Genius_ The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick [26]
“Now doctor will you give me in a few words the low-down on all your investigations?”
“No.”
“Good. Will it be all right if I put it this way—‘Professor Dirac solves all the problems of mathematical physics, but is unable to find a better way of figuring out Babe Ruth’s batting average’?”
“Yes.”
…
“Do you go to the movies?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“In 1920—perhaps also 1930.”
The genius was otherworldly and remote. More than the practical Americans whose science meant gizmos and machines, Europeans such as Einstein and Dirac also incarnated the culture’s standard oddball view of the scientist. “Is he the tall, backward boy … ?” Barbara Stanwyck’s character asked in The Lady Eve about Henry Fonda’s, an ophiologist roughly Feynman’s age.
—He isn’t backward, he’s a scientist.
—Oh, is that what it is. I knew he was peculiar.
“Peculiar” meant harmless. It meant that brilliant men paid for their gifts with compensating, humanizing flaws. There was an element of self-defense in the popular view. And there was a little truth. Many scientists did walk through the ordinary world seeming out of place, their minds elsewhere. They sometimes failed to master the arts of dressing carefully or making social conversation.
Had the Journal’s reporter solicited Dirac’s opinion of the state of American science, he might have provoked a longer comment. “There are no physicists in America,” Dirac had said bitingly, in more private company. It was too harsh an assessment, but the margin of his error was only a few years, and when Dirac spoke of physics he meant something new. Physics was not about vacuum cleaners or rayon or any of the technological wonders spreading in that decade; it was not about lighting lights or broadcasting radio waves; it was not even about measuring the charge of the electron or the frequency spectra of glowing gases in laboratory experiments. It was about a vision of reality so fractured, accidental, and tenuous that it frightened those few older American physicists who saw it coming.
“I feel that there is a real world corresponding to our sense perceptions,” Yale University’s chief physicist, John Zeleny, defensively told a Minneapolis audience. “I believe that Minneapolis is a real city and not simply a city of my dreams.” What Einstein had (or had not) said about relativity was truer of quantum mechanics: a bare handful of people had the mathematics needed to understand it.
Richard and Julian
Summer brought a salty heat to Far Rockaway, the wind rising across the beaches. The asphalt shimmered with refractive air. In winter, snow fell early from low, gray clouds; then dazzlingly white hours would pass, the sky too bright to see clearly. Free and impudent times—Richard lost himself in his notebooks, or roamed to the drugstore, where he would play a mean-spirited optical-hydrodynamical trick on the waitress by inverting a glass of water over a one-penny tip on the smooth tabletop.
On the beach some days he watched a particular girl. She had warm, deep blue eyes and long hair that she wore deftly knotted up in a braid. After swimming she would comb it out, and boys Richard knew from school would flock around her. Her name was Arline (for a long time Richard thought it was spelled the usual way, “Arlene”) Greenbaum, and she lived in Cedarhurst, Long Island, just across the city line. He dreamed about her. He thought she was wonderful and beautiful, but getting to know girls seemed hopeless enough, and Arline, he discovered, already had a boyfriend. Even so, he followed her into an after-school social league sponsored by the synagogue. Arline joined an art class, so Richard joined the art class, overlooking a lack of aptitude. Shortly he found himself lying on the floor and breathing through a straw, while another student made a plaster cast of his face.
If Arline noticed Richard, she did not let on. But one evening she arrived at a boy-girl party in the middle of a kissing session. An older boy was teaching couples the correct lip angles and nose positions, and in this instructional context