by James Gleick
A Century of Progress
By then the search for forces had produced a decade of reinterpretation of the nature of the atom. The science known as chemical physics was giving way rapidly to the sciences that would soon be known as nuclear and high-energy physics. Those studying the chemical properties of different substances were trying to assimilate the first startling findings of quantum mechanics. The American Physical Society met that summer in Chicago. The chemist Linus Pauling spoke on the implications of quantum mechanics for complex organic molecules, primitive components of life. John C. Slater, a physicist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, struggled to make a connection between the quantum mechanical view of electrons and the energies that chemists could measure. And then the meeting spilled onto the fairgrounds of the spectacular 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, “A Century of Progress.” Niels Bohr himself spoke on the unsettling problem of measuring anything in the new physics. Before a crowd of visitors both sitting and standing, his ethereal Danish tones often smothered by crying babies and a balking microphone, he offered a principle that he called “complementarity,” a recognition of an inescapable duality at the heart of things. He claimed revolutionary import for this notion. Not just atomic particles, but all reality, he said, fell under its sway. “We have been forced to recognize that we must modify not only all our concepts of classical physics but even the ideas we use in everyday life,” he said. He had lately been meeting with Professor Einstein (their discussions were actually more discordant than Bohr now let on), and they had found no way out. “We have to renounce a description of phenomena based on the concept of cause and effect.”
Elsewhere amid the throngs at the fairground that summer, enduring the stifling heat, were Melville, Lucille, Richard, and Joan Feynman. For the occasion Joan had been taught to eat bacon with a knife and fork; then the Feynmans strapped suitcases to the back of a car and headed off crosscountry, a seemingly endless drive on the local roads of the era before interstate highways. On the way they stayed at farmhouses. The fair spread across four hundred acres on the shore of Lake Michigan, and the emblems of science were everywhere. Progress indeed: the fair celebrated a public sense of science that was reaching a crest. Knowledge Is Power—that earnest motto adorned a book of Richard’s called The Boy Scientist. Science was invention and betterment; it changed the way people lived. The eponymous business enterprises of Edison, Bell, and Ford were knotting the countryside with networks of wire and pavement—an altogether positive good, it seemed. How wonderful were these manifestations of the photon and the electron, lighting lights and bearing voices across hundreds of miles!
Even in the trough of the Depression the wonder of science fueled an optimistic faith in the future. Just over the horizon were fast airships, half-mile-high skyscrapers, and technological cures for diseases of the human body and the body politic. Who knew where the bright young students of today would be able to carry the world? One New York writer painted a picture of his city fifty years in the future: New York in 1982 would hold a magnificent fifty million people, he predicted, the East River and much of the Hudson River having been “filled in.” “Traffic arrangements will no doubt have provided for several tiers of elevated roadways and noiseless railways—built on extended balconies flanking the enormous skyscrapers …” Nourishment will come from concentrated pellets. Ladies’ dress will be streamlined to something like the 1930s bathing suit. The hero of this fantasy was the “high-school genius (who generally knows more than anybody else).” There was no limit to the hopes vested in the young.
Scientists, too, struggled to assimilate the new images pouring into the culture from the laboratory. Electricity powered the human brain itself, a University of Chicago researcher announced that summer; the brain’s central switchboard used vast numbers of connecting lines to join brain cells, each one of which could be considered both a tiny chemical factory and electric battery. Chicago’s business community made the most of these symbols, too. In an opening-day stunt, technicians at four astronomical observatories used faint rays of starlight from Arcturus, forty light-years distant, focused by telescopes and electrically amplified, to turn on the lights of the exposition. “Here are gathered the evidences of man’s achievements in the realm of physical science, proofs of his power to prevail over all the perils that beset him,” declared Rufus C. Dawes, president of the fair corporation, as loud projectiles released hundreds of American flags in the sky over the fairgrounds. Life-size dinosaurs awed visitors. A robot gave lectures. Visitors less interested in science could pay to see an unemployed actress named Sally Rand dance with ostrich-feather fans. The Feynmans, though, took the Sky Ride, suspended on cables between two six-hundred-foot towers, and visited the Hall of Science, where a 151-word wall motto summed up the history of science from Pythagoras to Euclid to Newton to Einstein.
