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By Root 2320 0

the foam, the sloshing motion of the water, the sound, the air, the winds and the clouds, the sun and the blue sky, and light; there is sand and there are rocks of various hardness and permanence, color and texture. There are animals and seaweed, hunger and disease, and the observer on the beach; there may even be happiness and thought.” Nature was elemental there, though for Feynman elemental did not mean simple or austere. The questions he considered within the physicist’s purview—the fundamental questions—arose on the beach. “Is the sand other than the rocks? That is, is the sand perhaps nothing but a great number of very tiny stones? Is the moon a great rock? If we understood rocks, would we also understand the sand and the moon? Is the wind a sloshing of the air analogous to the sloshing motion of the water in the sea?”

The great European migration to America was ending. For the Jews of Russia, Eastern Europe, and Germany, for the Irish and the Italians, the first-hand and first-generation memories would now recede. The outer neighborhoods of New York flourished in the generations before World War II and then began to wane. In Far Rockaway not much changed visibly in the sixty-nine years of Feynman’s lifetime. When Feynman returned on a visit with his children a few years before his death, everything seemed shrunken and forlorn, the fields and vacant lots were gone, but it was the same beach with its boardwalk, the same high school, the same house he had wired for radio broadcasts—the house now divided, to accommodate a tenant, and not nearly so spacious as in memory. He did not ring the bell. The village’s main street, Central Avenue, seemed shabby and narrow. The population had become largely Orthodox Jewish, and Feynman was vaguely disturbed to see so many yarmulkes, or, as he actually said, “those little hats that they wear”—meaning: I don’t care what things are called. And casually repudiating the culture that hung as thick in the air of his childhood as the smoke of the city or the salt of the ocean.

The Judaism of Far Rockaway took in a liberal range of styles of belief, almost broad enough to encompass atheists like Richard’s father, Melville. It was a mostly Reform Judaism, letting go the absolutist and fundamental traditions for the sake of a gentle, ethical humanism, well suited for fresh Americans pinning their hopes on children who might make their way into the mainstream of the New World. Some households barely honored the Sabbath. In some, like Feynman’s, Yiddish would have been a foreign language. The Feynmans belonged to the neighborhood temple. Richard went to Sunday school for a while and belonged to a Shaaray Tefila youth group that organized after-school activities. Religion remained part of the village’s ethical core. Families like the Feynmans, in neighborhoods all around greater New York City, produced in the first half of the twentieth century an outpouring of men and women who became successful in many fields, but especially science. These hundred-odd square miles of the planet’s surface were disproportionately fertile in the spawning of Nobel laureates. Many families, as Jews, were embedded in a culture that prized learning and discourse; immigrants and the children of immigrants worked to fulfill themselves through their own children, who had to be sharply conscious of their parents’ hopes and sacrifices. They shared a sense that science, as a profession, rewarded merit. In fact, the best colleges and universities continued to raise barriers against Jewish applicants, and their science faculties remained determinedly Protestant, until after World War II. Science nevertheless offered the appearance of a level landscape, where the rules seemed mathematical and clear, free from the hidden variables of taste and class.

As a town Far">22"/> to America was ending. For the Jews of Russia, Eastern Europe, and Germany, for the Irish and the Italians, the first-hand and first-generation memories would now recede. The outer neighborhoods of New York flourished in the generations before World War