Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [10]
No wonder so many future physicists started as radio tinkerers, and no wonder, before physicist became a commonplace word, so many of them grew up thinking they might become electrical engineers, professionals known to earn a good wage. Richard, called Ritty by his friends, seemed to be heading single-mindedly in that direction. He accumulated tube sets and an old storage battery from around the neighborhood. He assembled transformers, switches, and coils. A coil salvaged from a Ford automobile made showy sparks that burned brown-black holes in newspaper. When he found a leftover rheostat, he pushed 110-volt electricity through it until it overloaded and burned. He held the stinking, smoking thing outside his second-floor window, as the ashes drifted down to the grassy rear yard. This was standard emergency procedure. When a pungent odor drifted in downstairs during his mother’s bridge game, it meant that Ritty was dangling his metal wastebasket out the window, waiting for the flames to die out after an abortive experiment with shoe polish—he meant to melt it and use the liquid as black paint for his “lab,” a wooden crate roughly the size of a refrigerator, standing in his bedroom upstairs in the rear of the house. Screwed into the crate were various electrical switches and lights that Ritty had wired, in series and in parallel. His sister, Joan, nine years younger, served eagerly as a four-cents-a-week lab assistant. Her duties included putting a finger into a spark gap and enduring a mild shock for the entertainment of Ritty’s friends.
It had already occurred to psychologists that children are innate scientists, probing, puttering, experimenting with the possible and impossible in a confused local universe. Children and scientists share an outlook on life. If I do this, what will happen? is both the motto of the child at play and the defining refrain of the physical scientist. Every child is observer, analyst, and taxonomist, building a mental life through a sequence of intellectual revolutions, constructing theories and promptly shedding them when they no longer fit. The unfamiliar and the strange—these are the domain of all children and scientists.
None of which could fully account for the presence of laboratory, rheostat, and lab assistant—tokens of a certain vivid cultural stereotype. Richard Feynman was relentless in filling his bedroom with the trappings and systems of organized science.
Neither Country nor City
Charmed lives were led by the children of Far Rockaway, a village that amounted to a few hundred acres of frame houses and brick apartment blocks on a spit of beach floating off Long Island’s south shore. The neighborhood had been agglomerated into the political entity of New York City as one of the more than sixty towns and neighborhoods that merged as the borough of Queens in 1898. The city was investing generously in these neighborhoods, spending tens of millions of dollars on the laying of water mains, sewers, and roadways and the construction of grand public buildings. Still, in the first part of the twentieth century, before the IND subway line reached out across the marshes of Jamaica Bay, the city seemed a faraway place. Commuters took the Long Island Rail Road. Beyond Far Rockaway’s eastern border lay the small towns of Nassau County, Long Island. To the northwest, across marshy tongues of ocean called Mott Basin and Hassock Channel, lay a flat expanse that later became Idlewild Airport and then Kennedy International Airport. On foot or on their bicycles, Far Rockaway’s children had free run of a self-contained world: ivy-covered houses, fields, and vacant lots. No one has