The Feynmans had never heard of Bohr or any of the other physicists gathering in Chicago, but, like most other American newspaper readers, they knew Einstein’s name well. That summer he was traveling in Europe, uprooted, having left Germany for good, preparing to arrive in New York Harbor in October. For fourteen years America had been in the throes of a publicity craze over this “mathematician.” The New York Times, the Feynmans’ regular paper, had led a wave of exaltation with only one precedent, the near deification of Edison a generation earlier. No theoretical scientist, European or American, before or since, ignited such a fever of adulation. A part of the legend, the truest part, was the revolutionary import of relativity for the way citizens of the twentieth century should conceive their universe. Another part was Einstein’s supposed claim that only twelve people worldwide could understand his work. “Lights All Askew in the Heavens,” the Times reported in a 1919 classic of headline writing. “Einstein Theory Triumphs. Stars Not Where They Seem or Were Calculated to Be, but Nobody Need Worry. A Book for 12 Wise Men. No More in the World Could Comprehend It, Said Einstein.” A series of editorials followed. One was titled “Assaulting the Absolute.” Another declared jovially, “Apprehensions for the safety of confidence even in the multiplication table will arise.”
The presumed obscurity of relativity contributed heavily to its popularity. Yet had Einstein’s message really been incomprehensible it could hardly have spread so well. More than one hundred books arrived to explain the mystery. The newspapers mixed tones of reverence and self-deprecating amusement about the mystery of relativity’s paradoxes; in actuality, they and their readers correctly understood the elements of this new physics. Space is curved—curved where gravity warps its invisible fabric. The ether is banished, along with the assumption of an absolute frame of reference for space and time. Light has a fixed velocity, measured at 186,000 miles per second, and its path bends in the sway of gravity. Not long after the general theory of relativity was transmitted by underwater cable to eager New York newspapers, schoolchildren who could barely compute the hypotenuse of a right triangle could nevertheless recite a formula of Einstein’s, E equals MC squared, and some could even report its implication: that matter and energy are theoretically interchangeable; that within the atom lay unreleased a new source of power. They sensed, too, that the universe had shrunk. It was no longer merely everything—an unimaginable totality. Now it might be bounded, thanks to four-dimensional curvature, and somehow it began to seem artificial. As the English physicist J. J. Thomson said unhappily, “We have Einstein’s space, de Sitter’s space, expanding universes, contracting universes, vibrating universes, mysterious universes. In fact the pure mathematician may create universes just by writing down an equation … he can have a universe of his own.”
There will never be another Einstein—just as there will never be another Edison, another Heifetz, another Babe Ruth, figures towering so far above their contemporaries that they stood out as legends, heroes, half-gods in the culture’s imagination. There will be, and almost certainly have already been, scientists, inventors, violinists, and baseball players with the same raw genius. But the
world has grown too large for such singular heroes. When there are a dozen Babe Ruths, there are none. In the early twentieth century, millions of Americans could name exactly one contemporary scientist. In the late twentieth century, anyone who can name a scientist at all can name a half-dozen or more. Einstein’s publicists, too, belonged to a more naïve era; icons are harder to build in a time of demythologizing, deconstruction, and pathography. Those celebrating Einstein had the will and the ability to remake the popular conception of scientific genius. It seemed that Edison’s formula favoring perspiration over inspiration did not apply to this inspired, abstracted thinker. Einstein’s genius seemed nearly divine in its creative power: he imagined a certain universe and this universe was born. Genius seemed to imply a detachment from the mundane, and it seemed to entail wisdom. Like sports heroes in the era before television, he was seen exclusively from a distance. Not much of the real person interfered with the myth. By now, too, he had changed from the earnest, ascetic-looking young clerk whose genius had reached its productive peak in the first and second decades of the century. The public had hardly seen that man at all. Now Einstein’s image drew on a colorful and absentminded appearance—wild hair, ill-fitting clothes, the legendary socklessness. The mythologizing of Einstein occasionally extended to others. When Paul A. M. Dirac, the British quantum theorist, visited the University of Wisconsin in 1929, the Wisconsin State Journal published a mocking piece about “a fellow they have up at the U. this spring … who is pushing Sir Isaac Newton, Einstein and all the others off the front page.” An American scientist, the reporter said, would be busy and active, “but Dirac is different. He seems to have all the time there is in the world and his heaviest work is looking out the window.” Dirac’s end of the dialogue was suitably monosyllabic. (The Journal’s readers must have assumed he was an ancient eminence; actually he was just twenty-seven years old.)
