Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [212]
“I’ve written a book with Sokolov.”
“How do I know what you contributed to it? Ivanenko, what is the integral of e to the minus x squared from minus to plus infinity?” Silence. “Ivanenko, what is one and one?” Feynman was dismayed by the work offered up. His own presentation drew little immediate notice, though his “ghosts,” extended by other theorists, later became crucial to modern theory. “I am learning nothing,” he wrote home in frustration, and he gave Gweneth a scathing taxonomy of pretentious science:
The “work” is always: (1) completely un-understandable, (2) vague and indefinite, (3) something correct that is obvious and self-evident, worked out by a long and difficult analysis, and presented as an important discovery, or (4) a claim based on the stupidity of the author that some obvious and correct fact, accepted and checked for years is, in fact, false (these are the worst: no argument will convince the idiot), (5) an attempt to do something, probably impossible, but certainly of no utility, which, it is finally revealed at the end, fails or (6) just plain wrong. There is a great deal of “activity in the field” these days, but this “activity” is mainly in showing that the previous “activity” of somebody else resulted in an error or in nothing useful or in something promising.
He never had liked crowds in science. “It is like a lot of worms trying to get out of a bottle by crawling all over each other.”
Dissatisfied though Feynman remained, his Warsaw talk marked the beginning of a turn toward his path integrals as a fundamental approach to the deepest of cosmological issues. Neither he nor other theorists had relied on this viewpoint in the high-energy physics of the late 1950s. Much later, however, some physicists applied path integrals to the very structure of space-time. They sought to unify its conceivable topologies by, in a sense, summing over all possible universes. Gell-Mann himself speculated that Feynman’s path integrals might prove to be more than a method, more than an equivalent alternative formulation: “the real foundation of quantum mechanics and thus of physical theory.”
Room at the Bottom
So little of modern physics seemed dedicated to the world of human scales. High-energy theorists had skipped far down a ladder of sizes, past the merely microscopic into a realm of the unimaginably small and short-lived. “Miniaturization” was a catchword of the day, but tininess meant something more modest to engineers and manufacturers than to particle physicists. The transistor, invented just over a decade before at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, was becoming a commodity. Transistors meant radios, battery-powered, with brittle plastic casings, small enough to fit in one’s hand. Researchers were beginning to consider ways of further reducing suitcase-sized devices like tape recorders. Electronic computers that had filled large rooms could now be squeezed into cabinets barely larger than an automobile. It occurred to Feynman that engineers had barely begun to imagine the possibilities. “There is a device on the market, they tell me,” he said at the end of 1959, when the American Physical Society held its annual meeting at Caltech, “by which you can write the Lord’s Prayer on the head of a pin. But that’s nothing… .” On toward the atom, he urged them. “It is a staggeringly small world that is below.”
That same pinhead could hold the twenty-four volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, pictures and all, if the encyclopedia were reduced 25,000 times in each direction. A modest reduction, considering that the barely visible dots making up a halftone photoengraving would still contain a thousand or so atoms. For writing and reading this tiny Britannica, he proposed engineering techniques within the limits of contemporary technology: