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

and the legend, too, grew thicker and more elaborate. The consummate safeman was thought to need sandpapered fingers and hypersensitive ears. His essential skil : a feeling for the vibrations of tumblers lining up or fal ing into place. This was pure myth. It was true that once in a long while someone would open a safe by feel, but, the lore notwithstanding, the chief tools of successful safecrackers were crowbars and dril s. Safes were cracked; holes were torn in their sides; handles and dials were torn off. When al else failed, safes were burned. The safeman used “soup”—

nitroglycerin. The Los Alamos physicists had been conditioned by the myth, and when word started spreading that the laboratory had a skil ed safecracker on its staff, most of them believed—and never stopped believing—that Feynman had mastered the art of listening to the tiny clicks.

To learn how to crack safes he had to find his way past the same myth. He read pulp memoirs of safemen to look for their secrets. They inspired him to dreams of glory:

these authors boasted about opening bul ion-fil ed safes underwater; he would write the book that would top them al .

In its preface he would intone, I opened the safes which contained behind them the entire secret of the atomic bomb: the schedules for the production of plutonium, the purification procedures, how much was going to be needed, how the atomic bomb worked, how the neutrons are generated … the whole schmeer. Only gradual y, as he looked for the nuggets of useful information, did he realize how mundane the business was. Because his repertoire would have to omit dril s and nitroglycerin, it would have to make the most of such practical rules as he could find.

Some he read; others he learned as he went along. Most were variations on a theme: People are predictable.

They tend to leave safes unlocked.

They tend to leave their combinations at factory settings such as 25-0-25.

They tend to write down the combinations, often on the edge of their desk drawers.

They tend to choose birthdays and other easily remembered numbers.

This last insight alone made an enormous difference. Of the 8,000 effective possible combinations, Feynman figured that only 162 worked as dates. The first number was a month from 1 to 12—given the margin of error, that meant he need try just three possibilities, 0, 5, and 10. For a day from 1 to 31 he needed six; for a year from 1900 to the present, just nine. He could try 3 × 6 × 9 combinations in

minutes. He also discovered that it took just a few inexplicable successes to make a safecracker’s reputation.

By fiddling with his own safe he learned that when a door was open he could find the last number of a combination by turning the dial and feeling when the bolt came down. Given some time, he could find the second number that way, too.

He made a habit of absently leaning against his col eagues’ safes when he visited their offices, twirling the dials like the perpetual fidgeter he was, and thus he built up a master list of partial combinations. The remaining trial and error was so trivial that he found himself—for the sake of cultivating his legend—carrying tools as red herrings and pretending that safe jobs took longer than they real y did.

The Last Springtime

Friday afternoon again. Gravel switchbacks wound perilously down the mesa. Across a desert spotted with pale green bristles, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains rose like luminous cutouts thirty miles to the east, as bright as if they were a few city blocks away. The air was clearer than any Feynman had seen. The scenery left emotional fingerprints on many of the Easterners and Europeans who lived in its spel for two years. When it snowed, the shades of whiteness seemed impossibly rich. Feynman reveled in the clouds skimming low across the val ey, the mountains visible above and below the clouds at once, the velvet glow of cloud-diffused moonlight. The sight stirred something

within the most rational of minds. He mocked himself for feeling it: See, I’m getting an aesthetic sense. The days blurred, especial y now—no more banker’s hours, not much theory to divert the mind. The pace of computation was hectic. Feynman’s day began at 8:30 and ended fifteen hours later. Sometimes he could not leave the computing center at al . He worked through for thirty-one hours once and the next day found that an error minutes after he went to bed had stal ed the whole team. The routine al owed just a few breaks: a hasty ride across the mesa to help put out a chemical fire; or one of those Los Alamos seminar-briefing-col oquium-town-meetings, where, slouching as far as his frame would permit, he would sit in the second row next to a detached-looking Oppenheimer; or a drive with his friend Fuchs to some Indian caves, where they could explore on hands and knees until dusk.

Stil , each Friday or Saturday, if he could, Feynman left this place behind, making his way down the rutted road in Paul Olum’s little Chevrolet coupe or sometimes now in Fuchs’s blue Buick. He turned over and over in his mind some nagging puzzle and let his thoughts drift back to the hard quantum problems he had left behind at Princeton. He made a difficult mental transition to his weekend. The trips down from those heights marked off ful weeks for him, empty ones for Arline. He was like a spy invented by a novelist: “not certain whether this time spent traveling between his two secret worlds was when he was truly himself, when he was able to hold the two in balance and know them to be separate from himself; or whether this was

the one time he was nothing at al , a void traveling between two points.” Later, when Fuchs, shockingly, turned out to have been a spy for the Soviet Union, Feynman thought it might not have been so strange after al that his friend had been able to hide his inner thoughts so wel . He, too, had felt he was leading a double life. His anguish over Arline, so dominating his mind, stayed invisible to the col eagues who saw his aggressively carefree self. He would sit in a group and look at someone—even at Fuchs—and think, how easy it is to hide my thoughts from others. A third springtime was coming to Los Alamos, and Feynman knew it would be the last. For a moment he thought he felt a break in the tension.

He found a way to get the computation group running smoothly enough to al ow him a few hours more sleep. He took a shower. For a half hour he read a book before fal ing asleep. It seemed, just for a moment, that the worst might be over. He wrote Arline:

You are a strong and beautiful woman. You are not always as strong as other times but it rises & fal s like the flow of a mountain stream. I feel I am a resevoir for your strength—without you I would be empty and weak

… I find it much harder these days to write these things to you.

He never wrote without saying I love you or I’m still loving you or I have a serious affliction: loving you forever. The pace quickened again, and Feynman sometimes thought about long days he had worked for twenty dol ars a week

waiting on tables and helping in the kitchen of his aunt’s summer hotel, the Arnold, on the beach at Far Rockaway.

Wherever he went, his drumming could be heard through the wal s, nervous or jaunty, a rapping that his staff had to enjoy or endure. It was not music. Feynman himself could barely endure the more standard tunes of his friend Julius Ashkin’s recorder, “an infernal y popular wooden tube,” he cal ed it, “for making noises bearing a one-one correspondence to black dots on a piece of paper—in imitation to music.”

Stresses were tightening, too, between the security staff and the scientists, and Feynman had lost his eager spirit of cooperation. A col eague had been interrogated for more than an hour in a smoky room, questions fired by men sitting in the dark, as in a melodramatic movie. “Don’t get scared tho,” Feynman wrote Arline, “they haven’t found out that I am a relativist yet.” Fear sometimes clutched Feynman now. His intestines suffered chronical y. He had a chest X ray: clear. Names rushed through his head: maybe Donald; if a girl, maybe Matilda. Putzie wasn’t drinking enough milk—how could he help her build her strength at this distance? They were spending $200 a month on the room and oxygen and $300 more on nurses, and $300 was the shortfal between income and expenditures. His salary as a Manhattan Project group leader: $380 a month. If they spent Arline’s savings, $3,300 plus a piano and a ring, they could cover ten more months. Arline seemed to be wasting away.