analysis,” recal ed Philip Morrison. “He did not disappoint us; he explained on the spot how to gain a quick result that had evaded one of our clever calculators for a month.” Feynman saw that the problem could be broken into two parts, such that part B

could be looked up in a table of Bessel functions and part A could be derived using a clever trick, differentiation with respect to parameter on the integral side—something he had practiced as a teenager. Now the audience was new and the stakes were higher.

He was not the last prodigy to plant the kernel of a legend at the Metal urgical Laboratory. Five months after he passed through, Julian Schwinger arrived from Columbia, by way of Berkeley, where he had already col aborated with Oppenheimer, and the MIT Radiation Laboratory.

Schwinger was Feynman’s exact contemporary, and the contrast between these two New Yorkers was striking.

Their paths had not yet crossed. Schwinger impressed the Chicago scientists with his pristine black Cadil ac sedan

and his meticulous attire. His tie never seemed to loosen through that hot summer. A col eague trying to take notes while he worked at the blackboard through the night found the process hectic. Schwinger, who was ambidextrous, seemed to have fashioned a two-handed blackboard technique that let him solve two equations at once.

Strange days for physicists reaching what should have been the intense prime of their creative careers. The war disrupted young scientists’ lives with infinite gentleness compared with the disruption suffered by most draft-age men; stil , Feynman could only wait uneasily for the course change war would entail. Almost as a lark he had accepted a long-distance job offer from the University of Wisconsin, as a visiting assistant professor on leave without pay. It gave him some feeling of security, though he hardly expected to become more than a professor on leave. Now, in Chicago, he decided at the last moment to take a side trip to Madison and spent a day walking about the campus almost incognito. In the end he introduced himself to a department secretary and met a few of his nominal col eagues before heading back.

He returned to Princeton with a little briefcase ful of data.

He briefed Wilson and the others: tel ing them how the bomb looked as of the winter of early 1943, how much uranium would be needed, how much energy would be produced. He was a twenty-four-year-old standing in shirtsleeves in a col ege classroom. Wisecracks and laughter echoed from the corridor. Feynman was not thinking about history, but Paul Olum was. “Someday when

they make a moving picture of the dramatic moment at which the men of Princeton learn about the bomb, and the representative comes back from Chicago and presents the information, it wil be a very serious situation, with everybody sitting in their suit coats and the man comes in with his briefcase,” he told Feynman. “Real life is different than one imagines.”

The army had made its unlikely choice of a civilian chief: a Jew, an aesthete, a mannered, acerbic, left-flirting, ultimately self-destructive scientist whose administrative experience had not extended beyond a California physics group. J. Robert Oppenheimer—Oppy, Oppie, Opje—held the respect of col eagues more for his quicksilver bril iance than for the depth of his work. He had no feeling for experimentation, and his style was unphysical; so, when he made mistakes, they were notoriously sil y ones: