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glyphs and would culminate in a neat expression that Feynman felt he could simply have written down as a starting point. He was sure this could not last. It did not. Feynman’s method, Feynman’s rules, began to take over. In the summer of 1950 a paper appeared with small “Feynman diagrams” on the first page—“following the simplified methods introduced by Feynman.” A month later came another: “a technique due to Feynman… . The calculation of matrix elements can be simplified greatly by use of the Feynman-Dyson methods.” The unreasonable power of the diagrams in the hands of students frustrated some of the elders, who felt that physicists were waving a sword that they did not understand. As the flood of papers began to cite Feynman, Schwinger went into what he described as his retreat. “Like the silicon chip of more recent years, the Feynman diagram was bringing computation to the masses,” he said. Later, people who overlooked the note of hoi polloi quoted this remark as though Schwinger had intended a tribute. He had not. This was “pedagogy, not physics.”

Yes, one can analyze experience into individual pieces of topology. But eventually one has to put it all together again. And then the piecemeal approach loses some of its attraction.

Making the increasingly precise calculations for which quantum electrodynamics became famous requi red formidable exercises in combinatorics.

Schwinger’s students at Harvard were put at a competitive disadvantage, or so it seemed to their fellows elsewhere, who suspected them of surreptitiously using the diagrams anyway. This was sometimes true. (They revered him, though—his night-owl ways, his Cadillac, his theatrically impeccable lecture performances. They emulated his way of saying, “We can effectively regard …” and they tried to construct the perfect Schwinger sentence: one graduate student, Jeremy Bernstein, liked a prototype that began, “Although ‘one’ is not perfectly ‘zero,’ we can effectively regard …” They also worried about Schwinger’s ability to materialize silently beside them at the lunch table; a group of his graduate students protected themselves with a conversational convention in which Schwinger meant Feynman and Feynman meant Schwinger.)

Murray Gell-Mann later spent a semester staying in Schwinger’s house in Cambridge and loved to say afterward that he had searched everywhere for the Feynman diagrams. He had not found any, but one room had been locked …

Away to a Fabulous Land

Bethe worried that Feynman was growing restless after four years at Cornell. There were entanglements with women: Feynman pursued them and dropped them, or tried to, with increasingly public frustration—so it seemed even to undergraduates, who knew him as the least professorial of professors, likely to be found beating a rhythm on a dormitory bench or lying supine and greasy beneath his Oldsmobile. He had never settled into any house or apartment. One year he lived as faculty guest in a student residence. Often he would stay nights or weeks with married friends until these arrangements became sexually volatile. He seemed to think that Cornell was alternately too large and too small—an isolated village with only a diffuse interest in science outside the confines of its physics department. Furthermore, Hans Bethe would always be the great man of physics at Cornell.

An old Los Alamos acquaintance, Robert Bacher, after serving on the new Atomic Energy Commission, was moving to Caltech, where he was charged with rebuilding an obsolete-looking physics program. He was swimming in a lake during a summer vacation in northern Michigan when Feynman’s name came into his head. He rushed back to shore, tracked Feynman down by telephone, and within a few days had him there visiting.

Feynman agreed to consider Pasadena, but he was also thinking about possibilities even more faraway, exotic, and warm. South America was on his mind. He had gone so far as to study Spanish. Pan American Airways had opened the continent to American tourists on a large scale, jumping from New York to Rio de Janeiro in