Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [166]
Clearly, if they were ever going to learn anything about Quefithe, they had to see it for themselves. And that is what they did.
After a few years had passed, the mole came back. He said that Quefithe consisted of lots of tunnels. One entered a hole and wandered through a maze, tunnels splitting and rejoining, until one found the next hole and got out. Quefithe sounded like a place only a mole would like, and nobody wanted to hear more about it.
Not much later the crow landed, flapping its wings and crowing excitedly. Quefithe was amazing, it said. The most beautiful landscape with high mountains, perilous passes and deep valleys. The valley floors were teeming with little moles who were scurrying down rutted paths. The crow sounded like he had taken too many bubble baths, and many who heard him shook their heads. The frogs kept on croaking “It is not rigorous, it is not rigorous!” … But there was something about crow’s enthusiasm that was infectious.
The most puzzling thing about it all was that the mole’s description of Quefithe sounded nothing like the crow’s description. Some even doubted that the mole and the crow had ever gotten to the mythical land. Only the fox, who was by nature very curious, kept running back and forth between the mole and the crow and asking questions, until he was sure that he understood them both. Nowadays, anybody can get to Quefithe—even snails.
CALTECH
The California Institute of Technology had entered the 1920s with an engineering building, a physics building, a chemistry laboratory, an auditorium, and an orange grove on a dusty, underirrigated thirty acres a few minutes east of the thriving civic center of Pasadena, a town of new money in search of monuments. The scent of orange and rose floated from the gardens of porticoed homes often described as mansions, built in a relaxed Spanish and Italianate style that was coming to be thought of as Californian. Walls were a pale stucco, roofs a red tile. “Pasadena is ten miles from Los Angeles as the Rolls-Royces fly,” one commentator said in 1932. “It is one of the prettiest towns in America, and probably the richest.” Albert Einstein wintered there for three years, posing for pictures on a bicycle to the delight of the institute administrators, attending, as Will Rogers said, “every luncheon, every dinner, every movie opening, every marriage and two-thirds of the divorces,” before he finally decided Princeton suited him better. Even as the Depression began to reverse Pasadena’s fortunes, Caltech’s rose on every new tide in science. A new Caltech laboratory polished the giant lens for the great telescope under way at Palomar Mountain. Caltech made itself the American center of systematic earthquake science; one of its young graduates, Charles Richter, devised the ubiquitous measurement scale that carries his name. The school moved quickly into aeronautic science, and a group of enthusiastic amateurs firing off rockets in the hills about the Rose Bowl became, by 1944, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Foundations and industrialists were eager to look beyond their usual East Coast funding targets. A cornflakes manufacturer paid for a building that became the Kellogg Radiation Laboratory, and its reigning expert, Charles Lauritsen, made it a national center for fundamental nuclear physics. Lauritsen spent much of the thirties investigating the nuclear properties of the light elements—hydrogen and deuterium, helium, lithium, up through carbon and beyond—filling in details of energy levels and spin with a patched-together arsenal of equipment.
He was still working in Kellogg in the winter of 1951, when oracular messages started coming in by ham radio. A blind operator