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

discrepancy between his experiment and Dirac’s theory, and he had awakened the next day thinking (accurately, as it turned out): Nobel Prize . News of what would soon be cal ed the Lamb shift had already reached most of the Shelter Island participants before Lamb made a detailed report the first day. The theorists present had often repeated the truism that progress in science comes when experiments contradict theory. Rarely had any of them seen such a clean example (more often it was theory that contradicted theory). To Schwinger, listening, the point was that the problem with quantum electrodynamics was neither infinite nor zero: it was a number, now standing before them, finite and smal . The alumni of Los Alamos and the Radiation Laboratory knew that the task of theoretical physics was to justify such numbers. The rest of the conference fed off a nervous euphoria, as it seemed to Schwinger: “The facts were incredible—to be told that the sacred Dirac theory was breaking down al over the place.”

As

the

meeting

adjourned,

Schwinger

left

with

Oppenheimer by seaplane.

Quantum electrodynamics was a “debacle,” another physicist said. Harsh assessments of a theory accurate enough for al but this delicate experiment. But after al , the physicists had known that the theory was fatal y pocked with infinities. The experiment gave them real numbers to calculate, numbers marking the exact not-quite-rightness of the world according to Dirac.

Dyson

That fal Freeman Dyson arrived at Cornel . Some of Cornel ’s mathematicians knew the work of a Briton by that name. It was hardly a common name, and mathematics was certainly known for its prodigies, but surely, they thought, this smal , hawk-nosed twenty-three-year-old joining the physics department could not be the same man.

Other graduate students found him genial but inscrutable.

He would sleep late, bring his New York Times to the office, read it until lunch time, and spend the afternoon with his feet up and perhaps his eyes closed. Just occasional y he would wander into Bethe’s office. What they did there, no one knew.

Indeed, Dyson was one of England’s two or three most bril iant mathematical prodigies. He was the son of two supremely cultured members of the middle class who were late to marry and entering middle age when he was born.

His father, George, composed, conducted, and taught music at a boys’ col ege in the south. Eventual y he became director of England’s Royal Col ege of Music. His mother, Mildred, trained as a lawyer, though she did not practice, and passed on to Freeman her deep love of literature, beginning with Chaucer and the poets of ancient Greece and Rome. As a six-year-old he would sit with encyclopedia volumes spread open before him and make long, engrossing calculations on sheets of paper. He was intensely self-possessed even then. His older sister once

interrupted him to ask where their nanny was and heard him reply, “I expect her to be in the absolute elsewhere.” He read a popular astronomy book, The Splendour of the Heavens , and the science fiction of Jules Verne, and when he was eight and nine wrote a science-fiction novel of his o w n, Sir Phillip Roberts’s Erolunar Collision , with a maturely cadenced syntax and an adult sense of literary flow. His scientist hero has a knack for both arithmetic and spaceship design. Freeman, who did not favor short sentences, imagined a scientist comfortable with public acclaim, yet solitary in his work:

“I, Sir Phil ip Roberts, and my friend, Major Forbes,”

he began, “have just unravel ed an important secret of nature; that Eros, that minor planet that is so wel -

known on account of its occasional proximity with the Earth, Eros, wil approach within 3,000,000 miles of the Earth in 10 years 287 days hence, instead of the usual 13,000,000 miles every 37 years; and, therefore it may, by some great chance fal upon the Earth.

Therefore I advise you to calculate the details of this happening!” …

When the cheers were over, and everybody had gone home, it did not mean that the excitement was over; no, not at al ; everybody was making the wildest calculations; some reasonable, some not; but Sir Phil ip only wrote cool y in his study rather more than usual; nobody could tel what his thoughts were.

He read popular books about Einstein and relativity and, realizing that he needed to learn a more advanced mathematics than his school taught, sent away to scientific publishers for their catalogs. His mother final y felt that his interest in mathematics was turning into an obsession. He was fifteen and had just spent a Christmas vacation working methodical y, from six each morning until ten each evening, through the seven hundred problems of H. T. H.

P i a g g i o ’ s Differential Equations . That same year, frustrated at learning that a classic book on number theory by I. M. Vinogradov existed only in Russian, he taught himself the language and wrote out a ful translation in his careful hand. As Christmas vacation ended, his mother went for a walk with him and began a cautionary lecture with the words of the Latin playwright Terence: “I am human and I let nothing human be alien to me.” She continued by tel ing him Goethe’s version of the Faust story, parts one and two, rendering Faust’s immersion in his books, his lust for knowledge and power, his sacrifice of the possibility of love, so powerful y that years later, when Dyson happened to see the film Citizen Kane , he realized that he was weeping with the recognition of his mother’s Faust incarnate once again on the screen.

As the war began, Dyson entered Trinity Col ege, Cambridge. At Cambridge he heard intimate lectures by England’s greatest mathematicians, Hardy, Littlewood, and Besicovitch. In physics Dirac reigned. Dyson’s war could hardly have been more different from Feynman’s. The British war organization wasted his talents prodigiously,

assigning him to the Royal Air Force bomber command in a Buckinghamshire forest, where he researched statistical studies that were doomed, when they countered the official wisdom, to be ignored. The futility of this work impressed him. He and others in the operational research section learned—contrary to the essential bomber command dogma—that the safety of bomber crews did not increase with experience; that escape hatches were too narrow for airmen to use in emergencies; that gun turrets slowed the aircraft and bloated the crew sizes without increasing the chances of surviving enemy fighters; and that the entire British strategic bombing campaign was a failure.

Mathematics repeatedly belied anecdotal experience, particularly when the anecdotal experience was colored by a lore whose purpose was to keep young men flying.

Dyson saw the scattershot bomb patterns in postmission photographs, saw the Germans’ ability to keep factories operating amid the rubble of civilian neighborhoods, worked through the firestorms of Hamburg in 1943 and Dresden in 1945, and felt himself descending into a moral hel . At Los Alamos a military bureaucracy worked more successful y than ever before or since with independent-minded scientists. The military bureaucracy of Dyson’s experience embodied a routine of petty and not-so-petty dishonesty, and the scientists of the bomber command were unable to chal enge it.

These were black days for the combination of science and machinery cal ed technology. England, which had invented so much, had always been prone to misgivings.

Machines disrupted traditional ways of living. In the workplace they seemed dehumanizing. At the turn of the century, amid the black soot clouds of the English industrial city, it was harder to romanticize the brutal new working conditions of the factory than the brutal old working conditions of the peasant farm. America, too, had its Luddites, but in the age of radio, telephone, and automobile few saw a malign influence in the progress that technology brought. For Americans the loathing of technology that would become a theme of late-twentieth-century life began with fears born amid the triumph of 1945.