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

apartment. One year he lived as faculty guest in a student residence. Often he would stay nights or weeks with married friends until these arrangements became sexual y volatile. He seemed to think that Cornel was alternately too large and too smal —an isolated vil age with only a diffuse interest in science outside the confines of its physics department. Furthermore, Hans Bethe would always be the great man of physics at Cornel .

An old Los Alamos acquaintance, Robert Bacher, after serving on the new Atomic Energy Commission, was moving to Caltech, where he was charged with rebuilding an obsolete-looking physics program. He was swimming in a lake during a summer vacation in northern Michigan when Feynman’s name came into his head. He rushed back to shore, tracked Feynman down by telephone, and within a few days had him there visiting.

Feynman agreed to consider Pasadena, but he was also thinking about possibilities even more faraway, exotic, and warm. South America was on his mind. He had gone so far as to study Spanish. Pan American Airways had opened the continent to American tourists on a large scale, jumping from New York to Rio de Janeiro in thirty-four hours for roughly the price of the fortnight-long ocean voyage, and the popular magazines were fil ing with sensual images: palms and plantations, hot beaches and gaudy nights. Carmen Miranda and bananas stil dominated the travel writing.

There was a new note, too, of the apocalyptic fear that had dogged Feynman: the Soviet Union had demonstrated its first working atomic bomb in September 1949, and worries

about

nuclear

war

were

entering

the

national

consciousness and spurring a panicky civil defense movement. Emigrations to South America became an odd symptom. One of Feynman’s girlfriends told him seriously that he might be safer there. John Wheeler said—by way of imploring Feynman to join work on a thermonuclear bomb

—that he was estimating “at least a 40 percent chance of war by September.”

When a Brazilian physicist visiting Princeton, Jayme Tiomno, heard that Feynman was flirting with Spanish, he had suggested a switch to Portuguese and invited him to visit the new Centro Brasiliero de Pesquisas Físicas in Rio for several weeks in the summer of 1949. Feynman accepted, applied for a passport, and left the continental United States for the first time. He did learn enough Portuguese to teach physicists and beseech women in their native language. (By the end of the summer he had persuaded one of them, a Copacabana resident named Clotilde, who cal ed him meu Ricardinho in her mel ifluous Portuguese, to come live with him in Ithaca—briefly.) Late the next winter he impulsively asked the centro to hire him permanently. Meanwhile he was negotiating seriously with Bacher. He had endured one too many days kneeling in cold slush as he tried to wrap chains around his tires.

Caltech appealed to him. It reminded him of the other Tech, such a pure haven for the technical y minded. Four years at a liberal-arts university had not softened his outlook. He was tired of “al the ins and outs of the smal town and the bad weather,” he wrote Bacher, and added, “The

theoretical broadening which comes from having many humanities subjects on the campus is offset by the general dopiness of the people who study these things and by the Department of Home Economics.” He warned Bacher about one of his weaknesses: he did not like having graduate students. At Cornel “poor Bethe” had ended up covering for him again and again.

I do not like to suggest a problem and suggest a method for its solution and feel responsible after the student is unable to work out the problem by the suggested method by the time his wife is going to have a baby so that he cannot get a job. What happens is that I find that I do not suggest any method that I do not know wil work and the only way I know it works is by having tried it out at home previously, so I find the old saying that “A Ph.D. thesis is research done by a professor under particularly trying circumstances” is for me the dead truth.

He had a sabbatical year coming. He was going to make his escape, one way or another.

Once (and it was not yesterday) , a diligent student of field theory wrote later at Niels Bohr’s institute in Copenhagen, there lived a very young mole and a very young crow who, having heard of the fabulous land called Quefithe, decided to visit it. Before starting out, they went to the wise owl and asked what Quefithe was like.

Owl’s description of Quefithe was quite confusing. He

said that in Quefithe everything was both up and down.

Physicists need more than ideas and methods. They need a version of history, too, a narrative cabinet for ordering their bits of knowledge. So they create a legend of search and discovery on the fly; they turn hearsay and supposition into instant lore. They discover that it is hard to teach a pure concept without clothing it in at least a fragment of narrative: who discovered it; what problem needed solving; what path led from not knowing to knowing. Some physicists learn that there is such a thing as physicists’

history, necessary and convenient but often different from real history. The fable of Quefithe—“ qu antum fi eld the ory”—

with a Schwinger mole and a Feynman crow, an owl resembling Bohr, and a fox like Dyson, lovingly satirized a story that had entered the community’s store of self-knowledge as rapidly as the path integrals and Feynman diagrams: If you knew where you were, there was no way of knowing where you were going and conversely, if you knew where you were going, there was no way of knowing where you were… .

Clearly, if they were ever going to learn anything about Quefithe, they had to see it for themselves. And that is what they did.

After a few years had passed, the mole came back. He said that Quefithe consisted of lots of tunnels. One entered a hole and wandered through a maze, tunnels splitting and rejoining, until one found the next hole and got out. Quefithe sounded like a place only a mole would

like, and nobody wanted to hear more about it.

Not much later the crow landed, flapping its wings and crowing excitedly. Quefithe was amazing, it said. The most beautiful landscape with high mountains, perilous passes and deep valleys. The valley floors were teeming with little moles who were scurrying down rutted paths. The crow sounded like he had taken too many bubble baths, and many who heard him shook their heads. The frogs kept on croaking “It is not rigorous, it is not rigorous!” … But there was something about crow’s enthusiasm that was infectious.

The most puzzling thing about it all was that the mole’s description of Quefithe sounded nothing like the crow’s description. Some even doubted that the mole and the crow had ever gotten to the mythical land. Only the fox, who was by nature very curious, kept running back and forth between the mole and the crow and asking questions, until he was sure that he understood them both. Nowadays, anybody can get to Quefithe — even snails.

CALTECH

The California Institute of Technology had entered the 1920s with an engineering building, a physics building, a chemistry laboratory, an auditorium, and an orange grove on a dusty, underirrigated thirty acres a few minutes east of the thriving civic center of Pasadena, a town of new money in search of monuments. The scent of orange and rose floated from the gardens of porticoed homes often described as mansions, built in a relaxed Spanish and Italianate style that was coming to be thought of as Californian. Wal s were a pale stucco, roofs a red tile.