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Herring, Simeon Hutner, Albert Hibbs, Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gerald Holton, John L. Joseph, Daniel Kevles, Sándor J. Kovács, Donald J. Kutyna, Janijoy La Belle, Leo Lavatelli, Ralph Leighton, Charles Lifer, Leite Lopes, Edward Maisel, Anne Tilghman Wilson Marks, Robert E. Marshak, Leonard Mautner, Robert M. May, William H. McLellan, Carver Mead, Nicholas Metropolis, Maurice A. Meyer, Philip Morrison, Masako Ohnuki, Paul Olum, Abraham Pais, David Park, John Polkinghorne, Burton Richter, John S. Rigden, Michael Riordan, Daniel Robbins, Matthew Sands, David Sanger, J. Robert Schrieffer, Theodore Schultz, Al Seckel, Barry Simon, Cyril Stanley Smith, Norris Parker Smith, Novera H. Spector, Millard Susman, Kip S. Thome, Yung-Su Tsai, John Tukey, Tom van Sant, Dorothy Walker, Robert L. Walker, Steven Weinberg, Charles Weiner, Theodore A. Welton, Arthur S. Wightman, Jane Wilson, Stephen Wolfram, and George Zweig.

Two indispensable histories of twentieth-century physics are Kevles, The Physicists, and Pais, Inward Bound.

I’m especially grateful to Mitchell Feigenbaum and Silvan S. Schweber for patient guidance and sharp insights on matters of physics. I particularly thank Schweber for letting me read the manuscript-in-progress of his forthcoming history of quantum electrodynamics, QED: 1946–1950: An American Success Story. I thank Predrag Cvitanovi? for permission to quote his fable of Quefithe. Robert Chadwell Williams, a biographer of Klaus Fuchs, sent a helpful mass of archival material relating to the Manhattan Project. I benefited from discussions with Joseph N. Straus and Hugh Wolff about genius, music, and music theory.

Cheryl Colbert lent me her intelligent and resourceful assistance. Emilio Millan shared a useful file of clippings and other documents that he had collected.

This book owes an enormous obligation to the skills of my editor, Daniel Frank, and my agent, Michael Carlisle.

As always, the indescribable debt is to Cynthia Crossen, who for so long endured, among other things, that strange, persistent presence of an extra soul in our household.

J. G.

Brooklyn, New York

8 July 1992

NOTES

ABBREVIATIONS

AIP: Niels Bohr Library, Center for the History of Physics, American Institute of Physics.

BET: H. A. Bethe papers, Cornell University.

CIT: California Institute of Technology Archives.

CPL: The Character of Physical Law.

F-H: Interview with Lillian Hoddeson and Gordon Baym, 16 April 1979. LANL.

F-L: Interviews with Ralph Leighton. Tapes courtesy of Leighton.

F-Sch: Interview with Silvan S. Schweber, 13 November 1988. Tape courtesy of Schweber.

F-Sy: Interview with Christopher Sykes, recorded in preparation for The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, BBC-TV, 1981. Tape courtesy of Sykes.

F-W: Interviews with Charles Werner, 4 March 1966, 27–28 June 1966, and 4 February 1973. AIP.

FOI: Feynman’s FBI files and documents from other federal agencies, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

LANL: Los Alamos National Laboratory Archives.

Lectures: The Feynman Lectures on Physics.

LOC: Library of Congress.

MIT: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries.

NL: “The Development of the Space-Time View of Quantum Electrodynamics.” Nobel lecture (Feynman 1965a; cf. Feynman 1965b and 1965c). For convenience, page numbers refer to the Weaver 1987 reprint.

OPP: J. R. Oppenheimer papers. LOC.

PERS: Personal papers obtained by the author.

PUL: Princeton University Libraries.

QED: QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter.

SMY: H. D. Smyth papers, American Philosophical Society.

SYJ: Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!

WDY: What Do You Care What Other People Think?

WHE: J. A. Wheeler papers, American Philosophical Society.

PROLOGUE

The account of the Pocono meeting is based on interviews with several of the participants (Hans Bethe, Robert Marshak, Abraham Pais, Julian Schwinger, Victor Weisskopf, and John Archibald Wheeler), on Feynman’s account in Physics Today (Feynman 1948d) and his recollections in F-W, on Wheeler’s handwritten and mimeographed notes (Wheeler 1948), on correspondence