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

Los Alamos built its wal against theoutside world and thrived within. Separately and privately Richard and Arline, too, sought what refuge they could. They made their secret lives. They built a fence of their own. None of his scientific friends knew that he cal ed her Putzie and she cal ed him Coach; that she noticed the muscles hardening in his legs from al his hiking; that the days of respite from her il ness were growing rarer. She wrote him in code, playing to his love of unraveling puzzles; his father did this, too. Their letters caught the eye of the military censors at the laboratory’s Intel igence Office. The censors alerted Feynman to regulation 4(e): Codes, ciphers or any form of secret writing will not be used. Crosses, X’s or other markings of a similar nature are equally objectionable.

Censorship had been designed delicately to accommodate a nonmilitary clientele, university people who stil liked to imagine that they were volunteers in a project of scientific research in a nation where the privacy of the mail was sacred. The censors trod careful y. They tried to turn mail around the day they received it, and they agreed to al ow correspondence in French, German, Italian, and Spanish.

They felt entitled at least to ask Feynman for the key to the codes.

He said he did not have a key or want a key. Final y they agreed that if Arline would enclose a key for their benefit they would remove it before the envelope got to Feynman.

Inevitably, he then ran afoul of regulation 8(l), a delightful y (to Feynman) self-referential law requiring the censorship of any information concerning these censorship regulations or any discourse on the subject of censorship . He got the message to Arline nonetheless, and her acid sense of fun took over. She started sending letters with holes cut in them or blotches of ink covering words: “It’s very difficult writing because I feel that the —— is looking over my shoulder.”

He would respond with numerical fancies, pointing out how peculiarly the decimal expansion of 1/243 repeats itself:

.004 115 226 337 448 … and his increasingly frustrated official audience would have to ensure that the string of digits was neither a cipher nor a technical secret. Feynman explained with subtle glee that this fact had the empty, tautological,

zero-information-content

quality

of

al

mathematical truths. In one of her mail-order catalogs Arline found a kit for do-it-yourself jigsaw puzzles; the next letter

from the Albuquerque sanatorium to Box 1663 came disassembled in a little sack. From another the censors deleted a suspicious-sounding shopping list. Richard and Arline talked about a booby-trapped letter that would begin,

“I hope you remembered to open this letter careful y because I have included the Pepto Bismol powder …”

Their letters were a lifeline. No wonder, under watchful eyes, the lovers found ways to make them private.

The censorship, like the high barbed-wire fence, reminded the mesa’s more sensitive residents of their special status: watched, enclosed, restricted, isolated, surrounded, guarded. They understood that no other civilian post office box had al its mail opened and read. The fence was a double-edged symbol. Few scientists were so important as to merit armed soldiers patrol ing their laboratory perimeters. They could not help feeling some pride. Feynman admonished his parents to maintain secrecy: “There are Captains in the Army who live up here who don’t know what we’re doing. (Even Majors.)” Much later, in a post– Catch-22 world, the military trappings were remembered as irritants and targets of mockery. At the time it was not so simple. The men and women of Los Alamos resented the fence and respected the fence.

Feynman explored most of its length. When he discovered holes, with wel -beaten paths leading through, he pointed them out in a spirit of good citizenship, annoyed only that the guards responded so lackadaisical y. (“I explained it to him & the officer in charge,” he wrote Arline, “but I bet they don’t do anything.”) He never realized that the holes had

don’t do anything.”) He never realized that the holes had semiofficial sanction. The security staff tolerated them—

with Oppenheimer’s connivance, it seemed—so that people from the local tribes could come to the laboratory’s twelve-cent movies.

Feynman’s exploring drew him to every secret and private place. He had a fidgety way of prying into things—

the laboratory’s new Coca-Cola dispenser, for example, a contraption that secured the bottles with a locked steel col ar around their necks. This device replaced an older container, the most ancient prototype of the soda machine: customers would open the lid, take a bottle, and honorably drop their coin in a box. The new dispenser struck Feynman as a withdrawal of trust; thus he felt entitled to accept the technological chal enge and finesse the mechanism. Was that right or wrong? He debated the moral principles with his friends. Meanwhile he found himself abstaining from liquor. He had got so drunk one night that he could tel it was ruining his drum playing and joke tel ing, although it did not stop him from running al over the base singing and beating pots and pans; final y he passed out, and Klaus Fuchs took him home. He decided to give up alcohol, along with tobacco, and wondered whether it was a sign of encroaching conventionality. Was he getting “moral er and moral er” as he got older? (“That’s bad.”)

His reputation as a skil ed prier spread. One scientist left some belongings in a storeroom at Ful er Lodge and borrowed Feynman’s fingers to pick the Yale lock. Paper clips, screwdriver, two minutes. Two men arrived,

clips, screwdriver, two minutes. Two men arrived, breathless from running up the stairs, and begged Feynman to crack a file cabinet holding a crucial document about a ski tow. Combination locks stil seemed too hard.

As a group leader he had been issued a special steel safe for sensitive material of his own, and he had not yet managed a way to break in. He would spin the dial from time to time. Occasional y it occurred to him that his interest in locks was turning into an obsession. Why? “Probably,” he told Arline,

because I like puzzles so much. Each lock is just like a puzzle you have to open without forcing it. But combination locks have me buffaloed.

You do too, sometimes, but eventual y I figure out you.

Locks mixed human logic and mechanical logic. The designer’s strategy was constrained by the manufacturer’s convenience or the limits of the metal, as it was in so many of the bomb project’s puzzles. The official logic of a Los Alamos safe, as displayed in the dial’s numbers and hatch marks, indicated a mil ion different combinations—three numbers from 0 to 99. Some experimentation, though, showed Feynman that the markings disguised a considerable margin of error, plus or minus two, attributable to plain mechanical slackness; if the correct number was 23, anything from 21 to 25 would work as wel . When he was searching combinations systematical y, therefore, he needed only to try one number in every five—0, 5, 10, 15 …

—to be sure of hitting the target. By thinking in terms of error ranges, instead of accepting the authority of the numerals on the dial, he brought a pragmatic physicist’s intuition to bear. That one insight effectively reduced the total combinations from one mil ion to a mere eight thousand, almost few enough to try, given a few hours.

An American folklore had developed about safes and the yeggs who cracked them. Through the cowboy era and the gangster era safes grew thicker and more elaborate—

double wal s of cast iron and manganese, triple side bolts and bottom bolts, curb tumblers and pressure handles—