Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [204]
The beachball-sized aluminum sphere called Sputnik began orbiting the earth on October 4, 1957. Its unexpected presence overhead and the insouciant beep-beep-beep played again and again on American radio and television broadcasts set off a wave of anxiety like nothing since the atomic bomb itself. (Feynman arrived at a picnic that evening in the biologist Max Delbrück’s backyard with a small gray radio receiver that looked as if he had built it himself. He called for an extension cord, tuned the receiver quickly, held up a finger to demand silence, and grinned as the beeps played out over the crowd.) “Red Moon over U.S.,” said Time magazine, immediately announcing “a new era in history” and “a grim new chapter in the cold war.” Newsweek called it “The Red Conquest”—with “all the mastery that it implies in the affairs of men on earth.” Why had the United States established no comparable space program? A worried-looking President Eisenhower said at a news conference, “Well, let’s get this straight. I am not a scientist.” The director of the American Institute of Physics seized the occasion to say that unless his country’s science education caught up with the Soviet Union’s, “our way of life is doomed.” That message was heard: Sputnik produced a rapid new commitment to the teaching of science. Magazines focused new attention on American physicists. Among the younger generation, Time singled out Feynman—
Curly-haired and handsome, he shuns neckties and coats, is an enormously dedicated adventurer … became fascinated with samba rhythms … playing bongo drums, breaking codes, picking locks …
and Gell-Mann—
he formulated the “Strangeness Theory,” i.e. assigned physical meanings to the behavior of newly discovered particles. At CalTech Gell-Mann works closely with Feynman on weak couplings. At the blackboard the two explode with ideas like sparks flying from a grindstone, alternately slap their foreheads at each other’s simplifications, quibble over the niceties.
But the physicist who received most of the public’s attention that fall was Edward Teller. He was in tune with the cold war. Sputnik led him to declare—though there was evidence to the contrary—“Scientific and technical leadership is slipping from our hands.” A direct Soviet attack on the United States was possible, but he saw an even greater threat. “I do not think this is the most probable way in which they will defeat us,” he said. He predicted that the Soviet Union would gain a broad technological dominance over the free world. “They will advance so fast in science and leave us so far behind that their way of doing things will be the way, and there will be nothing we can do about it.”
With the winter’s excitement barely waning—the Reader’s Digest had now faced into the wind with an article titled “No Time for Hysteria”—a State Department official let Caltech know that the department would appreciate a presentation at the Geneva conference in the name of both Feynman and Gell-Mann, to balance the expected Soviet scientific presence there. Feynman acquiesced, although the mixing of propaganda and science disturbed him.
He declined to let the State Department make his hotel reservation; he found a walk-up room in an establishment called, in English, Hotel City. It reminded him of the flophouses he had known in Albuquerque and on his cross-country trip with Freeman Dyson. He had hoped to bring a woman with whom he had been having a sporadic and tempestuous yearlong love affair—the wife of a research fellow. She had accompanied him on a trip the summer before, when he was working on weak interactions. Now she agreed to meet him afterward in England but refused to come to Geneva. Instead, he met Gweneth Howarth on the beach.
She told him she was making her way around the world. She was twenty-four years