“Now doctor will you give me in a few words the low-down on all your investigations?”
“No.”
“Good. Will it be all right if I put it this way—‘Professor Dirac solves all the problems of mathematical physics, but is unable to find a better way of figuring out Babe Ruth’s batting average’?”
“Yes.”
…
“Do you go to the movies?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“In 1920—perhaps also 1930.”
The genius was otherworldly and remote. More than the practical Americans whose science meant gizmos and machines, Europeans such as Einstein and Dirac also incarnated the culture’s standard oddball view of the scientist. “Is he the tall, backward boy … ?” Barbara Stanwyck’s character asked in The Lady Eve about Henry Fonda’s, an ophiologist roughly Feynman’s age.
—He isn’t backward, he’s a scientist.
—Oh, is that what it is. I knew he was peculiar.
“Peculiar” meant harmless. It meant that brilliant men paid for their gifts with compensating, humanizing flaws. There was an element of self-defense in the popular view. And there was a little truth. Many scientists did walk through the ordinary world seeming out of place, their minds elsewhere. They sometimes failed to master the arts of dressing carefully or making social conversation.
Had the Journal’s reporter solicited Dirac’s opinion of the state of American science, he might have provoked a longer comment. “There are no physicists in America,” Dirac had said bitingly, in more private company. It was too harsh an assessment, but the margin of his error was only a few years, and when Dirac spoke of physics he meant something new. Physics was not about vacuum cleaners or rayon or any of the technological wonders spreading in that decade; it was not about lighting lights or broadcasting radio waves; it was not even about measuring the charge of the electron or the frequency spectra of glowing gases in laboratory experiments. It was about a vision of reality so fractured, accidental, and tenuous that it frightened those few older American physicists who saw it coming.
“I feel that there is a real world corresponding to our sense perceptions,” Yale University’s chief physicist, John Zeleny, defensively told a Minneapolis audience. “I believe that Minneapolis is a real city and not simply a city of my dreams.” What Einstein had (or had not) said about relativity was truer of quantum mechanics: a bare handful of people had the mathematics needed to understand it.
Richard and Julian
Summer brought a salty heat to Far Rockaway, the wind rising across the beaches. The asphalt shimmered with refractive air. In winter, snow fell early from low, gray clouds; then dazzlingly white hours would pass, the sky too bright to see clearly. Free and impudent times—Richard lost himself in his notebooks, or roamed to the drugstore, where he would play a mean-spirited optical-hydrodynamical trick on the waitress by inverting a glass of water over a one-penny tip on the smooth tabletop.
On the beach some days he watched a particular girl. She had warm, deep blue eyes and long hair that she wore deftly knotted up in a braid. After swimming she would comb it out, and boys Richard knew from school would flock around her. Her name was Arline (for a long time Richard thought it was spelled the usual way, “Arlene”) Greenbaum, and she lived in Cedarhurst, Long Island, just across the city line. He dreamed about her. He thought she was wonderful and beautiful, but getting to know girls seemed hopeless enough, and Arline, he discovered, already had a boyfriend. Even so, he followed her into an after-school social league sponsored by the synagogue. Arline joined an art class, so Richard joined the art class, overlooking a lack of aptitude. Shortly he found himself lying on the floor and breathing through a straw, while another student made a plaster cast of his face.
