Genius

by James Gleick

  In Ithaca, as in towns and cities across America that fall, the hotels and short-term apartments were booked. Housing was scarce. With demobilization college enrollments were exploding. Boom was in the air. Even sleepy Ithaca seemed like a Western town amid the gold rush. Cornell was building houses and barracks at emergency speed. The week before Feynman arrived, five new barracks burned down. He tried a second hotel. Then he realized he could not afford to wander by taxicab, so he checked his suitcase and began to walk, past darkened houses and dormitories. He realized he must have found Cornell. Huge raked piles of leaves dotted the campus, and they started to look like beds—if only he could find one out of the glare of the streetlights. Finally he spotted an open building with couches in the lobby and asked the janitor if he could spend the night on one. He explained awkwardly that he was a new professor.

  The next morning he washed as well as he could in the public bathroom, checked in at the physics department, and made his way to a campus housing office in Willard Straight Hall, near the center of the sloping campus. There a clerk told him haughtily that the housing situation was so bad that last night a professor had had to sleep in the lobby. “Look, buddy,” Feynman snapped back, “I’m that professor. Now do something for me.” He was unpleasantly startled to realize that in a town Ithaca’s size he could set off a rumor and circle back into its wake within a matter of hours. He also began to realize that he was going to have to readjust his internal clock. The war had left him with a sense of urgency about appointments and deadlines. Even as ten thousand undergraduates arrived, Cornell seemed slack. He was surprised to discover that the administration had scheduled a full week with nothing for him to do but explore the campus and prepare for classes. Speech patterns struck him as slow, with none of the beep-beep-beep nervousness he had got used to. People took time to talk about the weather.

  His first months were lonely. None of his close colleagues had been in such a hurry to begin postwar life. Even Bethe did not leave Los Alamos for Cornell until December. The school year began late and stayed unsettled. Space ran short. Workers subdivided rooms in Rockefeller Hall. Closets became offices. Outside, three tennis courts gave way to hasty wooden barracks. Feynman soon shared his dingy Rockefeller office with a colleague from Los Alamos, Philip Morrison, who had carried the atomic bomb’s plutonium core to Alamogordo in the back seat of an army sedan. Morrison had been lured by the sweet, serious Bethe, so full of integrity—and also by Feynman, though it now seemed, surprisingly, that Feynman was depressed and lonely. Bethe sensed this, too, but few others noticed. Later Bethe noted dryly, “Feynman depressed is just a little more cheerful than any other person when he is exuberant.”

  He spent time in the library reading the mildly bawdy Arabian Nights and staring hopefully at women. Unlike most of the Ivy League universities, Cornell had accepted women as undergraduates since its founding, after the Civil War, though they automatically matriculated in the College of Home Economics. He went to freshman dances and ate in the student cafeteria. He looked younger than his twenty-seven years, and he did not stand out amid all the returning servicemen. His dance partners looked askance at what sounded like a line—that he was a physicist just back from building the atomic bomb. He missed Arline. Even before leaving Los Alamos he had begun dating other women—especially beautiful women, in what some of his friends saw as a frenetic, razor-edge denial of grief.

  A gulf had opened between Feynman and his mother. Lucille, after so adamantly opposing Richard’s marriage, had written painfully on Arline’s death:

  … now I want you to know that I’m proud and glad you married her & did what you could to make her short life happy. She worshipped you. Forgive me for not seeing things your way. I was frightened for you—for what you would have to bear. But you bore it so well. Now try to face life without her …

  Begging him to come home, she promised him piles of rice and sugar buns and gave her word that no one would tell him to comb his hair. He did come, briefly, for a few days in July. Then, in August, the news of the atomic bomb broke over the household like a lightning storm. Friends and relatives called almost continuously. Lucille tried in vain to get through to Santa Fe by telephone. One cousin called from a wire-service office to read a comment of Oppenheimer’s that had just come across the ticker. After 11 P.M. the phone rang and a voice said, “This is the Princeton Triangle. Is it true that your son R. P. Feynman had more gravy stains on his gown that any other man at the Graduate College in 1940?” It was another cousin.

