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

Chemistry sets had their appeal, but a boy like Richard Feynman, loving diagrams and maps, could see that the radio was its own map, a diagram of itself. Its parts expressed their function, once he learned to break the code of wires, resistors, crystals, and capacitors. He assembled

a crystal set, attached oversized earphones from a rummage sale, and listened under the bedcovers until he fel asleep. Sometimes his parents would tiptoe in and take the earphones off their sleeping boy. When atmospheric conditions were right, his radio could pul in signals from far away—Schenectady in upstate New York or even station WACO from Waco, Texas. The mechanism responded to the touch. To change channels he slid a contact across a wire coil. Stil , the radio was not like a watch, with gears and wheels. It was already one step removed from the mechanical world. Its essential magic was invisible after al .

The crystal, motionless, captured waves of electromagnetic radiation from the ether.

Yet there was no ether—no substance bearing these waves. If scientists wished to imagine radio waves propagating with the unmistakable undulating rhythm of waves in a pond, they nonetheless had to face the fact that these waves were not in anything. Not in the era of relativity: Einstein was showing that if an ether existed it would have to be motionless with respect to any and al observers—

though they themselves moved in different directions. This was impossible. “It seems that the aether has betaken itself to the land of the shades in a final effort to elude the inquisitive search of the physicist!” the mathematician Hermann Weyl wrote in 1918, the year Feynman was born.

Through what medium, then, were radio waves sweeping in their brief journey from the aerials of downtown New York to Feynman’s second-story bedroom in a smal frame house on the city’s outskirts? Whatever it was, the radio wave was

only one of the many sorts of oscil ations disturbing every region of space. Waves of light, physical y identical to radio waves but many times shorter, crisscrossing hectical y; infrared waves, perceptible as heat on the skin; the ominously named X rays; the ultra-high-frequency gamma rays, with wavelengths smal er than atoms—al these were just different guises of one phenomenon, electromagnetic radiation. Already space was an electromagnetic babel, and human-built transmitters were making it busier stil .

Fragmented voices, accidental clicks, slide-whistle drones: strange noises passed through one another, more waves in a wel -corrugated waviness. These waves coexisted not in the ether but in a rather more abstract medium, the precise nature of which was posing difficulties for physicists. They could not imagine what it was—a problem that was only mildly al ayed by the fact that they had a name for it, the electromagnetic field, or just the field. The field was merely a continuous surface or volume across which some quantity varied. It had no substance, yet it shook; it vibrated.

Physicists were discovering that the vibrations sometimes behaved like particles, but this just complicated the issue. If they were particles, they were nonetheless particles with an undeniably wavelike quality that enabled boys like Feynman to tune in to certain desirable wavelengths, the ones carrying

“The

Shadow”

and

“Uncle

Don”

and

advertisements for Eno Effervescent Salts. The scientific difficulties were obscure, known only to a handful of scientists more likely to speak German than English. The essence of the mystery, however, was clear to amateurs

who read about Einstein in the newspapers and pondered the simple magic of a radio set.

No wonder so many future physicists started as radio tinkerers, and no wonder, before physicist became a commonplace word, so many of them grew up thinking they might become electrical engineers, professionals known to earn a good wage. Richard, cal ed Ritty by his friends, seemed to be heading single-mindedly in that direction. He accumulated tube sets and an old storage battery from around the neighborhood. He assembled transformers, switches, and coils. A coil salvaged from a Ford automobile made showy sparks that burned brown-black holes in newspaper. When he found a leftover rheostat, he pushed 110-volt electricity through it until it overloaded and burned. He held the stinking, smoking thing outside his second-floor window, as the ashes drifted down to the grassy rear yard. This was standard emergency procedure.

When a pungent odor drifted in downstairs during his mother’s bridge game, it meant that Ritty was dangling his metal wastebasket out the window, waiting for the flames to die out after an abortive experiment with shoe polish—he meant to melt it and use the liquid as black paint for his

“lab,” a wooden crate roughly the size of a refrigerator, standing in his bedroom upstairs in the rear of the house.

Screwed into the crate were various electrical switches and lights that Ritty had wired, in series and in paral el. His sister, Joan, nine years younger, served eagerly as a four-cents-a-week lab assistant. Her duties included putting a finger into a spark gap and enduring a mild shock for the

entertainment of Ritty’s friends.

It had already occurred to psychologists that children are innate scientists, probing, puttering, experimenting with the possible and impossible in a confused local universe.

Children and scientists share an outlook on life. If I do this, what will happen? is both the motto of the child at play and the defining refrain of the physical scientist. Every child is observer, analyst, and taxonomist, building a mental life through a sequence of intel ectual revolutions, constructing theories and promptly shedding them when they no longer fit. The unfamiliar and the strange—these are the domain of al children and scientists.

None of which could ful y account for the presence of laboratory, rheostat, and lab assistant—tokens of a certain vivid cultural stereotype. Richard Feynman was relentless in fil ing his bedroom with the trappings and systems of organized science.

Neither Country nor City

Charmed lives were led by the children of Far Rockaway, a vil age that amounted to a few hundred acres of frame houses and brick apartment blocks on a spit of beach floating off Long Island’s south shore. The neighborhood had been agglomerated into the political entity of New York City as one of the more than sixty towns and neighborhoods that merged as the borough of Queens in 1898. The city was investing generously in these

neighborhoods, spending tens of mil ions of dol ars on the laying of water mains, sewers, and roadways and the construction of grand public buildings. Stil , in the first part of the twentieth century, before the IND subway line reached out across the marshes of Jamaica Bay, the city seemed a faraway place. Commuters took the Long Island Rail Road. Beyond Far Rockaway’s eastern border lay the smal towns of Nassau County, Long Island. To the northwest, across marshy tongues of ocean cal ed Mott Basin and Hassock Channel, lay a flat expanse that later became Idlewild Airport and then Kennedy International Airport. On foot or on their bicycles, Far Rockaway’s children had free run of a self-contained world: ivy-covered houses, fields, and vacant lots. No one has yet isolated the circumstances that help a child grow whole and independent, but they were present. At some point in a town’s evolution, houses and fences grow dense enough to form a connected barrier. When that critical point is reached, movement is mostly restricted to public streets. In Far Rockaway boys and girls stil percolated through the neighborhood and established their own paths through backyards and empty lots behind the houses and streets.