Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [176]
FEYNMAN has developed a fair degree of skill opening sample tumbler and Yale type locks with hairpins, bits of wire, etc… . Feynman has been trying to learn the workings of safe locks and has expressed an ambition to be able to open a safe.
In this first report the agent tried diligently to understand the exculpatory opinion of the informant that “this was not indicative of any criminal tendencies on the part of Feynman but was merely one of the works of a brilliant mathematical mind challenged by a device considered practically impossible of solution by an ordinary individual.” Nevertheless, the suggestive combination of opened safes containing atomic secrets and socialized with Klaus Fuchs proved irresistible to the anonymous authors of memorandums, special inquiries, and secret airtels that swelled Feynman’s file for years to come.
The bureau monitored one other incident with particular interest. The Soviet Academy of Sciences invited Feynman to a conference in Moscow, where he would have had a chance to meet the great Lev Landau and other Russian physicists. Nuclear physics, particularly in its sensitive guises, was not on the agenda. Still, the cream of Soviet physics was engaged in a weapons program quickly catching up with the Americans’. That year the Russians exploded an advanced, portable thermonuclear bomb over Siberia. (One of its principal architects, the future dissident Andrei Sakharov, watched from a platform on the snowy steppe, miles from ground zero. Having read an American primer called the black book, he decided it would be safe to remove his dark goggles.) Feynman accepted the invitation enthusiastically, the Soviet Academy having offered to cover his travel expenses. Then he had second thoughts. He wrote a careful letter to the AEC to ask for the government’s advice. “I thought you would be interested,” he said, “because I was connected to the Los Alamos project during the war, so the danger that I might not be able to return, or the attitude of public opinion must be considered.” After a delay, officials at both the commission and the State Department replied, asking him to turn the Soviets down. His presence might be exploited for “propaganda gains.” Feynman acquiesced. He wrote the head of the Soviet Academy that “circumstances have arisen which make it impossible for me to attend.” The government also forced Freeman Dyson to withdraw, warning him that under the McCarran Immigration Act he might not be allowed back into the United States. Dyson did not surrender so quietly, however. He told newspaper reporters, “This is a clear case in which the law has been proved stupid.”
In their basic, nonweapons research, Russian physicists eagerly pursued the latest developments in the United States and Europe. Yet a faint difference in outlook between East and West was already unfolding. The triumph of the atomic bomb had been an American triumph, had won the American war, and had not ingrained itself so firmly into the Soviet psyche (obsessed though policymakers were with the arms race). Although an international-class synchrocyclotron went up in Dubno, money was not so readily available for giant particle accelerators of the kind now under construction in the United States. And the most influential single figure in Soviet physics was Landau, famous for the catholicity of his interests across the whole breadth of phenomena that could be called theoretical physics. He had devoted his greatest work not to elementary particles but to condensed matter: the dynamics of fluids, transitions between one phase of matter and another, turbulence, plasmas, sound dispersion, and low-temperature physics. Fundamental though all these subjects were, in the United States