Genius

by James Gleick

  He was at work in the computing room when the call came from Albuquerque that Arline was dying. He had arranged to borrow Klaus Fuchs’s car. When he reached her room she was still. Her eyes barely followed him as he moved. He sat with her for hours, aware of the minutes passing on her clock, aware of something momentous that he could not quite feel. He heard her breaths stop and start, heard her efforts to swallow, and tried to think about the science of it, the individual cells starved of air, the heart unable to pump. Finally he heard a last small breath, and a nurse came and said that Arline was dead. He leaned over to kiss her and made a mental note of the surprising scent of her hair, surprising because it was the same as always.

  The nurse recorded the time of death, 9:21 P.M. He discovered, oddly, that the clock had halted at that moment—just the sort of mystical phenomenon that appealed to unscientific people. Then an explanation occurred to him. He knew the clock was fragile, because he had repaired it several times, and he decided that the nurse must have stopped it by picking it up to check the time in the dim light.

  The next day he arranged an immediate cremation and collected her few possessions. He returned to Los Alamos late at night. A party was under way at the dormitory. He came in and sat down, looking shattered. His computing team, he found the next day, was deep in a computing run, not needing his help. He let his friends know that he wanted no special attention. In her papers he found a small spiral notebook she had used to log her medical condition. He carefully penned a final entry: “June 16—Death.”

  He returned to work, but soon Bethe ordered him home to Far Rockaway for a rest. (His family did not know he was coming until the telephone rang and a foreign-accented voice asked for him. Joan replied that her brother had not been home for years. The voice said, When he comes in, tell him Johnny von Neumann called.) There Richard stayed for several weeks, until a coded telegram arrived. He flew from New York Saturday night and reached Albuquerque at noon the next day, July 15. An army car met him and drove him directly to Bethe’s house. Rose Bethe had made sandwiches. Feynman was barely in time to catch the bus to the observation site, a ridge overlooking the patch of New Mexican desert, the Jornada del Muerto, already called by its more modern name, ground zero.

  We Scientists Are Clever

  The test seared images into all their memories: for Bethe the perfect shade of ionized violet; for Weisskopf the eerie Tchaikovsky waltz and the unbidden memory of the halo in a medieval painting of Christ’s ascension; for Otto Frisch the cloud rising on its tornado stem of dust; for Feynman the awareness of his “scientific brain” trying to calm his “befuddled one,” and then the sound he felt in his bones; for so many of them the erect figure of Fermi, letting his bits of paper slip through the wind. Fermi measured the displacement, consulted a table he had prepared in his notebook, and estimated that the first atomic bomb had released the energy of 10,000 tons of TNT, somewhat more than the theorists had predicted and somewhat less than later measurements would suggest. Two days later, calculating that the ground radiation should have decayed sufficiently, he drove with Bethe and Weisskopf to inspect the glazed area that Feynman saw from an observation plane. The molten sand, the absent tower. Later a small monument marked the spot.

  The aftermath changed them all. Everyone had played a part. If a man had merely calculated a numerical table of corrections for the effect of wind on the aerodynamically clumsy Nagasaki bomb, the memory would never leave him. No matter how innocent they remained through the days of Trinity and Hiroshima, those who had worked on the hill had knowledge that they could not keep from themselves. They knew they had been complicit in the final bringing of fire; Oppenheimer gave public lectures explaining that the legend of Prometheus had been fulfilled. They knew, despite their labors and ingenuity, how easy it had all been.

  The official report on its development stated later that year that the bomb was a weapon “created not by the devilish inspiration of some warped genius but by the arduous labor of thousands of normal men and women working for the safety of their country.” Yet they were not normal men and women. They were scientists, and some already sensed that a dark association like a smoke cloud would attach itself to the hitherto-innocent word physicist. (A draft of the same report had said, “The general attitude of Americans toward their scientists is a curious mixture of exaggerated admiration and amused contempt”—never again was it quite so amused.) Not long after writing his triumphant letter home, Feynman wrote some arithmetic on a yellow pad. He estimated that a Hiroshima bomb in mass production would cost as much as one B-29 superfortress bomber. Its destructive force surpassed the power of one thousand airplanes carrying ten-ton loads of conventional bombs. He understood the implications. “No monopoly,” he wrote. “No defense.” “No security until we have control on a world level.”

  Under the heading “SKILL & KNOWLEDGE” he concluded:

  Most was known… . Other peoples are not being hindered in the development of the bomb by any secrets we are keeping. They might be helped a little by our mentioning which of two processes is found to be more efficient, & by our telling them what size parts to plan for—but soon they will be able to do to Columbus, Ohio, and hundreds of cities like it what we did to Hiroshima.

  And we scientists are clever—too clever—are you not satisfied? Is four square miles in one bomb not enough? Men are still thinking. Just tell us how big you want it!

