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cordially compared techniques and found themselves in nearly perfect agreement). He could see that Feynman was offering a patchwork of guesses and intuition. It struck him as engineering, all I-beams and T-beams. Bethe interrupted once, sensing that the audience was numbed with detail, and tried to return Feynman to fundamentals. Feynman explained his path integrals, an alien idea, and his positrons moving backward in time, even more disturbing. Teller caught the apparent infringement of the exclusion principle and refused to accept Feynman’s unrigorous justification. It struck Feynman that everyone had a favorite principle or theorem and he was violating them all. When Dirac asked, “Is it unitary?” Feynman did not even know what he meant. Dirac explained: the matrix that carries one from the past to the future had to maintain an exact bookkeeping of total probability. But Feynman had no such matrix. The essence of his approach was a view of past and future together, with the freedom to go forward or backward in time at will. He was getting almost nothing across. Finally, as he sketched diagrams on the blackboard—schematic trajectories of particles—and tried to show his method of summing the amplitudes for different paths, Bohr rose to object. Had Feynman ignored the central lesson of two decades of quantum mechanics? It was obvious, Bohr said, that such trajectories violated the uncertainty principle. He stepped to the blackboard, gestured Feynman aside, and began to explain. Wheeler, taking notes, quickly jotted, “Bohr Has Raised The Question As To Whether This Point Of View Has Not The Same Physical Content As The Theory Of Dirac, But Differs In A Manner Of Speaking Of Things Which Are Not Well-Defined Physically.” Bohr continued for long minutes. That was when Feynman knew he had failed. At the time, he was in anguish. Later he said simply: “I had too much stuff. My machines came from too far away.”

There Was Also Presented (by Feynman) …

Wheeler had arranged as rapid a news service as the available technology permitted. On his first day back in Princeton he pressed his graduate students into service as scribes. They reproduced his notes page by page onto mimeograph blanks and printed dozens of copies, turning their forearms magenta. For months this samizdat document served as the only available introduction to the new Schwingerian covariant quantum electrodynamics. Only a few pages were devoted to Feynman, with his “alternative formulation” and curious diagrams. Dyson read the Wheeler notes avidly. Bethe had tried to get him an invitation to Pocono (“you can imagine that I was highly pleased and flattered,” Dyson wrote his parents), but Oppenheimer refused to consider someone whose current caste was student.

Feynman himself was assigned the task of writing a nontechnical account of the Pocono meeting for a new trade journal for physicists, Physics Today—anonymously, he hoped. He explained renormalization à la Schwinger, concluding:

A major portion of the conference was spent in hearing and discussing these results of Schwinger. (((One conferee put it: “We did not have time to discuss a great deal, for we had to take time out to learn some physics.” He was referring to this work of Schwinger.)))

There was also presented (by Feynman) a theory in which the equations of electrodynamics are artificially altered so that all quantities including the inertia of the electron turn out finite. The results of this theory are in essential agreement with those of Schwinger, but they are not as complete.

In the same runner-up vein Feynman was asked to help select a winner for a new prize the National Academy of Sciences was awarding for “an outstanding contribution to our knowledge of the nature of light.” When Schwinger saw Feynman’s name on the list of judges, he inferred correctly that the prize was meant for him. What was quantum electrodynamics about, if not light, in all its many dresses?

No one had been more definitively impressed by Schwinger, and unimpressed by Feynman, than Oppenheimer. Awaiting him back