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

computation.

He was at work in the computing room when the cal came from Albuquerque that Arline was dying. He had arranged to borrow Klaus Fuchs’s car. When he reached her room she was stil . Her eyes barely fol owed him as he moved. He sat with her for hours, aware of the minutes passing on her clock, aware of something momentous that he could not quite feel. He heard her breaths stop and start, heard her efforts to swal ow, and tried to think about the science of it, the individual cel s starved of air, the heart unable to pump. Final y he heard a last smal breath, and a nurse came and said that Arline was dead. He leaned over to kiss her and made a mental note of the surprising scent of her hair, surprising because it was the same as always.

The nurse recorded the time of death, 9:21 P.M. He discovered, oddly, that the clock had halted at that moment

—just the sort of mystical phenomenon that appealed to unscientific people. Then an explanation occurred to him.

He knew the clock was fragile, because he had repaired it several times, and he decided that the nurse must have stopped it by picking it up to check the time in the dim light.

The next day he arranged an immediate cremation and col ected her few possessions. He returned to Los Alamos late at night. A party was under way at the dormitory. He came in and sat down, looking shattered. His computing team, he found the next day, was deep in a computing run, not needing his help. He let his friends know that he wanted no special attention. In her papers he found a smal spiral notebook she had used to log her medical condition. He

careful y penned a final entry: “June 16—Death.”

He returned to work, but soon Bethe ordered him home to Far Rockaway for a rest. (His family did not know he was coming until the telephone rang and a foreign-accented voice asked for him. Joan replied that her brother had not been home for years. The voice said, When he comes in, tell him Johnny von Neumann called. ) There Richard stayed for several weeks, until a coded telegram arrived.

He flew from New York Saturday night and reached Albuquerque at noon the next day, July 15. An army car met him and drove him directly to Bethe’s house. Rose Bethe had made sandwiches. Feynman was barely in time to catch the bus to the observation site, a ridge overlooking the patch of New Mexican desert, the Jornada del Muerto, already cal ed by its more modern name, ground zero.

We Scientists Are Clever

The test seared images into al their memories: for Bethe the perfect shade of ionized violet; for Weisskopf the eerie Tchaikovsky waltz and the unbidden memory of the halo in a medieval painting of Christ’s ascension; for Otto Frisch the cloud rising on its tornado stem of dust; for Feynman the awareness of his “scientific brain” trying to calm his

“befuddled one,” and then the sound he felt in his bones; for so many of them the erect figure of Fermi, letting his bits of paper slip through the wind. Fermi measured the displacement, consulted a table he had prepared in his

notebook, and estimated that the first atomic bomb had released the energy of 10,000 tons of TNT, somewhat more than the theorists had predicted and somewhat less than later measurements would suggest. Two days later, calculating that the ground radiation should have decayed sufficiently, he drove with Bethe and Weisskopf to inspect the glazed area that Feynman saw from an observation plane. The molten sand, the absent tower. Later a smal monument marked the spot.

The aftermath changed them al . Everyone had played a part. If a man had merely calculated a numerical table of corrections for the effect of wind on the aerodynamical y clumsy Nagasaki bomb, the memory would never leave him. No matter how innocent they remained through the days of Trinity and Hiroshima, those who had worked on the hil had knowledge that they could not keep from themselves. They knew they had been complicit in the final bringing of fire; Oppenheimer gave public lectures explaining that the legend of Prometheus had been fulfil ed.

They knew, despite their labors and ingenuity, how easy it had al been.

The official report on its development stated later that year that the bomb was a weapon “created not by the devilish inspiration of some warped genius but by the arduous labor of thousands of normal men and women working for the safety of their country.” Yet they were not normal men and women. They were scientists, and some already sensed that a dark association like a smoke cloud would attach itself to the hitherto-innocent word physicist .

(A draft of the same report had said, “The general attitude of Americans toward their scientists is a curious mixture of exaggerated admiration and amused contempt”—never again was it quite so amused.) Not long after writing his triumphant letter home, Feynman wrote some arithmetic on a yel ow pad. He estimated that a Hiroshima bomb in mass production would cost as much as one B-29 superfortress bomber. Its destructive force surpassed the power of one thousand airplanes carrying ten-ton loads of conventional bombs. He understood the implications. “No monopoly,” he wrote. “No defense.” “No security until we have control on a world level.”

Under the heading “SKILL & KNOWLEDGE” he concluded:

Most was known… . Other peoples are not being hindered in the development of the bomb by any secrets we are keeping. They might be helped a little by our mentioning which of two processes is found to be more efficient, & by our tel ing them what size parts to plan for—but soon they wil be able to do to Columbus, Ohio, and hundreds of cities like it what we did to Hiroshima.

And we scientists are clever—too clever—are you not satisfied? Is four square miles in one bomb not enough? Men are stil thinking. Just tel us how big you want it!

Many of the scientists found their magic mountain hard to leave. Lingering for months, they continued minor research

that had acquired its own momentum, or skied near the Val e Grande, where they were intermittently aware that their tow rope had previously served to hoist the bomb up the tower at ground zero. Some joined the hydrogen bomb project that Tel er would lead, and some remained at Los Alamos permanently, as the compound behind the fence grew into a major national laboratory and a central fixture of the American weapons-research establishment. The scientists who slowly dispersed began to realize how unlikely they were to work ever again in such a purposeful, col egial, and passionate scientific enterprise.

Nothing held Feynman to Los Alamos. He was joining Bethe’s faculty at Cornel . Raymond Birge at Berkeley had angered Oppenheimer by delaying the job offer he had recommended. Oppenheimer wrote again: “It would seem to me that under these circumstances too much of courage was not required in making a commitment to a young scientist… . I perhaps presumed too much on the excel ence of his reputation among those to whom he is known… . He is not only an extremely bril iant theorist, but a man of the greatest robustness, responsibility and warmth, a bril iant and lucid teacher … one of the most responsible men I have ever met… . We regard him as invaluable here; he has been given a responsibility and his work carries a weight far beyond his years… .” Birge final y came through with an offer to Feynman that summer, but too late. When Arline was alive they had talked about moving to California for her health. Now Bethe easily swayed him.

Feynman became the first of the group leaders to leave,

in October 1945. There were only a few reports to write up and some final safety tours of Oak Ridge and Hanford. It was on his last trip to Oak Ridge, as he walked past a shop window, that he happened to see a pretty dress. Before he could prevent it, a thought came. Arline would like that. For the first time since her death, he wept.