Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

by James Gleick

  He was. His friends refused to understand why he finally chose to settle down with Mary Louise Bell of Neodesha, Kansas, who had met him in a Cornell cafeteria and pursued him—they said cattily—all the way to Pasadena and finally accepted his proposal by mail from Rio de Janeiro. They considered her a platinum blonde (“the girl with the cellophane hair” was one unkind nickname that floated behind Feynman’s back) who wore white high heels and tight white shorts to picnics. They thought she was older than he was (the age difference was actually just a few months). Even before they married, they quarreled by mail about how much they should spend on interior furnishings and how he looked in old clothes. She made clear that she did not usually think scientists were much fun. She had studied the history of Mexican art and textiles—that was exotic enough to interest him. While he was in Brazil, she taught courses at Michigan State University in the History of Furniture and Institutional Interiors, mainly to men pursuing careers in hotel or restaurant management. “The pattern is that the girl who teaches this course usually marries one of those characters,” she told him.

  They married as soon as he returned from Brazil, in June 1952, and they honeymooned in Mexico and Guatemala, where they ran up and down Mayan pyramids. He made her laugh, but he also frightened her with what she decided was a violent temper. She did not know what to think when, riding down a Mexican highway, she complained that the car’s sun flap was annoying her, and he pulled out a screwdriver and repaired it, with both hands off the wheel. She gave his friends the impression that she did not altogether appreciate him. She wanted him to dress better; they discovered that they could tell whether she was near by looking to see whether he was wearing a necktie. She nagged him, they thought. She liked to tell people that he was not “evolved” to the point of appreciating music and that sometimes she thought she was married to an uneducated man with a Ph.D.

  They moved from Feynman’s bungalow apartment near campus to a larger place in Altadena, just across Pasadena’s northern border. She resisted socializing with other physicists. Once he missed a chance to catch Niels Bohr while he was in Pasadena briefly; as he and Mary Lou were sitting down to dinner, she said that she probably should have told him, but someone had invited them over that evening to see an old bore. Politically she was an extreme conservative, unlike most of Feynman’s colleagues, and as the Oppenheimer security hearings began, she irritated Feynman by saying, “Where there’s smoke there’s fire.” He, too, voted Republican, at least for a while. Divorce was inevitable—Feynman realized early that they should not have children, he confided in his sister—but it was nearly four years before they finally separated.

  By agreement he confessed to Extreme Cruelty—

  has wilfully, wrongfully, and without provocation, justification or excuse whatsoever inflicted grievous physical and mental suffering … ; plaintiff has suffered great physical pain and grievous mental suffering, and has suffered physical nervous shock to the extent that further married life between plaintiff and defendant has been rendered impossible.

  He agreed to a circumscribed alimony, a total of ten thousand dollars over the next three years. She kept their 1950 Oldsmobile and all their household furniture. He kept their 1951 Lincoln Cosmopolitan, his scientific books, “All Drums and Percussion Instruments,” and a set of dishes that his mother had given him. The divorce had a fleeting life in the national press—not because Feynman was a celebrity, but because columnists and cartoonists could not overlook the nature of the extreme cruelty: Prof Plays Bongos, Does Calculus in Bed. “The drums made terrific noise,” his wife had testified. And: “He begins working calculus problems in his head as soon as he awakens… . He did calculus while driving his car, while sitting in the living room and while lying in bed at night.”

  One day near Thanksgiving 1954, as Southern California’s winter neared with no discernible change of season, the smog had rolled up from Los Angeles toward the northern hills that cradled Pasadena, and for a moment their shared discontents had become too much. Feynman wrote to Bethe begging for his old job back. His eyes smarted from the smog; Mary Lou was complaining that she could not see the beautiful colors of the trees. He said he would take any salary—he surrendered unconditionally.

