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By Root 2309 0

In a few places he found that the procedures were too conservative. He noted minute details of the operations. “Is CT-1 empty when we drop from WK-1… ? Is P-2 empty when solt’n is transfered … ? Supervisor OK’s solution of P-2’s ppt. Under what circumstances?” Eventually, meeting with senior army officers and company managers, he laid out a detailed program for ensuring safety. He also invented a practical method—using, once again, a variational method to solve an otherwise unsolvable integral equation—that would let engineers make a conservative approximation, on the spot, of the safe levels of bomb material stored in various geometrical layouts. A few people, long afterward, thought he had saved their lives.

Wielding the authority of Los Alamos was an instructive experience. Feynman’s first visit to Oak Ridge was his first ride on an airplane, and the thrill was heightened by his special-priority military status on the flight, with a satchel of secret documents actually strapped to his back under his shirt. Oppenheimer had briefed his young protégé with care. Feynman decided that the plant could not be operated safely by people kept ignorant of the nature of their work, and he insisted that the army allow briefings on basic nuclear physics. Oppenheimer had armed him with a means of handling difficult negotiations:

“You should say: Los Alamos cannot accept the responsibility for the safety of the Oak Ridge plant unless——”

“… You mean me, little Richard, is going to go in there and say——”

“… Yes, little Richard, you go in there and do that.”

John von Neumann may have advised him during their thin-air walks that there could be honor in irresponsibility, but amid the barrels and carboys of the world’s first nuclear hoards, responsibility caught up with him. Lives depended on his methods and judgments. What if his estimates were not conservative enough? The plant designers had taken his calculations as fact. He hovered outside himself, a young man watching, unsure and giddy, while someone carried off an impersonation of an older, more powerful man. As he said, recalling the feeling many years later, he had to grow up fast.

The possibility of death at Oak Ridge tormented him more urgently than the mass slaughter to come. Sometime that spring it struck him that the seedy El Fidel hotel, where he had nonchalantly roomed on his trips to Albuquerque, was a firetrap. He could not stay there any more.

I Will Bide My Time

Hitchhiking back one Sunday night, nearing the unpaved turnoff to Los Alamos, he saw the lights of a carnival shining from a few miles north in Espanola. Years had passed since he and Arline last went to a carnival, and he could not resist. He rode a rickety Ferris wheel and spun about in a machine that whirled metal chairs hanging on chains. He decided not to play the hoop-toss game, with unappealing Christ figures as prizes. He saw some children staring at an airplane device and bought them a ride. It all made him think sadly about Arline. Later he got a lift home with three women. “But they were kind of ugly,” he wrote Arline, “so I remained faithful without even having the fun of exerting will power to do it.”

A week later he rebuked her for some act of weakness and then, miserable, wrote the last letter she would read.

My Wife:

I am always too slow… . I understand at last how sick you are. I understand that this is not the time to ask you to make any effort to be less of a bother to others… . It is a time to comfort you as you wish to be comforted, not as I think you should wish to be comforted. It is a time to love you in any way that you wish. Whether it be by not seeing you or by holding your hand or whatever.

This time will pass—you will get better. You don’t believe it, but I do. So I will bide my time & yell at you later and now I am your lover devoted to serving you in your hardest moments… .

I am sorry to have failed you, not to have provided the pillar you need to lean upon. Now, I am a man upon whom you can rely, have trust, faith, that I will not make you unhappy any longer