  “I have a sense of humor, too,” Lucille wrote to Richard, “but I don’t think this is a funny occasion.”

  I felt thrilled & frightened at your part in this tremendous thing. No one can be really joyous. It is with horror that I listen to the death & destruction the bomb has caused… . I pray that this horrible destruction of man by man may be the climax of all such destruction… . No wonder I thought you were nervous. Who wouldn’t be, playing around in such a dangerous place.

  The combination of pride and terror—the scientists, too, were feeling it that night—stirred a remarkable memory. “It reminded me of the time I was playing bridge in the living room & my child prodigy had a little fire in a trash basket he was holding outside the window.

  “By the way,” she added, “I don’t think you ever told me how you put it out.”

  Feynman did not stop at home on his way to Ithaca from New Mexico that fall. At some point Lucille began to realize how much damage had been done by her opposition to the marriage. Late one night, unable to sleep, she got out of bed and penned an anguished letter—a love letter from mother to son—beginning, “Richard, What has happened between you and your family? What has driven us apart? My heart yearns for you… . My heart is full to bursting & hot tears burn my eyes as I write.”

  She wrote about his childhood: how much he had been wanted and treasured; how she had read him beautiful stories; how Melville had made patterns for him from colored tiles; how they had tried to invest him with a sense of morality and duty. She reminded him of the pride they had felt in all his achievements, from high school through graduate school.

  More times than I can enumerate here my heart has leaped for joy because of you… . And now—now—strange harvest that I reap. We are as far apart as the poles.

  Without mentioning Arline, she said she felt a sense of shame. “The fault must be mine. Some where along the way I lost you.” Other mothers, she said, had sons who loved them. Why not her? She closed with as impassioned a plea as any spurned lover could make.

  I need you. I want you. I will never give you up. Not even death can break the bond between us… . Think of me sometimes & let me know that you are thinking of me. My darling, oh my darling, what more can I say to you. I adore you & always will.

  He did go home for Christmas in 1945. Gradually the wound began to heal. In the meantime Feynman made some indirect efforts to find his way back into the unfinished theory that had occupied him at Princeton, but they did not lead to anything usable. The culmination of the driven, purposeful work of the past three years had left a void that he could not easily fill. He found it hard to concentrate on research. As spring came he would sit on the grass outdoors and worry about whether he had slipped past his best working years without achieving anything. He had built a reputation among senior physicists, but now, back in a world returning to normal, he realized that he had not done the normal work to go with the reputation. Since his two published papers in college—his squib on cosmic rays with Vallarta and his undergraduate thesis—his only journal publications had been accounts of the work with Wheeler on the absorber theory, already looking short-lived.

  Phenomena Complex—Laws Simple

  If Feynman was struggling to find his footing, Julian Schwinger was not. Since growing up at opposite ends of New York City, in neighborhoods that might as well have been a thousand miles apart, they had become competitors without either quite acknowledging it. Their routes into physics had remained utterly
separate, as had their styles. Schwinger, with heavy owlish eyes and a mild stoop even in his twenties, took as great pains to achieve elegance as Feynman did to remain rough-hewn. He dressed carefully and expensively and drove a Cadillac. He worked nocturnally, usually sleeping until late afternoon.His lectures had already become famous for their seamlessness and uninterruptibility. He prided himself on speaking without notes. A young Englishman who heard him (and who considered Feynman’s ebullience slightly tiring, by contrast) thought Schwinger became “a man possessed”—“It seems to be the spirit of Macaulay which takes over, for he speaks in splendid periods, the carefully architected sentences rolling on, with every subordinate clause duly closing.” He liked to make his listeners think. He would never announce directly that he had married and taken a honeymoon, when he could say, “I abandoned my bachelor quarters and embarked on an accompanied, nostalgic trip around the country… .” His equations had something of the same style.