  Soon afterward, someone rushed up to him with news of a discovery by Walter Baade, an astronomer at Mount Wilson Observatory up in the San Gabriel Mountains, demonstrating that the stars of the distant universe were several times older than anyone had established before. Caltech in the fifties was becoming an international center of cosmological discovery. The same day, a young microbiologist told him of a discovery he had made, confirming the fundamental irreducibility of the DNA molecule as bacteria divide and divide again. With Linus Pauling and Max Delbrück on hand, Caltech had some of the leading lights of molecular genetics as the field was undergoing its sensational birth. Meanwhile, although Bethe had been thrilled by Feynman’s letter, he had to tell him that the most Cornell could offer on the spot was a temporary appointment.

  Feynman changed his mind again. That same fall, Enrico Fermi died, and the University of Chicago decided to do whatever was necessary to hire Feynman. Its dean of the Division of Physical Sciences, Walter Bartky, and a younger physicist, Marvin Goldberger, later to become president of Caltech, traveled westward on the Super Chief—Bartky was afraid to fly—and took a taxi directly from the railway station to Feynman’s house. He refused to consider their proposition, and he begged them not even to tell him how much money they were offering. He was worried, he said, that Mary Lou would hear the amount and insist on moving. He had decided. He was going to stay at Caltech.

  Onward with Physics

  Where next, in the newly illuminated quantum world?

  Feynman had reached maturity at a moment when the community of theoretical physicists shared a great unsolved problem, such a weighty knot that the enterprise could scarcely move forward until it was untied or cut. Now that quantum electrodynamics had been solved, no single problem seemed as universally compelling. Most theoretical physicists turned convoy fashion toward the smaller atomic distances and smaller time scales at which new particles appeared. They were driven in part by the logic of the past century’s history: each new step inward toward the atom’s core had brought not just new revelations but also a new simplification. The periodic table of elements had once served as a powerful unifying scheme; now it seemed more like a taxonomical catalog, itself unified by the deeper principles revealed by the quest inside the atom. A rhetoric was appearing in popular writing about physics by physicists and journalists: catchwords were fundamental and constituents of matter and building blocks of nature and innermost sanctum of matter. The phrases were seductive. Other kinds of science sought laws of nature, but a kind of priority seemed to belong to the search for elementary units.

  The prestige of particle physics also rose with a flood tide of military support. Most plainly, the weapons laboratories prospered and such agencies as the Office of Naval Research financed specific military research projects.

  A host of applied sciences, from electronics to cryptography, benefited from the concrete interest of military program officers. Academic scientists could immediately see the potential danger of allowing the armed forces to direct the course of scientific research. “When science is allowed to exist merely from the crumbs that fall from the table of a weapons development program,” said Caltech’s new president, Lee DuBridge, “then science is headed into the stifling atmosphere of ‘mobilized secrecy’ and it is surely doomed—even though the crumbs themselves should provide more than adequate nourishment.” Yet the military also recognized this. One of the many legacies of the Manhattan Project was that generals and admirals now believed the scientists’ dogma: that researchers left alone to follow their instincts will lay golden eggs. The bomb had been born of the esoteric fancies of the mandarins—that was clear. Now pure physicists wished to conduct basic research into forces and particles even stranger than those powering atomic bombs; th
e public and the government supported them enthusiastically. At institutions like DuBridge’s Caltech, even the theoretical programs of research on particle physics flourished by accepting enormous government grants to which the professors applied in groups. The grants paid for salaries, graduate students, office expenses, and university overhead. The military actively encouraged, when it did not finance directly, the giant cyclotrons, betatrons, synchrotrons, and synchrocyclotrons, any one of which consumed more steel and electricity than a prewar experimentalist could have imagined. These were not so much crumbs from the weapons-development table as they were blank checks from officials persuaded that physics worked miracles. Who could say what was impossible? Free energy? Time travel? Antigravity? In 1954 the secretary of the army invited Feynman to serve as a paid consultant on an army scientific advisory panel, and he agreed, traveling to Washington for several days in November. At a cocktail party after one session, a general confided that what the army really needed was a tank that could use sand as fuel.