  Many of the scientists found their magic mountain hard to leave. Lingering for months, they continued minor research that had acquired its own momentum, or skied near the Valle Grande, where they were intermittently aware that their tow rope had previously served to hoist the bomb up the tower at ground zero. Some joined the hydrogen bomb project that Teller would lead, and some remained at Los Alamos permanently, as the compound behind the fence grew into a major national laboratory and a central fixture of the American weapons-research establishment. The scientists who slowly dispersed began to realize how unlikely they were to work ever again in such a purposeful, collegial, and passionate scientific enterprise.

  Nothing held Feynman to Los Alamos. He was joining Bethe’s faculty at Cornell. Raymond Birge at Berkeley had angered Oppenheimer by delaying the job offer he had recommended. Oppenheimer wrote again: “It would seem to me that under these circumstances too much of courage was not required in making a commitment to a young scientist… . I perhaps presumed too much on the excellence of his reputation among those to whom he is known… . He is not only an extremely brilliant theorist, but a man of the greatest robustness, responsibility and warmth, a brilliant and lucid teacher … one of the most responsible men I have ever met… . We regard him as invaluable here; he has been given a responsibility and his work carries a weight far beyond his years… .” Birge finally came through with an offer to Feynman that summer, but too late. When Arline was alive they had talked about moving to California for her health. Now Bethe easily swayed him.

  Feynman became the first of the group leaders to leave, in October 1945. There were only a few reports to write up and some final safety tours of Oak Ridge and Hanford. It was on his last trip to Oak Ridge, as he walked past a shop window, that he happened to see a pretty dress. Before he could prevent it, a thought came. Arline would like that. For the first time since her death, he wept.

  CORNELL

  For physics as an enterprise within American culture there were two eras. One ended and the other began in the summer of the atomic bombs. Politicians, educators, newspaper editors, priests, and the scientists themselves began to understand the divide that had been crossed.

  “Among the divinities of ancient Greece, there was a Titan named Prometheus,” ran a typical essay in The Christian Century the next winter. “He stole fire from heaven and gave it to man… . For this act, Prometheus has been held in highest honor as a benefactor of humanity and the divine patron of science and learning.” No more. Now, rather to the cleric essayist’s delight, the atomic bomb had humbled Prometheus’s heirs, the sc
ientists. Their centuries of progress had decisively ended with their invention of a device of human self-destruction. Now it was time for Christian ministers to step in. Even the scientists, he said, “have for the first time in history turned aside from their vocation and become statesmen and evangelists, preaching the grim gospel of damnation unless men repent.” Here he was alluding to J. Robert Oppenheimer, for Oppenheimer had already seen the aptness of the Promethean legend—who could have missed it?—and had begun to speak out both to the public and to scientists. What Oppenheimer preached, however, was more subtle than a gospel of damnation. He reminded listeners that the religious had long felt threatened by science, and now the only mildly God-fearing public had something real to fear. He suspected that atomic weapons would scare people more than any scientific development since Darwin’s theory of evolution.

  Already, in November 1945, with relieved soldiers and sailors streaming home from the Pacific Theater, before fallout shelters, nuclear proliferation, and ban the bomb had a chance to enter the language, Oppenheimer anticipated the time when celebration would give way to dread. “Atomic weapons are a peril which affect everyone in the world,” he told his friends and colleagues of the past thirty months. His audience filled the largest assembly hall in Los Alamos, its movie theater. He knew that the newspapers and magazines glorifying the scientists’ achievement would soon recognize how little real mystery there had been, how unremarkable, actually, were the problems of nuclear fission (if not implosion), how easy atomic bombs would be to make, and how affordable for many nations.

  Prometheus was not the only mythic figure standing in for the scientist; the other was Faust. Lately the Faustian bargain for knowledge and power had not seemed so horrible as it had in medieval times. Knowledge meant washing machines and medicines, and the devil had softened into an amusing character for Saturday cartoons and Broadway musicals. But now the fires in two Japanese cities renewed a primal understanding that the devil was not so tame. It might mean something, after all, to sell him one’s soul. Oppenheimer knew, partly from introspection, that the scientists had immediately begun to question their own motives. “It’s a terrible thing that we made,” Robert Wilson had said to Feynman, surprising him and pricking his ebullient bubble. Others were beginning to agree. Oppenheimer reminded them of what they were reminding themselves: that two years earlier a Nazi bomb had seemed possible and that the American victory had seemed far from inevitable. He acknowledged that these justifications had faded. Some people, he said, might have been driven by a less high-minded motivation, no more than curiosity and a sense of adventure, and he surprised some of them by saying, “and rightly so.” He said it again: “And rightly so.” Feynman had left Los Alamos several days before, so he did not hear, nor did he need to hear, Oppy’s reminder of their shared credo, a credo now being welded to the most painful act of self-justification they had ever had to perform:

  When you come right down to it the reason that we did this job is because it was an organic necessity. If you are a scientist you cannot stop such a thing. If you are a scientist you believe that it is good to find out how the world works; that it is good to find out what the realities are; that it is good to turn over to mankind at large the greatest possible power to control the world… . It is not possible to be a scientist unless you believe that the knowledge of the world, and the power which this gives, is a thing which is of intrinsic value to humanity, and that you are using it to help in the spread of knowledge, and are willing to take the consequences.

