Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [0]
The Life and Science of Richard Feynman
James Gleick
For my mother and father,
Beth and Donen
I was born not knowing
and have only had a little time to change that here and there.
—Richard Feynman
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
FAR ROCKAWAY
•Neither Country nor City •A Birth and a Death •It’s Worth It •At School •All Things Are Made of Atoms •A Century of Progress •Richard and Julian
MIT
• The Best Path • Socializing the Engineer • The Newest Physics • Shop Men • Feynman of Course Is Jewish • Forces in Molecules • Is He Good Enough?
PRINCETON
• A Quaint Ceremonious Village • Folds and Rhythms • Forward or Backward? • The Reasonable Man • Mr. X and the Nature of Time • Least Action in Quantum Mechanics • The Aura • The White Plague • Preparing for War • The Manhattan Project • Finishing Up
LOS ALAMOS
• The Man Comes In with His Briefcase • Chain Reactions • The Battleship and the Mosquito Boat • Diffusion • Computing by Brain • Computing by Machine • Fenced In • The Last Springtime • False Hopes • Nuclear Fear • I Will Bide My Time • We Scientists Are Clever
CORNELL
• The University at Peace • Phenomena Complex—Laws Simple • They All Seem Ashes • Around a Mental Block • Shrinking the Infinities • Dyson • A Half-Assedly Thought-Out Pictorial Semi-Vision Thing • Schwinger’s Glory • My Machines Came from Too Far Away • There Was Also Presented (by Feynman) … • Cross-Country with Freeman Dyson • Oppenheimer’s Surrender • Dyson Graphs, Feynman Diagrams • Away to a Fabulous Land
CALTECH
• Faker from Copacabana • Alas, the Love of Women! • Onward with Physics • A Quantum Liquid • New Particles, New Language • Murray • In Search of Genius • Weak Interactions • Toward a Domestic Life • From QED to Genetics • Ghosts and Worms • Room at the Bottom • All His Knowledge • The Explorers and the Tourists • The Swedish Prize • Quarks and Partons • Teaching the Young • Do You Think You Can Last On Forever? • Surely You’re Joking! • A Disaster of Technology
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
A FEYNMAN BIBLIOGRAPHY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
PROLOGUE
Nothing is certain. This hopeful message went to an Albuquerque sanatorium from the secret world at Los Alamos. We lead a charmed life.
Afterward demons afflicted the bomb makers. J. Robert Oppenheimer made speeches about his shadowed soul, and other physicists began to feel his uneasiness at having handed humanity the power of self-destruction. Richard Feynman, younger and not so responsible, suffered a more private grief. He felt he possessed knowledge that set him alone and apart. It gnawed at him that ordinary people were living their ordinary lives oblivious to the nuclear doom that science had prepared for them. Why build roads and bridges meant to last a century? If only they knew what he knew, they surely would not bother. The war was over, a new era of science was beginning, and he was not at ease. For a while he could hardly work—by day a boyish and excitable professor at Cornell University, by night wild in love, veering from freshman mixers (where women sidled away from this rubber-legged dancer claiming to be a scientist who had made the atomic bomb) to bars and brothels. Meanwhile new colleagues, young physicists and mathematicians of his own age, were seeing him for the first time and forming their quick impressions. “Half genius and half buffoon,” Freeman Dyson, himself a rising prodigy, wrote his parents back in England. Feynman struck him as uproariously American—unbuttoned and burning with physical energy. It took him a while to realize how obsessively his new friend was tunneling into the very bedrock of modern science.
In the spring of 1948, still in the shadow of the bomb they had made, twenty-seven physicists assembled at a resort hotel in the Pocono Mountains of northern Pennsylvania to confront a crisis in their understanding of the atom. With Oppenheimer’s help (he was now more than ever their spiritual leader) they had scraped together the thousand-odd dollars needed to cover their rooms and train fare,