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By Root 2438 0

and a unifying vision—too ambitious, he thought. Too many physicists had already stumbled in pursuit of this grail, including Einstein, notoriously. Dyson—more than anyone who heard Feynman at Pocono or attended his occasional seminars at Cornell, more even than Bethe—was beginning to see just how far Feynman sought to reach. He was not ready to concede that his friend could out-Einstein Einstein. He admired Feynman’s gall, the largeness of his dream, the implicit attempt to unify realms of physics that were more distant from one another than anything in human experience. On the largest scale, the scale of solar systems and galactic clusters, gravity reigned. On the smallest scale, particles still awaiting discovery bound the atom’s nucleus with unimaginably strong forces. Dyson considered it enough to walk the “middle ground,” the realm that after all encompassed everything in between: the furniture of everyday life, the foundations underlying chemistry and biology. The middle ground, where quantum theory ruled, extended to all phenomena that could be seen and studied without the help of either a mammoth telescope or a behemoth particle accelerator. Yet Feynman wanted more.

It was essential to his view of things that it must be universal. It must describe everything that happens in nature. You could not imagine the sum-over-histories picture being true for a part of nature and untrue for another part. You could not imagine it being true for electrons and untrue for gravity. It was a unifying principle that would either explain everything or explain nothing.

Many years later each man recalled their night in Vinita, Dyson showing how unshakably he revered his friend still, Feynman showing how he could use storytelling as a strategy—a dagger and a cloak. Dyson wrote:

In that little room, with the rain drumming on the dirty window panes, we talked the night through. Dick talked of his dead wife, of the joy he had had in nursing her and making her last days tolerable, of the tricks they had played together on the Los Alamos security people, of her jokes and her courage. He talked of death with an easy familiarity which can come only to one who has lived with spirit unbroken through the worst that death can do. Ingmar Bergman in his film The Seventh Seal created the character of the juggler Jof, always joking and playing the fool, seeing visions and dreams that nobody else believes in, surviving at the end when death carries the rest away. Dick and Jof have a great deal in common.

And Feynman:

The room was fairly clean, it had a sink; it wasn’t so bad. We get ready for bed.

He says, “I’ve got to pee.”

“The bathroom is down the hall.”

We hear girls giggling and walking back and forth in the hall outside, and he’s nervous. He doesn’t want to go out there.

“That’s all right; just pee in the sink,” I say.

“But that’s unsanitary.”

“Naw, it’s okay; you just turn the water on.”

“I can’t pee in the sink,” he says.

We’re both tired, so we lie down. It’s so hot that we don’t use any covers, and my friend can’t get to sleep because of the noises in the place. I kind of fall asleep a little bit.

A little later I hear a creaking of the floor nearby, and I open one eye slightly. There he is, in the dark, quietly stepping over to the sink.

And Dyson:

That stormy night in our little room in Vinita, Dick and I were not looking thirty years ahead. I knew only that somewhere hidden in Dick’s ideas was the key to a theory of quantum electrodynamics simpler and more physical than Julian Schwinger’s elaborate construction. Dick knew only that he had larger aims in view than tidying up Schwinger’s equations. So the argument did not come to an end, but left us each going his own way.

They reached Albuquerque, Dyson seeing for the first time the deceptively clear air and the red desert beneath still snowy peaks. Feynman bore into town at 70 miles per hour and was immediately arrested for a rapid sequence of traffic violations. The justice of the peace announced that the fine he handed down was a personal record.