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came out just as he had thought, converging to a finite answer. Meanwhile, glowing news of Schwinger’s progress was reaching Ithaca from Cambridge via Weisskopf and Bethe. When Feynman heard late in the fall that Schwinger had worked out a calculation for the magnetic moment of the electron—another tiny experimental anomaly newly found in Rabi’s laboratory—he solved the problem, too. Schwinger’s elaborate piece of calculating gave leading physicists a conviction that theory was once again on the march. “God is great!” Rabi wrote Bethe with characteristic wryness, and Bethe replied: “It is certainly wonderful how these experiments of yours have given a completely new slant to a theory and how the theory has blossomed out in a relatively short time. It is as exciting as in the early days of quantum mechanics.”

Feynman felt increasingly competitive about Schwinger, and increasingly frustrated. He had his quantum electrodynamics, he believed, and what he now thought of as “the Schwinger-Weisskopf-Bethe camp” had another. In January the American Physical Society met in New York, and Schwinger was the star. His program was not complete, but he had integrated the new idea of renormalization into the standard quantum mechanics in a way that let him demonstrate a series of impressive derivations. He showed how the anomalous magnetic moment, like the Lamb shift, came from the electron’s interaction with its own field. His lecture drew a crowd that packed the hall. Too many physicists were forced to stand out in the corridors to hear the bursts of applause (and the embarrassed laughter that came when Schwinger finally said, “It is quite clear that …”). Hasty arrangements were made for Schwinger to repeat the lecture later the same day in Columbia’s McMillin Theater. Dyson attended. Oppenheimer smoked his pipe conspicuously in the front row. Feynman rose during the question period to say that he, too, had reached these results and that, in fact, he could offer a small correction. Immediately he regretted it. He thought he must have sounded like a little boy piping up with “I did it too, Daddy.” Few people that winter realized the depths of the rivalry he felt, but he made a bitter remark to a girlfriend, who understood the drift of his disappointment if not the exact circumstances.

“I’m so sorry that your long worked-on experiment was more or less stolen by someone else,” she wrote back. “I know it just makes you feel sick. But Dick dear, how could life or things be interesting if there was not competition?” She wondered, why couldn’t he and his competitor combine their ideas and work together?

Schwinger and Feynman were not alone in trying to produce the calculations—the explanation—required by the immediate experiments on the Lamb shift and the electron’s magnetic moment. Other theorists followed the lead provided by Bethe’s back-of-the-envelope approach. They saw no need to create a monumental new quantum electrodynamics, when they might generate the right numbers merely by patching the technique of renormalization onto the existing physics. Independently, two pairs of scientists succeeded in this, producing solutions that went beyond Bethe’s in that they took into account the way masses fattened at relativistic speeds. Before publishing, one team, Weisskopf and a graduate student, Bruce French, committed a fatal act of indecision by consulting both Schwinger and Feynman. Engrossed in their more ambitious programs, Schwinger and Feynman each warned Weisskopf off, saying that he was in error by a small factor. Weisskopf decided it was inconceivable that these brilliant upstarts could both be wrong, independently, and delayed his manuscript. Months passed before Feynman called apologetically to say that Weisskopf’s answer had been correct.

For Feynman’s own developing theory, a breakthrough came when he confronted the ticklish area of antimatter. The first antiparticle, the negative electron, or positron, had been born less than two decades earlier as a minus sign in Dirac’s equations—a consequence of a symmetry between positive