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By Root 2414 0

utterly separate, as had their styles. Schwinger, with heavy owlish eyes and a mild stoop even in his twenties, took as great pains to achieve elegance as Feynman did to remain rough-hewn. He dressed carefully and expensively and drove a Cadillac. He worked nocturnally, usually sleeping until late afternoon.His lectures had already become famous for their seamlessness and uninterruptibility. He prided himself on speaking without notes. A young Englishman who heard him (and who considered Feynman’s ebullience slightly tiring, by contrast) thought Schwinger became “a man possessed”—“It seems to be the spirit of Macaulay which takes over, for he speaks in splendid periods, the carefully architected sentences rolling on, with every subordinate clause duly closing.” He liked to make his listeners think. He would never announce directly that he had married and taken a honeymoon, when he could say, “I abandoned my bachelor quarters and embarked on an accompanied, nostalgic trip around the country… .” His equations had something of the same style.

His patron had been I. I. Rabi, who never tired of describing their first encounter: Schwinger, a seventeen-year-old waiting quietly in his office, had finally piped up to settle an argument over a controversial foray into quantum-mechanical paradox just published by Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen. With the arrogance of a shy young man determined to plow his own course, Schwinger was already in administrative difficulties at City College because he rarely attended classes. Rabi helped him transfer to Columbia and then took devilish pleasure in encouraging his irate instructors to carry out their threats to flunk him. “Are you a mouse or a man? Give him an F,” he told one dull chemistry professor; he judged correctly that the grade would come to haunt the professor more than it would the student. Even before Schwinger got his college diploma at the age of nineteen, Rabi was having him fill in as the lecturer in his quantum-mechanics course. Also before graduating, he completed the research that served as his doctoral dissertation. Fermi, Teller, and Bethe each knew him, knew his work, or had collaborated with him. Meanwhile Feynman, barely three months younger, was completing his sophomore year at MIT. Schwinger published a fecund series of research papers, mostly in the Physical Review, each highly polished, with a dozen different collaborators. By the time Feynman published his undergraduate thesis, Schwinger was in Berkeley as a National Research Council fellow, working directly with Oppenheimer.

With Rabi, he chose to avoid Los Alamos in favor of radar and the Radiation Laboratory. He never seemed to lose a stride. By the war’s end Rabi had him replace Pauli as a special lecturer in charge of bringing the laboratory’s scientists up to date with nonwar physics. For the atomic bomb scientists, isolated as they were behind their desert fence, the war brought a more total interruption of normal careers. Physicists Feynman’s age were especially aware of it. They had just reached what should have been their crucial, productive years. Schwinger made one tour through Los Alamos in 1945 and met Feynman briefly for the first time. Feynman marveled at how much this contemporary had managed to publish. He had thought Schwinger was older. When he had long since forgotten the content of Schwinger’s lecture to the Los Alamos theorists, he still remembered the style: the way Schwinger walked into the room, his head tilted, like a bull into the ring; the way he conspicuously set his notebook aside; the intimidating perfection of his discourse.

Now Schwinger was at Harvard, where he was shortly to become a twenty-nine-year-old full professor. The Harvard committee had seriously considered only Bethe for the same opening and worried meanwhile whether Schwinger would be able to wake up to teach classes that met as early as noon. He managed, and his lectures on nuclear physics quickly became a draw for the entire Harvard and MIT physics community.

Feynman, meanwhile, poured energy into his