  Earlier that year Feynman had picked up the telephone in Pasadena to hear the chairman of the AEC, Admiral Lewis L. Strauss, say that he had won his first major prize, the Albert Einstein Award: fifteen thousand dollars and a gold medal. He was the third winner, after Kurt Gödel and Julian Schwinger. Strauss informed him of the award (Feynman amused him by saying, “Hot dog!”). The public announcement came from Oppenheimer as director of the Institute for Advanced Study. Only gradually did it occur to Feynman that this was the same Strauss who was in the process of permanently removing Oppenheimer from public life. Strauss had carried out President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s order to strip Oppenheimer of his security clearance, after a letter to J. Edgar Hoover accused him, in the fashion of the time, of being a “hardened Communist” who was probably “functioning as an espionage agent.” The AEC began four weeks of hearings in April. Many physicists publicly defended the man they had so admired over the past decade. The famous, damaging exception was Teller, who complained that Oppenheimer had not supported his hydrogen bomb project and testified, choosing his words carefully, “I feel that I would like to see the vital interests of this country in hands which I understand better, and therefore trust more.” Under the circumstances Feynman did not relish the prospect of accepting the award from Strauss. But Rabi, who was visiting Caltech, advised him to go ahead. “You should never turn a man’s generosity as a sword against him,” he recalled Rabi saying. “Any virtue that a man has, even if he has many vices, should not be used as a tool against him.”

  In the frightened climate, atomic scientists developed an invisible trail of agents, questioning their friends and childhood neighbors, painstakingly uncovering the obvious, trying to tune in to a hearsay of who liked whom, who resented whom, who might be likely to inform on whom. Feynman’s own file at the FBI grew bulky. His Los Alamos friend Klaus Fuchs had been imprisoned in 1950 for spying for the Soviet Union. Fortunately for Feynman, the bureau did not realize how often Fuchs had lent Feynman his car. It was noted that Feynman had once made a speech at Temple Israel in Far Rockaway, “at which time he had spoken on brotherhood.” He was described as a shy, retiring, introverted type of individual. Neighbors vouched for his loyalty and doubted that he had participated in the high school’s Young People’s Socialist League, which an investigating agent described as “a militant, pro-communistic group of students.” Bethe was pestered by an officer of the Department of Commerce for information regarding Feynman’s “loyalty.” Finally he replied curtly, “Professor Feynman is one of the leading theoretical physicists of the world. His loyalty to the United States is unquestioned. Any further elaboration would be an insult to Dr. Feynman.”

  On one occasion the bureau discovered a “contact by Oppenheimer with one ‘FINEMAN’ (phonetic)” and surmised “that this ‘FINEMAN’ is in fact subject RICHARD FEYNMAN.” Officials discussed the possibility of turning him into a confidential informant against Oppenheimer. They authorized a discreet approach and then placed Feynman on the “no contact” list when he refused to be interviewed by the bureau about anything at all. Agents interviewed his Los Alamos colleagues, who generally described him as a “prodigy” of “excellent character.” Yet it was learned that he sometimes boasted of having “out-foxed” the Selective Service psychiatrists to obtain a 4-F classification. One colleague considered him a “screwball.” Another felt that his interest in “jazz” was not in keeping with the usual demeanor of a physics professor. Yet he had voted for Eisenhower, according to informants, registered Independent (not to be confused with Independent Progressive), and “had no respect whatsoever for the Russians.” The bureau carefully copied out newspaper accounts of his divorce. And one oddity had to be reported:

  FEYNMAN has developed a fair degree of skill opening sample tumbler and Yale type locks with hairpins, bits of wire, etc… . Feynman has been trying to learn the workings of safe locks and has expressed an ambition to be able to open a safe.

