Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [174]
Feynman changed his mind again. That same fall, Enrico Fermi died, and the University of Chicago decided to do whatever was necessary to hire Feynman. Its dean of the Division of Physical Sciences, Walter Bartky, and a younger physicist, Marvin Goldberger, later to become president of Caltech, traveled westward on the Super Chief—Bartky was afraid to fly—and took a taxi directly from the railway station to Feynman’s house. He refused to consider their proposition, and he begged them not even to tell him how much money they were offering. He was worried, he said, that Mary Lou would hear the amount and insist on moving. He had decided. He was going to stay at Caltech.
Onward with Physics
Where next, in the newly illuminated quantum world?
Feynman had reached maturity at a moment when the community of theoretical physicists shared a great unsolved problem, such a weighty knot that the enterprise could scarcely move forward until it was untied or cut. Now that quantum electrodynamics had been solved, no single problem seemed as universally compelling. Most theoretical physicists turned convoy fashion toward the smaller atomic distances and smaller time scales at which new particles appeared. They were driven in part by the logic of the past century’s history: each new step inward toward the atom’s core had brought not just new revelations but also a new simplification. The periodic table of elements had once served as a powerful unifying scheme; now it seemed more like a taxonomical catalog, itself unified by the deeper principles revealed by the quest inside the atom. A rhetoric was appearing in popular writing about physics by physicists and journalists: catchwords were fundamental and constituents of matter and building blocks of nature and innermost sanctum of matter. The phrases were seductive. Other kinds of science sought laws of nature, but a kind of priority seemed to belong to the search for elementary units.
The prestige of particle physics also rose with a flood tide of military support. Most plainly, the weapons laboratories prospered and such agencies as the Office of Naval Research financed specific military research projects.
A host of applied sciences, from electronics to cryptography, benefited from the concrete interest of military program officers. Academic scientists could immediately see the potential danger of allowing the armed forces to direct the course of scientific research. “When science is allowed to exist merely from the crumbs that fall from the table of a weapons development program,” said Caltech’s new president, Lee DuBridge, “then science is headed into the stifling atmosphere of ‘mobilized secrecy’ and it is surely doomed—even though the crumbs themselves should provide more than adequate nourishment.” Yet the military also recognized this. One of the many legacies of the Manhattan Project was that generals and admirals now believed the scientists’ dogma: that researchers left alone to follow their instincts will lay golden eggs. The bomb had been born of the esoteric fancies of the mandarins—that was clear. Now pure physicists wished to conduct basic research into forces and particles even stranger than those powering atomic bombs; the public and the government supported them enthusiastically. At institutions like DuBridge’s Caltech, even the theoretical programs of research on particle physics flourished by accepting enormous government grants to which the professors applied in groups. The grants paid for salaries, graduate students, office expenses, and university overhead. The military actively encouraged, when it did not finance directly, the giant cyclotrons, betatrons, synchrotrons, and synchrocyclotrons, any one of which consumed more steel and electricity than a prewar experimentalist could have imagined. These were not so much crumbs from the weapons-development table as they were blank checks from officials persuaded that