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By Root 2404 0

found themselves hailed as hero wizards, and this was a more complex role than many of them realized at first, containing as it did the seeds of darker relationships. In less than a decade Oppenheimer himself would lose his security clearance in the classic McCarthy-era auto-da-fé. The public would find that knowledge created by scientists was a commodity requiring special handling. It could be stamped CLASSIFIED or betrayed to foreign enemies. Knowledge was the grist of secrets and the currency of spies.

Theoretical physicists, too, had learned something about their kind of knowledge. Oppenheimer reminded them of it, in his November 1945 talk at Los Alamos. The nature of the work in theoretical physics before the war had forced a certain recognition on them, he said—the recognition that human language has limits, that people choose concepts that correspond only faintly to things in the real world, like the shadows of ghosts. Before the bomb work began, quantum mechanics had already altered the relations between science and common sense. We make models of experience, and we know that our models fail to meet the reality.

The University at Peace

Their remarkable change in status buffeted every American institution that made a home for physicists. At Cornell, President Edmund Ezra Day was one of the first to feel the force of the transition, in the stark contrast between two budget meetings with his physicists, one during and one after the war.

In the first, he sat down with his chief experimentalist, Robert F. Bacher, who was setting off on his leave of absence; ultimately Bacher led the bomb project’s experimental physics division. Bacher pleaded for a cyclotron like those at Berkeley and Princeton. He pressed Day to find a way of providing operating costs that he said might amount to as much as a professor’s salary, from four thousand to five thousand dollars a year.

In the second, two months after Hiroshima, Day’s physicists told him that a far more powerful accelerator would be required, along with a new laboratory to house it. This time they asked for a capital expenditure of $3,000,000 and an operating budget that would begin at $250,000. They suggested, furthermore, that without this commitment they would have to look elsewhere for a more propitious environment for nuclear science. The trustees had no obvious source of funds, but after a heated meeting with Day they voted unanimously to proceed. Day declared: “The problem is not to control nuclear forces but to control nuclear physicists. They are in tremendous demand, and at a frightful premium.” Bacher himself, after returning to Cornell briefly, left for Washington to serve as the first scientist on the newly formed Atomic Energy Commission. Three years later Cornell had a new accelerator, a synchrotron. The trustees’ leap of faith had been vindicated by generous funding from the Office of Naval Research. Three years after that, the synchrotron had passed into obsolescence and a new version was already under construction.

Feynman’s first glimpse of the postwar university came in the dead of night before the start of classes in the fall of 1945. Ithaca was a village at the dimmest reaches of a New York City boy’s sense of his state’s geography, practically in Ohio. He made the journey by train, using the long hours to begin sketching out a basic graduate course he was supposed to teach in mathematical methods for physicists. He debarked with a single suitcase and a self-conscious sense of being, finally, a professor. He suppressed the urge to sling his bag over his shoulder as usual. Instead he let a porter guide him to the rear seat of a taxicab. He told the driver to take him to the biggest hotel in town.

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