Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [24]
Even in the trough of the Depression the wonder of science fueled an optimistic faith in the future. Just over the horizon were fast airships, half-mile-high skyscrapers, and technological cures for diseases of the human body and the body politic. Who knew where the bright young students of today would be able to carry the world? One New York writer painted a picture of his city fifty years in the future: New York in 1982 would hold a magnificent fifty million people, he predicted, the East River and much of the Hudson River having been “filled in.” “Traffic arrangements will no doubt have provided for several tiers of elevated roadways and noiseless railways—built on extended balconies flanking the enormous skyscrapers …” Nourishment will come from concentrated pellets. Ladies’ dress will be streamlined to something like the 1930s bathing suit. The hero of this fantasy was the “high-school genius (who generally knows more than anybody else).” There was no limit to the hopes vested in the young.
Scientists, too, struggled to assimilate the new images pouring into the culture from the laboratory. Electricity powered the human brain itself, a University of Chicago researcher announced that summer; the brain’s central switchboard used vast numbers of connecting lines to join brain cells, each one of which could be considered both a tiny chemical factory and electric battery. Chicago’s business community made the most of these symbols, too. In an opening-day stunt, technicians at four astronomical observatories used faint rays of starlight from Arcturus, forty light-years distant, focused by telescopes and electrically amplified, to turn on the lights of the exposition. “Here are gathered the evidences of man’s achievements in the realm of physical science, proofs of his power to prevail over all the perils that beset him,” declared Rufus C. Dawes, president of the fair corporation, as loud projectiles released hundreds of American flags in the sky over the fairgrounds. Life-size dinosaurs awed visitors. A robot gave lectures. Visitors less interested in science could pay to see an unemployed actress named Sally Rand dance with ostrich-feather fans. The Feynmans, though, took the Sky Ride, suspended on cables between two six-hundred-foot towers, and visited the Hall of Science, where a 151-word wall motto summed up the history of science from Pythagoras to Euclid to Newton to Einstein.
The Feynmans had never heard of Bohr or any of the other physicists gathering in Chicago, but, like most other American newspaper readers, they knew Einstein’s name well. That summer he was traveling in Europe, uprooted, having left Germany for good, preparing to arrive in New York Harbor in October. For fourteen years America had been in the throes of a publicity craze over this “mathematician.” The New York Times, the Feynmans’ regular paper, had led a wave of exaltation with only one precedent, the near deification of Edison a generation earlier. No theoretical scientist, European or American, before or since, ignited such a fever of adulation. A part of the legend, the truest part, was the revolutionary import of relativity for the way citizens of the twentieth century should conceive their universe. Another part was Einstein’s supposed claim that only twelve people worldwide could understand his work. “Lights All Askew in the Heavens,” the Times reported in a 1919 classic of headline writing. “Einstein Theory Triumphs. Stars Not Where They Seem or Were Calculated to Be, but Nobody Need Worry. A Book for 12 Wise Men. No More in the World Could Comprehend It, Said Einstein.” A series of editorials followed. One was titled “Assaulting the Absolute.” Another declared jovially, “Apprehensions for the safety of confidence even in the multiplication table will arise.”
The presumed obscurity of