Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [131]
Instead he proposed a form of jet propulsion, using air as the propellant. Jet technology had just now reached practicality in airplanes. Feynman’s spacecraft would use the outer edges of the earth’s atmosphere as a sort of warm-up track and accelerate as it circled the earth. An atomic reactor would power the jet by heating the air that was sucked into the engine. Wings would be used first to provide lift and then, when the speed rose beyond five miles per second, “flying upside down to keep you from going off the earth, or rather out of the atmosphere.” When the craft reached a useful escape velocity, it would fly off at a tangent toward its destination like a rock from a slingshot.
Yes, air resistance, heating the ship, would be a problem. But Feynman thought this could be overcome by delicately adjusting the altitude as the craft sped up—“if there is enough air to cause appreciable heating by friction there surely is enough to feed the jet engines.” The engines would need impressive engineering to operate in such a wide range of air densities, he admitted. He did not address a problem of symmetry: how such a spacecraft would slow down on reaching an airless destination such as the moon. In any event he could not have anticipated the killing flaw in his idea: that people would lose faith in the innocence of nuclear reactors flying about overhead.
They All Seem Ashes
He visited Far Rockaway just before the fall semester began in 1946 and gave another talk on the atomic bomb at the local Temple Israel the day after Yom Kippur. The synagogue had a glamorous new rabbi, Judah Cahn, who delivered widely admired sermons on modern problems. Feynman’s parents, despite their atheism, had started attending from time to time. Melville’s health seemed slightly better. His uncontrollable high blood pressure had become a constant source of worry to the family, and in the preceding spring he had traveled out to the Mayo Clinic, in Minnesota, where he was enrolled in an early experiment on the effect of diet. He accepted a strict regimen of rice and fruit. It seemed to work. His blood pressure decreased. He returned home and occasionally sneaked out, in violation of doctors’ orders, to play golf with friends. He was fifty-six years old. One day Feynman saw him at the table, staring at a salt shaker. Melville closed one eye, opened it, closed the other eye, and said he had a blind spot. A small blood vessel must have burst in his brain, he said.
The knowledge that sudden death might come at any time hung over the family. Melville and his son almost never wrote each other—Lucille handled the intrafamily correspondence—but when Richard first accepted the Cornell professorship he sent his father a letter expressing twenty-five years of love and gratitude, and Melville, moved, responded in kind. His chest was swelled with pride, he wrote (while Lucille complained that he was wasting paper by writing on only one side):
It is not so easy for a Dope of a father to write to a son who has already arrived to a state of learning and wisdom beyond his… . That was all right when you were small and I had a great advantage over you—but today it would be more equitable if I could bask in the sunlight of your knowledge, and sit by your side and learn from you some of the more wondrous secrets of nature that now are beyond my ken but are known to you.
On October 7 he collapsed from a