If Arline noticed Richard, she did not let on. But one evening she arrived at a boy-girl party in the middle of a kissing session. An older boy was teaching couples the correct lip angles and nose positions, and in this instructional context a certain amount of practice was under way. Richard himself was practicing, with a girl he hardly knew. When Arline came in, there was a little commotion. Almost everyone got up to greet her—everyone, it seemed to her, but one horribly rude boy, off in the corner, who ostentatiously kept on kissing.
Occasionally Richard went on dates with other girls. He could never rid himself of a sense that he was a stranger engaging in a ritual the rules to which he did not know. His mother taught him some basic manners. Even so, the waiting in a girl’s parlor with her parents, the procedures for cutting in at dances, the stock phrases (“Thank you for a lovely evening”) all left him feeling inept, as if he could not quite decipher a code everyone else had mastered.
He stayed not quite conscious of the hopes his parents had for him. He was not quite aware of the void left by the death of his infant brother—his mother still thought of the baby often—or of his mother’s social descent to the lower middle class, in increasingly tight circumstances. With the coming of the Depression the Feynmans had to give up the house and yard on New Broadway and move to a small apartment, where they used a dining room and a breakfast room as bedrooms. Melville was often on the road now, selling. When he was home, he would read the National Geographic magazines that he collected secondhand. On Sundays he would go outdoors and paint woodland scenery or flowers. Or he and Richard would take Joan into the city to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They went to the Egyptian section, first studying glyphs in the encyclopedia so that they could stand and decode bits of the chiseled artifacts, a sight that made people stare.
Richard still had some tinkering and probing to do. The Depression broadened the market for inexpensive radio repair, and Richard found himself in demand. In just over a decade of full-scale commercial production, the radio had penetrated nearly half of American households. By 1932 the average price of a new set had fallen to $48, barely a third of the price just three years before. “Midget” sets had arrived, just five tubes compactly arranged within an astonishing six-pound box, containing its own built-in aerial and a shrunken loudspeaker the size of a paper dollar. Some rece
ivers offered knobs that would let the user adjust the high and low tones separately; some advertised high style, like the “satin-finished ebony black Durez with polished chromium grille and trimmings.”
Broken radios confronted Richard with a whole range of pathologies in the circuits he had learned so well. He rewired a plug or climbed a neighbor’s roof to install an antenna. He looked for clues, wax on a condenser or telltale charcoal on a burned-out resistor. Later he made a story out of it—“He Fixes Radios by Thinking!” The hero was an exaggeratedly young boy, with a comically large screwdriver sticking out of his back pocket, who solved an ever-more-challenging sequence of puzzles. The last and best broken radio—the one that established his reputation—made a bloodcurdling howl when first turned on. Richard paced back and forth, thinking, while the curmudgeonly owner badgered him: “What are you doing? Can you fix it?” Richard thought about it. What could be making a noise that changed with time? It must have something to do with the heating of the tubes—first some extraneous signal was swollen into a shriek; then it settled back to normal. Richard stopped pacing, went back to the set, pulled out one tube, pulled out a second tube, and exchanged them. He turned on the set, and the noise had vanished. The boy who fixes radios by thinking—that was how he saw himself, reflected in the eyes of his customers in Far Rockaway. Reason worked. Equations could be trusted; they were more than schoolbook exercises. The heady rush of solving a puzzle, of feeling the mental pieces shift and fade and rearrange themselves until suddenly they slid into their grooves—the sense of power and sheer rightness—these pleasures sustained an addiction. Luxuriating in the buoyant joy of it, Feynman could sink into a trance of concentration that even his family found unnerving.