  His patron had been I. I. Rabi, who never tired of describing their first encounter: Schwinger, a seventeen-year-old waiting quietly in his office, had finally piped up to settle an argument over a controversial foray into quantum-mechanical paradox just published by Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen. With the arrogance of a shy young man determined to plow his own course, Schwinger was already in administrative difficulties at City College because he rarely attended classes. Rabi helped him transfer to Columbia and then took devilish pleasure in encouraging his irate instructors to carry out their threats to flunk him. “Are you a mouse or a man? Give him an F,” he told one dull chemistry professor; he judged correctly that the grade would come to haunt the professor more than it would the student. Even before Schwinger got his college diploma at the age of nineteen, Rabi was having him fill in as the lecturer in his quantum-mechanics course. Also before graduating, he completed the research that served as his doctoral dissertation. Fermi, Teller, and Bethe each knew him, knew his work, or had collaborated with him. Meanwhile Feynman, barely three months younger, was completing his sophomore year at MIT. Schwinger published a fecund series of research papers, mostly in the Physical Review, each highly polished, with a dozen different collaborators. By the time Feynman published his undergraduate thesis, Schwinger was in Berkeley as a National Research Council fellow, working directly with Oppenheimer.

  With Rabi, he chose to avoid Los Alamos in favor of radar and the Radiation Laboratory. He never seemed to lose a stride. By the war’s end Rabi had him replace Pauli as a special lecturer in charge of bringing the laboratory’s scientists up to date with nonwar physics. For the atomic bomb scientists, isolated as they were behind their desert fence, the war brought a more total interruption of normal careers. Physicists Feynman’s age were especially aware of it. They had just reached what should have been their crucial, productive years. Schwinger made one tour through Los Alamos in 1945 and met Feynman briefly for the first time. Feynman marveled at how much this contemporary had managed to publish. He had thought Schwinger was older. When he had long since forgotten the content of Schwinger’s lecture to the Los Alamos theorists, he still remembered the style: the way Schwinger walked into the room, his head tilted, like a bull into the ring; the way he conspicuously set his notebook aside; the intimidating perfection of his discourse.

  Now Schwinger was at Harvard, where he was shortly to become a twenty-nine-year-old full professor. The Harvard committee had seriously considered only Bethe for the same opening and worried meanwhile whether Schwinger would be able to wake up to teach classes that met as early as noon. He managed, and his lectures on nuclear physics quickly became a draw for the entire Harvard and MIT physics community.

  Feynman, meanwhile, poured energy into his more mundane course in the methods of mathematical physics. This was a standard course, taught in every physics department, though it occurred to Feynman that he had just lived through a momentous change in physicists’ mathematical methods. At Los Alamos mathematical methods had been put through a crucible: refined, clarified, rewritten, reinvented. Feynman thought he knew what was useful and what was mere textbook knowledge taught because it had always been taught. He intended to emphasize nonlinearity more than was customary and to teach students the patchwork of gimmicks and tricks that he used himself to solve equations. Beginning with his jottings on the night train that brought him to Ithaca, he designed a new course from the bottom up.

  On the first page of a cardboard notebook like the ones he had used in high school he began with first principles:

  Phenomena complex—laws simple— connection is math-phys—the solution of equ obtained from laws.

  He was thinking about how to mold students in his own image. How did he solve problems?

  Know what to leave out… . physical insight knowing what can be done by math.

  He decided to give the students a blunt summary of what did and did not lie ahead.

  Lots of tricks to introduce—no time for complete study or math rigor demonstration. Lots of work.

  He crossed that out.

  Really introduce each subject.

  But after all it would be lots of work.

  Lots of work—practice. Interested in more detail, read books, see me, practice more examples. If no go—OK we slow up. Hand in some problems so I can tell.

  He would promise them important mathematical methods left out of ordinary courses, as well as methods that were altogether new. It would be practical, not perfect, mathematics.