  In this first report the agent tried diligently to understand the exculpatory opinion of the informant that “this was not indicative of any criminal tendencies on the part of Feynman but was merely one of the works of a brilliant mathematical mind challenged by a device considered practically impossible of solution by an ordinary individual.” Nevertheless, the suggestive combination of opened safes containing atomic secrets and socialized with Klaus Fuchs proved irresistible to the anonymous authors of memorandums, special inquiries, and secret airtels that swelled Feynman’s file for years to come.

  The bureau monitored one other incident with particular interest. The Soviet Academy of Sciences invited Feynman to a conference in Moscow, where he would have had a chance to meet the great Lev Landau and other Russian physicists. Nuclear physics, particularly in its sensitive guises, was not on the agenda. Still, the cream of Soviet physics was engaged in a weapons program quickly catching up with the Americans’. That year the Russians exploded an advanced, portable thermonuclear bomb over Siberia. (One of its principal architects, the future dissident Andrei Sakharov, watched from a platform on the snowy steppe, miles from ground zero. Having read an American primer called the black book, he decided it would be safe to remove his dark goggles.) Feynman accepted the invitation enthusiastically, the Soviet Academy having offered to cover his travel expenses. Then he had second thoughts. He wrote a careful letter to the AEC to ask for the government’s advice. “I thought you would be interested,” he said, “because I was connected to the Los Alamos project during the war, so the danger that I might not be able to return, or the attitude of public opinion must be considered.” After a delay, officials at both the commission and the State Department replied, asking him to turn the Soviets down. His presence might be exploited for “propaganda gains.” Feynman acquiesced. He wrote the head of the Soviet Academy that “circumstances have arisen which make it impossible for me to attend.” The government also forced Freeman Dyson to withdraw, warning him that under the McCarran Immigration Act he might not be allowed back into the United States. Dyson did not surrender so quietly, however. He told newspaper reporters, “This is a clear case in which the law has been proved stupid.”

  In their basic, nonweapons research, Russian physicists eagerly pursued the latest developments in the United States and Europe. Yet a faint difference in outlook between East and West was already unfolding. The triumph of the atomic bomb had been an American triumph, had won the American war, and had not ingrained itself so firmly into the Soviet psyche (obsessed though policymakers were with the arms race). Although an international-class synchrocyclotron went up in Dubno, money was not so readily available for giant particle accelerators of the kind now under construction in the United States. And the most influential single figure in Soviet physics was Landau, famous for the catholicity of his interests across the whole breadth of phenomena that could be called theoretical physics. He had devoted his greatest work not to elementary particles but to condensed matter: the dynamics of fluids, transitions between on
e phase of matter and another, turbulence, plasmas, sound dispersion, and low-temperature physics. Fundamental though all these subjects were, in the United States their status was beginning to dim slightly next to the glamour of particle physics. Not so in the Soviet Union, where physicists were particularly eager in 1955 to meet Feynman. For his first major work since quantum electrodynamics, he had turned away from particle physics after all and chosen instead a subject close to Landau’s heart: a theory of superfluidity, the frictionless motion of liquid helium cooled to near absolute zero.

  A Quantum Liquid

  By then science-fiction writers had learned an interesting rule: not to let their imaginations run too freely, too widely. It was often better to be conservative. To create a strange new world, they had only to alter one or two features of the usual reality and let the manifold unexpected implications play themselves out. Nature, too, seemed capable of adjusting a single rule and thereby creating the most bizarre phenomena.

  Superfluid helium showed what happens when a liquid can flow with no friction—not just low friction, but zero friction. Resting in a beaker, the liquid spontaneously glides in a thin film up and over the walls, apparently in defiance of gravity. It passes through cracks or holes so microscopically small that even a gas would not fit through. No matter how perfectly a pair of glass plates are polished to a smooth surface, and no matter how hard they are pressed together, superfluid helium will still flow freely between them. The liquid conducts heat far better than any ordinary substance, and no amount of cooling will freeze it into a solid.