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

The combination of pride and terror—the scientists, too, were feeling it that night—stirred a remarkable memory. “It reminded me of the time I was playing bridge in the living room & my child prodigy had a little fire in a trash basket he was holding outside the window.

“By the way,” she added, “I don’t think you ever told me how you put it out.”

Feynman did not stop at home on his way to Ithaca from New Mexico that fal . At some point Lucil e began to realize

how much damage had been done by her opposition to the marriage. Late one night, unable to sleep, she got out of bed and penned an anguished letter—a love letter from mother to son—beginning, “Richard, What has happened between you and your family? What has driven us apart?

My heart yearns for you… . My heart is ful to bursting & hot tears burn my eyes as I write.”

She wrote about his childhood: how much he had been wanted and treasured; how she had read him beautiful stories; how Melvil e had made patterns for him from colored tiles; how they had tried to invest him with a sense of morality and duty. She reminded him of the pride they had felt in al his achievements, from high school through graduate school.

More times than I can enumerate here my heart has leaped for joy because of you… . And now—now—

strange harvest that I reap. We are as far apart as the poles.

Without mentioning Arline, she said she felt a sense of shame. “The fault must be mine. Some where along the way I lost you.” Other mothers, she said, had sons who loved them. Why not her? She closed with as impassioned a plea as any spurned lover could make.

I need you . I want you. I wil never give you up. Not even death can break the bond between us… . Think of me sometimes & let me know that you are thinking

of me. My darling, oh my darling, what more can I say to you. I adore you & always wil .

He did go home for Christmas in 1945. Gradual y the wound began to heal. In the meantime Feynman made some indirect efforts to find his way back into the unfinished theory that had occupied him at Princeton, but they did not lead to anything usable. The culmination of the driven, purposeful work of the past three years had left a void that he could not easily fil . He found it hard to concentrate on research. As spring came he would sit on the grass outdoors and worry about whether he had slipped past his best working years without achieving anything. He had built a reputation among senior physicists, but now, back in a world returning to normal, he realized that he had not done the normal work to go with the reputation. Since his two published papers in col ege—his squib on cosmic rays with Val arta and his undergraduate thesis—his only journal publications had been accounts of the work with Wheeler on the absorber theory, already looking short-lived.

Phenomena Complex—Laws Simple

If Feynman was struggling to find his footing, Julian Schwinger was not. Since growing up at opposite ends of New York City, in neighborhoods that might as wel have been a thousand miles apart, they had become competitors without either quite acknowledging it. Their

routes into physics had remained utterly separate, as had their styles. Schwinger, with heavy owlish eyes and a mild stoop even in his twenties, took as great pains to achieve elegance as Feynman did to remain rough-hewn. He dressed careful y and expensively and drove a Cadil ac. He worked nocturnal y, usual y sleeping until late afternoon.His lectures

had

already

become

famous

for

their

seamlessness and uninterruptibility. He prided himself on speaking without notes. A young Englishman who heard him (and who considered Feynman’s ebul ience slightly tiring, by contrast) thought Schwinger became “a man possessed”—“It seems to be the spirit of Macaulay which takes over, for he speaks in splendid periods, the careful y architected sentences rol ing on, with every subordinate clause duly closing.” He liked to make his listeners think.

He would never announce directly that he had married and taken a honeymoon, when he could say, “I abandoned my bachelor quarters and embarked on an accompanied, nostalgic trip around the country… .” His equations had something of the same style.

His patron had been I. I. Rabi, who never tired of describing their first encounter: Schwinger, a seventeen-year-old waiting quietly in his office, had final y piped up to settle an argument over a controversial foray into quantum-mechanical paradox just published by Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen. With the arrogance of a shy young man determined to plow his own course, Schwinger was already in administrative difficulties at City Col ege because he rarely attended classes. Rabi helped him

transfer to Columbia and then took devilish pleasure in encouraging his irate instructors to carry out their threats to flunk him. “Are you a mouse or a man? Give him an F,” he told one dul chemistry professor; he judged correctly that the grade would come to haunt the professor more than it would the student. Even before Schwinger got his col ege diploma at the age of nineteen, Rabi was having him fil in as the lecturer in his quantum-mechanics course. Also before graduating, he completed the research that served as his doctoral dissertation. Fermi, Tel er, and Bethe each knew him, knew his work, or had col aborated with him.

Meanwhile Feynman, barely three months younger, was completing his sophomore year at MIT. Schwinger published a fecund series of research papers, mostly in the Physical Review , each highly polished, with a dozen different col aborators. By the time Feynman published his undergraduate thesis, Schwinger was in Berkeley as a National Research Council fel ow, working directly with Oppenheimer.

With Rabi, he chose to avoid Los Alamos in favor of radar and the Radiation Laboratory. He never seemed to lose a stride. By the war’s end Rabi had him replace Pauli as a special lecturer in charge of bringing the laboratory’s scientists up to date with nonwar physics. For the atomic bomb scientists, isolated as they were behind their desert fence, the war brought a more total interruption of normal careers. Physicists Feynman’s age were especial y aware of it. They had just reached what should have been their crucial, productive years. Schwinger made one tour through

Los Alamos in 1945 and met Feynman briefly for the first time. Feynman marveled at how much this contemporary had managed to publish. He had thought Schwinger was older. When he had long since forgotten the content of Schwinger’s lecture to the Los Alamos theorists, he stil remembered the style: the way Schwinger walked into the room, his head tilted, like a bul into the ring; the way he conspicuously set his notebook aside; the intimidating perfection of his discourse.

Now Schwinger was at Harvard, where he was shortly to become a twenty-nine-year-old ful professor. The Harvard committee had seriously considered only Bethe for the same opening and worried meanwhile whether Schwinger would be able to wake up to teach classes that met as early as noon. He managed, and his lectures on nuclear physics quickly became a draw for the entire Harvard and MIT

physics community.

Feynman, meanwhile, poured energy into his more mundane course in the methods of mathematical physics.

This was a standard course, taught in every physics department, though it occurred to Feynman that he had just lived through a momentous change in physicists’

mathematical methods. At Los Alamos mathematical methods had been put through a crucible: refined, clarified, rewritten, reinvented. Feynman thought he knew what was useful and what was mere textbook knowledge taught because it had always been taught. He intended to emphasize nonlinearity more than was customary and to teach students the patchwork of gimmicks and tricks that