• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2291 0

thirty-four hours for roughly the price of the fortnight-long ocean voyage, and the popular magazines were filling with sensual images: palms and plantations, hot beaches and gaudy nights. Carmen Miranda and bananas still dominated the travel writing. There was a new note, too, of the apocalyptic fear that had dogged Feynman: the Soviet Union had demonstrated its first working atomic bomb in September 1949, and worries about nuclear war were entering the national consciousness and spurring a panicky civil defense movement. Emigrations to South America became an odd symptom. One of Feynman’s girlfriends told him seriously that he might be safer there. John Wheeler said—by way of imploring Feynman to join work on a thermonuclear bomb—that he was estimating “at least a 40 percent chance of war by September.”

When a Brazilian physicist visiting Princeton, Jayme Tiomno, heard that Feynman was flirting with Spanish, he had suggested a switch to Portuguese and invited him to visit the new Centro Brasiliero de Pesquisas Físicas in Rio for several weeks in the summer of 1949. Feynman accepted, applied for a passport, and left the continental United States for the first time. He did learn enough Portuguese to teach physicists and beseech women in their native language. (By the end of the summer he had persuaded one of them, a Copacabana resident named Clotilde, who called him meu Ricardinho in her mellifluous Portuguese, to come live with him in Ithaca—briefly.) Late the next winter he impulsively asked the centro to hire him permanently. Meanwhile he was negotiating seriously with Bacher. He had endured one too many days kneeling in cold slush as he tried to wrap chains around his tires. Caltech appealed to him. It reminded him of the other Tech, such a pure haven for the technically minded. Four years at a liberal-arts university had not softened his outlook. He was tired of “all the ins and outs of the small town and the bad weather,” he wrote Bacher, and added, “The theoretical broadening which comes from having many humanities subjects on the campus is offset by the general dopiness of the people who study these things and by the Department of Home Economics.” He warned Bacher about one of his weaknesses: he did not like having graduate students. At Cornell “poor Bethe” had ended up covering for him again and again.

I do not like to suggest a problem and suggest a method for its solution and feel responsible after the student is unable to work out the problem by the suggested method by the time his wife is going to have a baby so that he cannot get a job. What happens is that I find that I do not suggest any method that I do not know will work and the only way I know it works is by having tried it out at home previously, so I find the old saying that “A Ph.D. thesis is research done by a professor under particularly trying circumstances” is for me the dead truth.

He had a sabbatical year coming. He was going to make his escape, one way or another.

Once (and it was not yesterday), a diligent student of field theory wrote later at Niels Bohr’s institute in Copenhagen, there lived a very young mole and a very young crow who, having heard of the fabulous land called Quefithe, decided to visit it. Before starting out, they went to the wise owl and asked what Quefithe was like.

Owl’s description of Quefithe was quite confusing. He said that in Quefithe everything was both up and down. Physicists need more than ideas and methods. They need a version of history, too, a narrative cabinet for ordering their bits of knowledge. So they create a legend of search and discovery on the fly; they turn hearsay and supposition into instant lore. They discover that it is hard to teach a pure concept without clothing it in at least a fragment of narrative: who discovered it; what problem needed solving; what path led from not knowing to knowing. Some physicists learn that there is such a thing as physicists’ history, necessary and convenient but often different from real history. The fable of Quefithe—“quantum field theory”—with a Schwinger