  Thus spoke a bringer of fire.

  The relations between Americans and their scientists had changed. It became an instant truism that science meant power. Science as an institution—“organized science”—ranked second only to the military as a guarantor of what was being called national security. President Harry S Truman told the Congress that fall that America’s role in the world would depend directly on research coordinated by universities, industrial companies, and the government: “The events of the past few years are both proof and prophecy of what science can do.” In short order the government established an Atomic Energy Commission, an Office of Naval Research, and a National Science Foundation. Permanent national laboratories with no precedent in the prewar world arose at Los Alamos; at Oak Ridge; at Argonne, south of Chicago; at Berkeley; and at Brookhaven, Long Island, on a six-thousand-acre former army site. Money flowed copiously. Before the war the government had paid for only a sixth of all scientific research. By the war’s end the proportions had flipped: only a sixth was financed by all nongovernment sources combined. The government and the public gained a new sense of proprietorship over the whole scientific enterprise. As physicists began to speak out about world government and the international control of nuclear arms, so an army of clerics, foundation heads, and congressmen now made the mission and the morality of science a part of their lecture-circuit repertoire.

  On the whole, the popular press lionized Oppenheimer and his colleagues. To have worked on the bomb gave a scientist a stature matched only by the Nobel Prize. By comparison it was nothing to have created radar at the MIT Radiation Laboratory, though by a plausible calculus radar had done more to win the war. The word physicist itself finally came into vogue. Einstein was now understood to be a physicist, not a mathematician. Even nonnuclear physicists acquired prestige by association. Soon Wilson, Feynman’s recruiter, would look back wistfully to “the quiet times when physics was a pleasant, intellectual subject, not unlike the study of Medieval French in its popular interest.” The atomic scientists felt the guilt that flowed from the sudden deaths of at least one hundred thousand residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; meanwhile the scientists found themselves hailed as hero wizards, and this was a more complex role than many of them realized at first, containing as it did the seeds of darker relationships. In less than a decade Oppenheimer himself would lose his security clearance in the classic McCarthy-era auto-da-fé. The public would find that knowledge created by scientists was a commodity requiring special handling. It could be stamped CLASSIFIED or betrayed to foreign enemies. Knowledge was the grist of secrets and the currency of spies.

  Theoretical physicists, too, had learned something about their kind of knowledge. Oppenheimer reminded them of it, in his November 1945 talk at Los Alamos. The nature of the work in theoretical physics before the war had forced a certain recognition on them, he said—the recognition that human language has limits, that people choose concepts that correspond only faintly to things in the real world, like the shadows of ghosts. Before the bomb work began, quantum mechanics had already altered the relations between science and common sense. We make models of experience, and we know that our models fail to meet the reality.

  The University at Peace

  Their remarkable change in status buffeted every American institution that made a home for physicists. At Cornell, President Edmund Ezra Day was one of the first to feel the force of the transition, in the stark contrast between two budget meetings with his physicists, one during and one after the war.

  In the first, he sat down with his chief experimentalist, Robert F. Bacher, who was setting off on his leave of absence; ultimately Bacher led the bomb project’s experimental physics division. Bacher pleaded for a cyclotron like those at Berkeley and Princeton. He pressed Day to find a way of providing operating costs that he said might amount to as much as a professor’s salary, from four thousand to five thousand dollars a year.

  In the second, two months after Hiroshima, Day’s physicists told him that a far more powerful accelerator would be required, along with a new laboratory to house it. This time they asked for a capital expenditure of $3,000,000 and an operating budget that would begin at $250,000. They suggested, furthermore, that without this commitment they would have to look elsewhere for a more propitious environment for nuclear science. The trustees had no obvious source of funds, but after a heated meeting with Day they voted unanimously to proceed. Day declared: “The problem is not to control nuclear fo
rces but to control nuclear physicists. They are in tremendous demand, and at a frightful premium.” Bacher himself, after returning to Cornell briefly, left for Washington to serve as the first scientist on the newly formed Atomic Energy Commission. Three years later Cornell had a new accelerator, a synchrotron. The trustees’ leap of faith had been vindicated by generous funding from the Office of Naval Research. Three years after that, the synchrotron had passed into obsolescence and a new version was already under construction.

  Feynman’s first glimpse of the postwar university came in the dead of night before the start of classes in the fall of 1945. Ithaca was a village at the dimmest reaches of a New York City boy’s sense of his state’s geography, practically in Ohio. He made the journey by train, using the long hours to begin sketching out a basic graduate course he was supposed to teach in mathematical methods for physicists. He debarked with a single suitcase and a self-conscious sense of being, finally, a professor. He suppressed the urge to sling his bag over his shoulder as usual. Instead he let a porter guide him to the rear seat of a taxicab. He told the driver to take him to the biggest hotel in town.