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By Root 2339 0

” By then Feynman had been awake for more than five hours. The first call had come at 4 A.M. from a correspondent of the American Broadcasting Corporation shortly after the announcement in Stockholm. He rolled over and told Gweneth. At first she thought he was joking. The telephone kept ringing until finally they left it off the hook. They could not get back to sleep. Feynman knew his life would not be the same. Photographers from the Associated Press and the local newspaper were at his house before sunrise. He posed outdoors in the dark with Carl, his sleepy three-year-old, and gamely held a telephone receiver to his ear as the flashbulbs popped.

Since the press now had to give an account of quantum electrodynamics for the first time, Feynman rapidly learned to field a sequence of variations on what seemed to him a single question: “Will you please tell us what you won the prize for—but don’t tell us! Because we’ll not understand it.” The actual questions were impossible to answer: “What applications does this paper have in the computer industry?” “I’m going to ask you also to comment on the statement that your work was to convert experimental data on strange particles into hard mathematical fact.” And then the one question he could answer: “What time did you hear about the award?” In a private moment a reporter for Time made a suggestion he loved: that he simply say, “Listen, buddy, if I could tell you in a minute what I did, it wouldn’t be worth the Nobel Prize.” He realized that he could work up a stock phrase about the interaction of matter and radiation but felt it would be a fraud. He did make a serious remark—and repeated it all day—that reflected his inner feeling about renormalization. The problem had been to eliminate infinities in calculations, he said, and “We have designed a method for sweeping them under the rug.”

Julian Schwinger called, and they shared a happy moment. Schwinger, still at Harvard, was pursuing an ever more solitary road in his theoretical physics but, unlike Feynman, had brought forth a long and distinguished string of graduate students working on the frontier problems of high-energy physics. A decade earlier, when Feynman won the Einstein Award, he wrote his mother: “I thought you would be happy that I beat Schwinger out at last, but it turns out he got the thing 3 yrs ago. Of course, he only got ½ a medal, so I guess you’ll be happy. You always compare me with Schwinger.” Now their rivalry was over, if not forgotten. Feynman called Tomonaga in Japan and then reported to a student journalist a capsule caricature of the Nobel Prize–day telephone conversation:

[FEYNMAN:] Congratulations.

[TOMONAGA:] Same to you.

How does it feel to be a Nobel Prize winner?

I guess you know.

Can you explain to me in layman’s terms exactly what it was you did to win the prize?

I am very sleepy.

By afternoon students had raised across the dome of Throop Hall an enormous cloth banner reading, “Win big, RF.”

Hundreds of letters and telegrams came in over the next weeks. He heard from childhood friends who had not seen him in almost forty years. There were cables from shipboard and muffled telephone calls from Mexico. He told reporters that he planned to spend his third of the $55,000 prize money to pay his taxes on his other income (actually he used it to buy a beach house in Mexico). He felt himself under stress. He had always felt that honors were suspect. He liked to ridicule pomp and talk about his father, the uniform salesman who taught him to see past the uniforms. Now he would be traveling to Sweden to appear before the king. The mere thought of buying a tuxedo made him nervous. He did not want to bow before a foreign potentate. For several weeks he grew obsessed with an odd fantasy that one was forbidden to turn one’s back on the king and therefore had to back up a flight of steps after receiving the award. He practiced jumping backward up steps, both feet at once, because he decided that he would invent a method that no one had used before. He planned to examine the actual steps in