  Specify accuracy required. Let’s go

  He scanted some of the laborious traditional techniques, such as contour integration, because he had so often found—winning bets in the process—that he could handle most such integrals directly by frontal assault. Whether he would succeed in conveying such skills to his students was a question that worried some of his colleagues as they watched Feynman plow apart the mathematical-methods syllabus. Nevertheless, during the few years that he taught the course, it drew some of the younger members of the physics and mathematics faculty along with the captive graduate students. The coolest among them had to feel the jolt of an examination problem that began, “In an atom bomb in the form of a cylinder radius a, height 2π, the density of neutrons n …” The students found themselves in the grip of a theorist whose obsession with mathematical methods concerned the uneasy first principles of quantum mechanics. Again and again he showed his affinity with the purest core issues of the propagation of sound and light. He drove his students through calculations of the total intensity of radiation in all directions when emitted by a periodic source; through the reluctant visualization of vectors, matrices, and tensors; through the summations of infinite series that sometimes converged and sometimes failed to converge, running inconveniently off toward infinity.

  Gradually he settled in at Cornell, though he still made no progress on his theoretical research. The atomic bomb was on his mind, and he went on the local radio to speak about it in unadorned language. Announcer: Last week Dr. Feynman told you what one atom bomb did to Hiroshima, and what one bomb would do to Ithaca … The interviewer asked about atomic-powered automobiles. Many listeners, he said, were awaiting the day when they could slip a spoonful of uranium into the tank and thumb their noses at the filling stations. Feynman said he doubted the practicality of that—“the rays emitted by the fission of the uranium in the engine would kill the driver.” Still, he had spent time working out other applications of nuclear power. At Los Alamos he had invented a type of fast reactor for generating electric power and had patented it (in the government’s behalf). He was also thinking about space travel. “Dear Sir,” he wrote to a physicist colleague as 1945 came to a close, “I believe that interplanetary travel is now (with the release of atomic energy) a definite possibility.” He had a radically quirky, almost flaky, proposal. Rocket propulsion would not be the answer, he said. It was fundamentally limited by the temperature and atomic weight of the propulsive gas, the temperature in turn being limited by the ability of metal to withstand hea
t. He predicted—anticipating the ungainly disposable boosters and giant fuel tanks that became the curse of space travel thirty years in the future—that the weight and bulk of fuel would exceed by too many times the weight and bulk of the vehicle.

  Instead he proposed a form of jet propulsion, using air as the propellant. Jet technology had just now reached practicality in airplanes. Feynman’s spacecraft would use the outer edges of the earth’s atmosphere as a sort of warm-up track and accelerate as it circled the earth. An atomic reactor would power the jet by heating the air that was sucked into the engine. Wings would be used first to provide lift and then, when the speed rose beyond five miles per second, “flying upside down to keep you from going off the earth, or rather out of the atmosphere.” When the craft reached a useful escape velocity, it would fly off at a tangent toward its destination like a rock from a slingshot.

  Yes, air resistance, heating the ship, would be a problem. But Feynman thought this could be overcome by delicately adjusting the altitude as the craft sped up—“if there is enough air to cause appreciable heating by friction there surely is enough to feed the jet engines.” The engines would need impressive engineering to operate in such a wide range of air densities, he admitted. He did not address a problem of symmetry: how such a spacecraft would slow down on reaching an airless destination such as the moon. In any event he could not have anticipated the killing flaw in his idea: that people would lose faith in the innocence of nuclear reactors flying about overhead.

  They All Seem Ashes

  He visited Far Rockaway just before the fall semester began in 1946 and gave another talk on the atomic bomb at the local Temple Israel the day after Yom Kippur. The synagogue had a glamorous new rabbi, Judah Cahn, who delivered widely admired sermons on modern problems. Feynman’s parents, despite their atheism, had started attending from time to time. Melville’s health seemed slightly better. His uncontrollable high blood pressure had become a constant source of worry to the family, and in the preceding spring he had traveled out to the Mayo Clinic, in Minnesota, where he was enrolled in an early experiment on the effect of diet. He accepted a strict regimen of rice and fruit. It seemed to work. His blood pressure decreased. He returned home and occasionally sneaked out, in violation of doctors’ orders, to play golf with friends. He was fifty-six years old. One day Feynman saw him at the table, staring at a salt shaker. Melville closed one eye, opened it, closed the other eye, and said he had a blind spot. A small blood vessel must have burst in his brain, he said.